Sick and Tired

I came down with a cold on Monday. Thursday, I'm still coughing and depressed. I didn't do as well as I wanted on my last midterm in biological wastewater treatment class. I wanted an A. I got a B. I studied a lot. I'm bummed about it, which of course does no good.
I've done some pretty cool stuff the last few weeks but I lack the will to blog about it at the moment. I just want to mope.
Writing about moping is far more effective than just moping. Have you noticed. It's like accelerated moping... moping in fast forward. Ah well a B's not so bad. I think I need a B+ average this term. So I guess I'll just keep working. What happens if I don't get a 3.3 average this term. Well I won't get any more student loans. That's not the end of the world. It's not even the end of my getting a degree. I haven't used up the loan money from this term and I could get a job for my last term in school. So really it will turn out fine either way. Doesn't mean I won't stop trying though. I'll give it my best and that will be good enough one way or another. Poop! Why do I have to be all reasonable when I'm writing.
Here's how I feel: I'm sick.  My desk is all cluttered! My grades suck. I'm fat and I have a headache. Plus it's raining. So there! Yeah. I'm cranky. First world problems.

Stumbled across this on the internet.  Very cute.

Cleaning The Dust Off My Bike

I dug my bike out of the garage last week and pumped up the tires. I cleaned the garage a fair bit before I found the bike pump. My arse is very extremely out of shape. I went on a six mile bikeride with Andrew yesterday. I was all tired out.
My confidence in all things mechanical has gone way up. That's thanks to the Andrew. My Presta valve tires frustrated me far less than they usually do. Bike's all clean now. I also put lube on the chain.

Week Seven Begins

Tomorrow begins week seven of ten (eleven including finals week.) The midterm I wrote about a couple weeks ago resulted in a B 83%. I wanted better but I'll take it. I very much want to take away and A from that class. There another midterm for it this Thursday. I want to kick it's butt. Let's see if I have it in me.

Valentine's Day

A romantic evening in

 I came home from my midterm to find a stuffed animal cookies and a card waiting for me. It was a great surprise. You can see my new animal in the corner of the picture. He's a mouse. His name is Herbert. 

Beside doing somewhat, ahem, traditional valentines day activities, Andrew and I celebrated Valentine's day by curling up in bed and reading aloud until neither of us had any voice left. I have a lot better read-aloud stamina than Andrew does. 

Andrew just finished with a major deadline of his senior project. He's been working nonstop on it for over a month. So it is extra fantastic to be able to chill out together. Our friend, Craig, joined us for a few chapters. Alex and Ember to turns sitting on us. Alex decided to leave right as I took the picture but he was hanging out with Herbert the mouse. The book we're reading is the first in the series called the Dresden Files. It's about a wizard detective. I mean come on how awesome is that? It's also really well written. I highly recommend it. 

The Dresden Files Storm Front, Volume One: The Gathering Storm by Butc (Google Affiliate Ad)

Watership Down

Watership Down is one of my favorite books in the world. The story follows the epic journey of a group of young rabbits. It's a whole other world like nothing I've ever come across elsewhere and I love every page of it. One of my favorite things about it is that it's reasonably true to the actually life cycle and behavior of rabbits. 

Being a book where the main characters are rabbits, one might be inclined to assume that this is a little kids book. It's not. There's too much fighting and death. Plus there's the writing level. I think it's young adult.

I'm trying out using google ad sense. It looks like they're selling a very attractive copy of Watership Down here (just click on the picture to see their prices) but I'm sure you can also find it cheaper if you shop around.

When Spring Begins and Winter Ends

According to me, spring begins when the crocuses start blooming.

Technically, it's still winter. 

This Rhododendron isn't sure what's going on.

But the crocuses know. 

Winter is losing it's grip. The smell in the air is changing.

I found these crocuses blooming in a garden downtown. There was a little yellow crocus blooming in my front yard but the neighborhood deer ate it before I could take a picture. 

What do you do for fun?

"What do you do for fun?" asked the graduate student who had joined me for my attempt at a Friday afternoon hike.
I was not sure how to answer that. So I put the question back to him.
"I asked you first," he said with intonation reminiscent of a grad school kid.
I suspected him of being uncertain to the answer to his own question. It's a harder question to answer than one might think it is.
"Well," I said stalling, "I like hiking." I gestured to what we were doing. "Um I like bird watching. I like playing with the ferrets and having tea parties." I was certain there was a myriad of other things  I like to for fun but I couldn't think of them. It made me feel like very boring person. "I like biking," I said, "but I haven't done it much this year." Lots of other things I used to do but don't right now flooded into my head. That just made me feel more lame. So I ended there and turned the question over to the original asker.
"What about you? What do you do for fun?"
"Pretty much the same things that you like to do," he said, "only without the ferrets and tea parties. I do drink a lot of tea though." He had a dog who had also joined me for the hike so that was a plus one that he was forgetting. He obviously spent a fair bit of his fun time on the dog who had come up in a high percentage of the non-schoolwork conversations I'd had with him. I unconsciously concluded that 'what do you do for fun' is a bad question to ask somebody if you actually want to know the answer to it. You'll find out more by asking about what a person did last weekend or just letting a conversation ramble. The conversation wandered from there into tea, favorite tea and where to buy it. It seems to me that ninety percent of the meaningful conversations that I have with people involve food, pets, family or lovers.
So what do you do for fun? Now that I have time to think about it I remember that I left of some of the most important items on the list. I spend time cuddling with my my Andrew watching community, bones or some other show. I cuddle Alex, Ember, Ferrets, Chickens. I spend a lot of time messing around in the garden. I write stories. I write in this blog. I talk on the phone with my family and friends who are too far away to see. I go on cleaning rampages, road-trips, reading marathons, random adventures to the grocery store. The list of things that I used to do and probably will again is more exciting: draw, ride horses, backpacking, hanging upside down from playgrounds (I should really do that again), martial arts, biking.
I dunno it's still a fuzzy picture even when I try to put it in writing. Not everything one likes to do is fun. Some of it is a bit painful like weeding for example. Sore arm muscles aren't exactly fun or are they? They're satisfying. It makes me happy.
How would you answer that question. What do you do for fun?
Here's another question I don't know how to answer (I first ran across it almost a decade ago): are you and optimistic person or a pessimistic person?
My answer. Err ummm... I'm a person. In other words I don't classify well. Like most people, I'm a hopeful pessimist and an apprehensive optimist. I have my ups and downs everything from top of the world to the depths of despair. I think if you really want to know about the optimistic/pessimistic nature of a person you might want to ask about range of emotions. Some people are more stable than others. The problem with binary questions and even 'what do you do for fun' questions is that they assume a steady state. Most people aren't steady state. I suppose my answer should go something like this, "I'm inconsistent..." I often envy people who stick with just one of two things and get really, really good at them. I'm nearly always obsessively enthusiastic about something. It's just a matter of what.

Midterm tomorrow. I've been studying most of the day. Wish me luck. Oh, and I've decided what I want to be when I grow up. I want to be a writer. I will write plant field guides and guides for surviving the zombie Apocalypse and I will write novels. A graduate degree in engineering will make a good backup though. 

Lonely?

This is your typical journal entry type post. I'm writing about me and what's got me down and what's got me scared. These type of entries get the 'Life of Jenny" tag and I imagine they are not very interesting to people who don't know me personally.

Week five of ten begins. I haven't missed a class yet, but I can feel my personal demons closing in on me. I'm lonely.

Andrew has been working on his senior project for the last three weeks nonstop. He's designed a complex device that takes a lot of time to machine. Who knew that making an aluminum tube could take so much time or make such a mess. We bought a small lath, which is a piece of crap so we will most likely be taking it back. It is however working well enough at the moment to cover the living room in aluminum shavings, which are pokey and get into everything. 

I've been trying to help by taking the majority of the house work. It's been hard. I'm doing extra work. Andrew is exhausted and the house is a mess. It's lonely for both of us. When Andrew's not machining all he can think of to talk about is machining a topic that I am only limitedly interested in. 

In addition we are both stressed due the the possibility that something goes awry and his project doesn't get done on time. If that happens Andrew will fail the class and he will not be able to graduate. 

"Let it go, Jenny. You can't do much about that. Don't worry". I'm pretty sure that's what you are telling me as you read this. Yeah well Worry is my middle name. I can't help it.

I'm also worried for my own academic success. As I may have mentioned, I failed a class last term. Well, technically, I received a D-. That's basically the same thing. I can't afford to do it again.

I did badly on the weekly quiz on Friday. My excuse, I made bad choices. I drank to much coffee and didn't eat breakfast. By two in the afternoon even my hand writing was shaky. 

One quiz doesn't matter much for the overall success of the class. It does however produce a starling sense of terror. For me, fear is dangerous. It stops my little brain in its tracks and I just sit there hating myself. 

What it all boils down to: hard times, but it won't last forever. The deadline for Andrew's project to be machined is a week from Monday. Seven days to doom or glory on that front.
First midterm on Thursday for me. 

Funny Nightmares

Sean Connery

I had a dream that I had Sean Connery style chest hair. I was also fat. I could hide things in my rolls. Ruth didn't want to be seen with me in a bathing suite. It was extremely relieving to find it was only a dream.