Three months

...isn't, after all, such a long time between posts. Right?

Aaaaaanyway. Semester's about over- just finishing up Dead Week, then finals start Monday. Things are tight, but slotting together reasonably well; I have stats on Monday, geography and linear algebra on Tuesday, partials either Wednesday or Friday, whenever I want to take it, and then my medieval philosophy final is an online take-home that's already open for me to work on whenever, due next Friday.

The philosophy take home is kinda unfortunate, because it gave the professor leeway to assign a rather longer, harder, more intense final than would have been at all reasonable for us to do had we actually gone to the class and sat the final properly. Oh well. 9-10 pages of philosophical analysis can't be that bad. Right?

It hasn't been a bad semester. The math's been harder than I was really hoping, though stats has been easy. I don't regret taking philosophy as an elective- it's been interesting and fun, without demanding too much more time than I'm comfortable devoting to it. Geography of Disasters has been depressingly miserable, (We spent the last two class periods watching Demi Moore's The Seventh Sign. Please, if you have any respect for your time, don't watch this movie. Go... do something off this list instead. Or stare at blank walls. I swear it'll be more enjoyable, and certainly more self-enriching.) but it's over now. Gah. So much potential, and just an awful class. Sigh.

Partials has been the real disappointment this semester- I feel like I should understand it better than I do not only because I suspect it'll come back to bite me if/when I don't, but also because it shouldn't be this hard. Mostly it's just bad because the professor is head of the department and so has no time. Which is unfortunate, and makes things difficult. Things are starting to come together a little bit, though, which is good- we are just about to take the final, it'd better happen now. Here're some pics of our work on the latest hw assignment.









Had a good time down south for birthday/Thanksgiving, though. Disneyland was really neat; here's me as our friend Indie:



Right then. Time for a bit of sleep, I think. Busy days ahead. I was kinda hoping to get a little holiday baking done this weekend, but not I don't know if that's going to happen. I'd certainly like it to. We'll see.

pg 161 meme

Snagged from mom; here's the fifth sentence on page 161 of the book nearest to me:

"Evaluate the determinants of the following matrices (i) using the first row (ii) using the "diagonals" method."

Hmm, not very interesting. Ah well. Would that linear algebra was that easy these days.

This week was kinda unpleasant academically, but really good otherwise. Had tests/quizzes in all my classes except philosophy, and had a writing assignment thing on Aristotle's De Anima due in that. Today was an exam in stats and a quiz in partials; both of which I think went well, but it's hard to tell until I get them back Monday. I'm quite sure I didn't butcher either of them, though, so that's nice.

There was a test in my Geography of Disasters class that just doesn't bear mentioning; if the sort of stuff on the test was really what he considers important about the material we've covered, then I absolutely don't feel bad about working on other homework through those class periods. It was just...wow. He had had us all (as an assignment) email him five possible test questions, and their answers. He then compiled the test using almost entirely these questions, and believe me when I tell you it showed. That was on Tuesday, and I was absurdly glad that that class was furloughed Thursday. Gah. What's incredibly depressing about whole thing is it's such an awesome idea for a class, and I really want to know about it. Grr...

Oh, and I (along with everyone else I know) failed our second linear algebra quiz. So there's that.

Soooo, it wasn't a great week as far as school went. But! All was not lost. The bf and I were able to hang out a lot, which was marvelous. Thursday was particularly fun, since I had 2/3 classes furloughed. I know on an intellectual level that furloughs are bad things that are stunting an important time in my education, but seriously? It's really hard to be disdainful of extra time to get some done. But yeah. Hanging out this week was fun, and we're headed to Spaghetti Factory tomorrow for a bit of a break. Exciting! So it's been a happy week there :)

That's pretty much all that's going on here. The AC is broken in the big room where we have our step class, which is...unfortunate. I've been spending a lot of time up in the math tutor lab, doing work, killing time, and helping out when they're busy. I got to teach a CE major IBP the other day- that was really rewarding. It's supposed to be 100F again this week up here, which, like the room's AC being broken, seems to be lacking in a certain amount of good fortune. I like grocery shopping with company. We had the first math club pizza night of the semester on Monday, and it went really well (I may mainly think so because I got to cuddle a baby during it). I made tortilla chips this evening, and had them for dinner. I'm looking forward to House starting on Monday.

Aaaand, I'm quite tired (long week!) so off to bed with me. Everyone have a good weekend!

Cooking, card games. and quizzes (and the immortality and pre-existence of the human soul) Oh My!

Have been making food the last couple of days. It was starting to get necessary- I really don't feel like cooking, most of the time when I get home from classes, and it's easy to just be able to yank something out of the fridge or freezer and shove it in the microwave. That said, I'm not yet ready to utilize Spencer's method, which is to just buy hot pockets en masse and live off those for weeks at a time. So! Chilli beans and rice it is.


I actually already had a bit of leftover rice, so I made the beans last night and ate them to today after step with the last of that rice. Then made new rice while I ate my dinner!





Food! So now I have about half of each in the fridge and freezer, respectively. That should keep me going for a while. Also, I'm almost halfway done with my 25 lb bag of rice. (I typed bog rice there first. That's not what I meant.)

So there's that. Other than cooking, it's mostly just been classes and homework out here, with some fun game nights with friends in between to break it up. Beer pong ftw! Munchkin, Settlers of Catan, and San Juan have all been introduced to me in the last couple of weeks, and there is the possibility of D&D this weekend. We will see. As I wrote to a friend of mine earlier, "I think when peoples' four-day-weekend plans involve a Risk marathon, there's really no j/k needed when referring to them no lives." And it's true.

We had a linear quiz on Tuesday that I thought went better than it actually did. That said, I did better than the four people that sit around me, and there are only 11 of us in the class. And while that's nice and all, it doesn't really do much for my 13/20. Sigh. Well, I think he drops our lowest quiz grade, so this'll just have to be my one fail!grade for the semester, y/y?

And at any rate, he only assigned us 13 more proofs to do over the long weekend. Le sigh. Also, while I'm complaining about him, he let us out ten minutes late today. So there.

As for soul statuses, ( I always think that 'status' should have a better plural form. Stati?) medieval philosophy was really cool today. Not that it isn't usually, because it is. Pretty much made of awesome. And there's no one thing about it that makes it great, just the overall effect- enthusiastic professor, challenging subject matter, educated/intelligent classmates that care about this stuff and really want to understand everything about it, an atmosphere where questions and comments are encouraged.

And the fact that the material is cool is just icing. We spent our 75 minutes today studying a brief bit out of Plato's dialogue Phaedo. I'd read the assigned bit beforehand, so I was able to follow along without having to scramble for notes. So. Much. Fun. As we went through the arguments presented, we got to pick at them and discuss them, and argue about their soundness and which conclusions Plato might have been assuming. (Bad!Plato!)

Aaaaanyway. Take home message? Linear algebra bad, philosophy good, food good, college furloughs technically bad but really? Good. Non-slanty bathtubs bad, geeky world domination games good.

Sleep, good.

Trufax

Almost done with week one...

I really love muscle memory. I haven't taken step in almost a year now, but I didn't even have to think today before my body fell back into the patterns we were doing. Which, okay yeah, were the most basic intro patterns. But! It required very little attention and went well. Unlike the abs part of the class, which was a sharp reminder of just how little ab work I've done in the last six months.

But anyway. Muscle memory is fun. Math classes not so much. No, I lie. The classes are kinda fun. Even abstract linear algebra, which is a TTR long class, is interesting and fun to be in. It's just, you know, the mass quantities of homework (Proofs! Many of them!) and the frighteningly impending tests/quizzes that aren't cool. For example, here are some of my recent notes:


Linear notes. It should be taken into account that we're all learning the really weird notation as he's scrawling it across the board.


Diff notes. Partial differentials this semester! More difficult than I was anticipating, to be honest.


Stats notes. Very easy class, conceptually. And the math isn't
tricky either. Just a lot of homework on with which to be getting.

Why my life has to be consumed with things like that, rather than things like like this:





It's beyond my understanding. Truly.

But mostly, I'm just complaining. After all, I knew the job was dangerous when I took it (Fred). I asked a girlfriend to day, as we sat pounding our heads against a linear proof, whay we chose to be math majors, again? After all, there are apparently majors where you can graduate in four years with your bachelors, and still go out and like, party every night. I have heard stories of such things. It makes me think I'm doing something wrong here. (Not the not partying, which I'm happy with. But I bet these drunken, hypothetical (business!) students have time for adequate sleep too. Jerks.)

At any rate, she told me we were math majors because we're crazy. So at least there's (an explicitly defined) madness to the madness.

WI, Day of Posting Lameness (Actually the End of Day 8)

No post tonight, but soon, to wrap up the trip. Tomorrow, with lots of pics. But it's now 23:52 here, and I require sleepage before the major goings-on of tomorrow. Sufficed to say that much fun has been had the past few days, and it will be recounted. Here is a sneak preview:

Exciting, no?

WI Days Five (I promise this time) and Six

It should preliminarily be noted that I'm running on three hours of sleep- mosquito bites made me too crazy to fall asleep last night until about 3 this morning, and then I got up again at six. Don't ask why, I've no idea. At any rate, I'm starting to get a bit sleepy now, so I thought I'd blog before I tottered off to bed.

A bed all to myself, since I'm at Oma's tonight and most of tomorrow, spending time with her and working on her computer. Norton is installed and is now running a nice full system scan, then there are major Windows service pack downloads to do tomorrow. Still haven't figured out why her hard drive thinks it's full, though...

Yesterday was fun and exciting in a shopping kinda way- we were originally going to go to the mall, but time got away from us a bit and we ended up going to Plato's Closet and Savers instead. I'd never heard of either of them, but J knew of Savers, and was blown away by Plato's. I admit, it was pretty fun. Jay got a long sweater top thing ($10), and a pink homecoming/prom dress
($8) that she bought herself, and I snagged two pretty new t-shirts ($3 & $6). So that was fun. I didn't find anything that particularly stuck my fancy at Savers, but J got another couple of tops there, I think. Bad memory is what I get for blogging late :)

Also, I keep reading "savers" as "slayers". Too much Buffy.


Girls before leaving for the shopping expedition.


J in her $8 dress. It's even nicer in person.

Then we had barbecued burgers and chicken for dinner; Oma and AK come out, and it was a very pleasant evening. Cooking for big groups is fun, especially when lots of people are working together.

Sadly, it was our last time with UD- he left this morning to go back to out of town work. I missed him by just a couple of hours, since I was up so late futzing with Norton. Oh yeah, that was the other thing I did yesterday, was fought with Norton and Windows Updates to get the second vista service pack so that stuff would run right. Anyway. That finally sorted itself out around nine last night, and I was up many hours later to watch it complete its first full system scan :)

So it was just me and AJ for quite a few hours this morning after I got up around 6. I showed her around norton and some of her new stuff I'd downloaded last night, and then we went to work ripping her music and syncing her iPod. So much tech, so little time!

While the girls were still abed, we went out to Walmart to pick up some meat for our grand afternoon meal with cousin Mike and his girlfriend. It was the girlfriend's birthday, so J and Sylvie decorated the living room and we got a very attractive meal together:


Isn't it pretty! So summery, which is what I loved. Corn, little bowls of fruit, shredded meat, buns, and coleslaw (not pictured). And nametags on the place settings!


The nice meat mix: boneless pork, zucchini, bouillon, wine, and some other stuff I'm forgetting. It was absolutely delicious.


The Decorator and The Chef! (Timelord Names?)

The visit was a lot of fun; after lunch and birthday cake we sat outside on the back porch for hours, just enjoying the day and learning about the restaurant industry. Fun stuff.

But now AK is at AJ's, since there's airport travelling to be done by AK in the morning before AJ goes to work. Aaaaaand, we're back at the beginning of the post! Still waiting for the scan to finish; contemplating just slapping on some hydrocortisone, leaving the scan to finish itself up on its own, and heading to bed.

Mmmph, right, I think that's a plan. G'night!