Mutatis mutandis

It has been a rather long week.

I know, I know, I don't get to use the past tense yet, since the week isn't "over" yet - even if we're talking about the school week. But there is only one day (two classes, three hours) left, and the ending is definitely in sight. I am allowed to confuse my tenses since English doesn't really have the imperfect tense.

There is, also, one and a half week left before final starts.

Which means that naturally it should be busy. The amount of units being taken per quarter isn't really felt until the week right after the first midterm, when things start to speed up and it really doesn't become distressful until the last two weeks before final kicks in. Which may some what account for my schedule this week. Then again, the large harvest / analysis going on at the greenhouse and the sudden need to work for three extra hours may account for part of it also. Or maybe it was my attempt to finish everything that's due next Tuesday and Wednesday early (I've given up trying to finish my biology reading though, 50-pages on my current schedule of bio text is just not doable; I may be masochistic but I'm not suicidal, even mentally). Tuesday, for example, was particularly exhausting. My day started at 9 with Latin, moved to genetics from 10 to noon. I worked at the green house from noon to five, took half an hour to water the garden plot as that Tuesday's my assigned day to water, which left me half an hour to try to get some homework done before going to a meeting at 6, ending at 7, which got me home at 7:15 and gave me exactly ten minutes to skim through two articles and prep myself for the online discussion for one of my classes which lasted until 9. At least having the online discussion at that time meant that I don't have THAT class on Friday. Hence only three hours tomorrow instead of five and a half. Hippo wasn't very happy with me that day.

But oh - for a long weekend!

le soir

The prospect of another week without midterms. Yay.

Hippo's become resigned, I think, to his Saturday morning trips. By resigned I mean he cries somewhat less and jumps around less in his carrier when I'm attempting to lug him up and down the stairs (and he's getting heavier, believe me). However, it also means that he knows where he's going to end up each Saturday morning, and inevitably I now have to spend more time chasing the cat around. I suppose it's good exercise. At least for agility. Even though Hippo's not terribly agile either. Oh well, practice for both of us, so long that I remember to set aside more time for myself to go cat-chasing on Saturday mornings.

Also, Lucy, I checked my schedule-- I have one 2-hour class on Friday.

Most of the time

Bio professor actually said "nucleuses" today. He makes me very hopeful because it means that getting a doctorate doesn't require great grammar or spelling. At least not in the field of science. It's incredibly relieving to know.

Four hours in the green house today, the first half of which I spent planting eucalyptus. Who knew there were so many different species? I planted Eucalyptus baueriana, E. macrocarpa, lehmanii, and possibly something that starts with a "c" and is quite long. They also had very tiny seeds (about millet size) that are wedge shaped and quite moldy because we had to stick them with damp paper towel in the fridge to get them to germinate (we call that a "treatment"). It's...kind of disgusting, actually, but it works. However, planting it means tweezers and a handful of moldy seeds and while I can be patient, by the end of three species I was starting to feel twitchy (about 50 pots per species) - not to mention the truly awful crick I got in my neck from bending over the pots. The next harvesting starts Friday, I think, and we have...10 x 6 x however many species we have x 2 + the small pots and I think the sum is in the hundreds (oh boy). On the bright side this time I know exactly what to do in terms of root and shoot analysis.

Left at 4pm. Originally I think Mike and Jen were going to stay around for a bit longer, but then this really awful smell came from who-knows-where and everyone decided to call it a day.

Oh look, they've finally decided to post the answer key to the practice midterm. Will go and look into that now.

I spent half an hour thinking about widgets today, for the simple reason that I couldn't get the word out of my mind. Is it normal to get one word stuck in your head?

BPG

Cicero supposidedly wrote, "Ne difficilia optemus" or, "let us not wish for difficult things". I suppose that wishing for either a Monday or a Wednesday day to drop out of a week is much too difficult.

Ah well, I did try.

Attempted to attend the second office hour of my college career today to find the room packed. My guess? People really panicked after the midterm. Seems like the professors "You will FAIL if you don't come to office hours" does ring true for some people. A lot of people. I will cross my fingers and pray that I can still remember which end of the protein the proton binds to, on which subunit of the protein complex, come Friday, even though I am not religiously inclined. Healthy superstition's the way to go. As Margaret Atwood's pointed out, dreams and superstitions are hardwired into the human psyche. Even if we don't have green-eyed, overly-citrusy people wandering around to prove it.

A table have sprouted up today to join the two chairs that germinated last Friday. In a discussion that followed the end of class it camed out that Kate's Medieval Studies' professor considered her to be different, though not unique. Which may or may not be synonymous with the word "special" though, if it is, her level of specialness exceeds Annie's if only because some company out there, for some unknown reason, had sent her an envelope that was unsealed and empty. To her. As in, through the mailbox. Kate deduced that this meant that she's so special that they expected her to figure out the message even though the message wasn't there. We considered framing it. I pointed out we're looking into new apartment decor, anyway. Somewhere along the way logic schlepped off elsewhere and I finished making my dinner and ended up hearing the beginning of a story that was attempting to relate Jesus, Alexander the Great, marshmallow peeps, and black cats all in one go. It was a rather heroic attempt and I feel for the pressure that the poor little story must be under.

Now I'm going to go to bed. It's been a long day.

Away with the scheduling, again

I think one more day ought to do it. I went through what the SBP Remus would probably call the "slug-in-nostril" stage this morning, and Hippo's allowed to be petted, though I'm still keeping him well away from my face. The nostril slug demands that it be so. Nevertheless he trailed me around like a dog this morning and jumped into my lap the first time I sat down. I felt very guilty that I had to stuff him in a carrier right afterwards but Petsmart was slow today so he got home early (yes, he's home already - the drop off was moved up to 1pm today), and so it all worked out.

Having finished all immediate work that's due on Monday, I think I'll begin the gradual slide into midterm-panic mode again. Why's it that I'm going to end up with the double-quiz-midterm deal again? On Thursday and Friday again, no less? Annie has taught me the phrase "that this just proves that there is a God and that He hates you" and so now whenever things like this just "happen" (o happy coincidences that they no doubt are) I find myself thinking about it. Apparently stress brings out the philosophical side of me. Who knew?

Meant to re-pot some of the stuff on the balcony into larger pots (as that their roots are already leaking out of the container) but am not feeling up to it today. Maybe when we start harvesting again at Orchard Park and I can pick up some potting soil. Warmer weather = better germination / growth rate for loads of things, anyway. Nothing, however, would've prepared me for the chairs (green, no less) that suddenly sprung up in our balcony on Friday, if Annie didn't already warn me a while back that she'll be bringing the deck chairs over.

I got attacked by frozen, mobile things from the freezer the other day. Freezed goods can be surprisingly ferocious. And bruising. And the chicken bake things might possibly even be somewhat aerodynamic, which's all very interesting if it's just... ... physics. Excuse me while I go and bang my head against something now. I'm having trouble shutting off bits of my brain. Signalling error. Shut down. Reboot. Etc.

Sodiums

After 12 hours of sleep and 4 bottles of water (among other things) later, I feel almost normal again. I wonder what the incubation period for virus is, given that they're obligate parasites and can't carry out their metabolism by themselves and by most definition isn't even technically alive. If I get over this thing before the weekend's over I'll have time to "air out" the place, so to speak. Decrease of virus density per diffusion. I am still keeping Hippo away until I am reasonably sure I can last an hour without sneezing.

NaNoWriMo's launching something else called Script Frenzy which sounds like a whole lot of fun (you can even write with a partner! An the good o' memory of my apocalyptic play thing that I had to work on last year with Amara....)except for the obvious fact that I don't have the time. If I can actually make that much time I'd be working on the Lunatics story, which has been sadly neglected of late. Or paint any one of the dozens of paintings that I have idea for, but never found time for.

Speaking of Lunatics. Joyeux anniversaire to Nick Lucille, who's turning 20. We're not psychotic, only slightly schizophrenic. (And Latin's kind of helpful in helping me pick apart French words I've never seen before.) Mike'll be cracking jokes about Nick being ancient but he got him that album he wanted so Nick wouldn't mind. It works out at the end. It always does.

When you have to register for a class, what do you do when a class that's supposed to be offered, that's required for your major, isn't?

No longer a question

The professor went over the material on bacteria phages again and I finally figured where the alleles came from. Unfortunately it also meant that we're moving on to some other poor topic. He (the professor) means well, I'm sure, but he is not good at teaching. He's one of those instructors who say one thing when he meant something else, lose track of his own notes, and remember, three quarters way through one subject, that he forgot to tell you something on the previous subject that usually turns out to be pretty important. I have to give him full credits for trying, even if he managed to couple the DNA-RNA together as parallel instead of anti-parallel. Annie, who sat besides me, entertained herself with my various pained expressions.

It probably could've gone a lot smoother if I didn't remember a lot of the stuff from bio AP and bio sci 1A, or if I didn't kept comparing the professor to Ms. Uji or Gerhart. (Still remember the oxygen on 2' C, by the way.) One good teacher (or two, in this case) can really spoil a student into expecting too much out of a class.

A bermuda grass seed somehow managed to work its way through my sock even though I wore tennis shoes today. The poking distracted me for most of Latin until I finally found time before bio to remove it. Then I felt another one poking on my way back (early today because we're in-between plant harvests and so I get today off from work). This is war.

Also, I think (well, six hours have passed, so I'm pretty sure now) I've caught a cold, which means that the flu shot has officially worn off (not bad, considering). Now I just have to worry about how to avoid getting my roommates sick as well. So far my plan is to follow the self-semi-quarantine routine from when I had strep throat, which mostly involves keeping to my room and avoid touching things as much as possible, and a lot of handwashing all around. I have no idea how easily it is for cold virus to jump species between humans and cats (harder than dogs, I expect, but easier than rabbits) so I'm being safe and playing "no-touchy" with Hippo, which he's not particularly happy about. But--c'est la vie. You can't have everything in life, even if you're a cat.

Slightly cooler, but definitely still summer

The morning began with the sound of choppers.

Sounds dramatic, doesn't it?

It would probably sound a whole lot less dramatic if I had said "the morning began with the sound of choppers and Hippo, crying outside of my door." I had no idea where they came from, of course, or why they were here. I didn't care very much either aside from the fact that I was annoyed that I couldn't have slept longer, but oh well.

In terms of science classes, I have nothing more to report for today aside from that fact that if you went into biochemistry, you would probably spend the rest of your life terrified of buffers, whereas "amino acids" would only trigger vague twinges of unease.

I have to remember to not walk through grassy fields while wearing sandals. I don't mean lawns, even the semi-feral, neglected types, because even those are harmless enough. I mean fields, of which there are plenty of around Davis. There is nothing like bermuda grass seeds trying to burrow into the flesh of your foot to remind you to respect mother nature. And possibly seed dispersal mechanisms. Bermuda grass is evoluntionarily quite sound. Last time I spent an hour wading through a field of them I had enough seeds buried in my jeans to start a small meadow on my own, should I feel so inclined (and I didn't). Investigating the lint trap in the dryer afterwards was fun. My life style can be summarized by the content of the lint trap: cat hair, grass seeds, and occasional remenants of some sort of paper by-product from who-knows-when. Somewhat strange, occasionally disgusting, but for the most parts gray, fuzzy, and boring. There was one instance where maleic acid might of being involved, last quarter, but I couldn't spot any differences in the lint.

I'm theorizing about lint now, which means I should probably go and do something productive like, say, study for bio. Or somehow try to live up to my classmate's expectation and get full marks on every single physics quiz.

No, not that masochistic.

Merci

We're still on the subjunctives in Latin. Annie has informed me that it's likely that I'll be dealing with subjunctives for the rest of my Latin career (which, admittedly, will not be very long). Having being banged over the head with yet another use for the oh-so-popular mood, I'm convinced that Latin involves too much subjunctives for good sense. I have to own up, though, that it is nice to deal with a language that is mostly symmetrical (i.e. unlike English).

Today is my first experience of sitting through 10 minutes of a bio lecture with no clue of what was going on. I did not enjoy the experience. I STILL have no idea what the professor was referring to when he was talking about complements I and II. Lamda phages? Fine. Lytic cycle? Fine. What was the logical link between that and complement tests and where on earth did he get the alleles from? It was aggravating. I think I'll have to read through that part of the book again and there is no doubt that, as interesting as I find biology to be, all the bio textbooks that I've not had the fortune of being able to avoid reading are mind-bogglingly boring. There are interesting texts out there, but it seems having interesting reading might be breaking one of the fundamental rules of science classes. Or something.

It is over 90 degrees today and I spent almost three hours in the green house. We did some planting and some blocking. Mike left an avocado pit in the bowl of Erythrina coralloides seeds, probably (make that most likely) (make that "just") to see what kind of reactions he'd get from people(and you know science is taking over your mind when you kept thinking Avogadro when you meant to think about avocado). He also labeled the bowl with a yellow sticky note, proclaiming the E. coralloides seeds (orange-red bean-like things, very pretty, by the way) to be "magic beans which'll help you do better in math"...again, probably just for the heck of it. Needless to say that made me think of Mike Reynolds and amused me for a while.

We had to throw away the Eriobotrya deflexa (i.e. green loquats, I think), because the previous generation germinated while they're being stratefied (i.e. while they were still in the fridge. I adopted one because, of course, I cannot bear to just throw a entire block of perfectly good plants away. Jen let me kept another one because she was sympathetic of the plants so now I've got two more plants added to the collection on the balcony.

The avocado pit? I stuck it in the garden plot when I went to water it. I wonder if it'll grow.

And then a ladybug flew into my head.



Is this type of updates too much detail?

No flying cows yet

But two posts in one day? Hm....

So yes, I did, in fact, register for my summer classes today which, when I last checked, starts sometimes around June 25th and ends at around August either 3rd or 10th (only one week apart, so can't be that far off, right?).

Ted the Titan has not bloomed yet when I checked this morning. Who's Ted, you ask? Well Ted is a corpse flower, an Amorphophallus titanum, that is currently residing in our botanical conservatory. It's one of those flowers that doesn't bloom very often and when it does bloom, the flower doesn't last very long (which is probably a good thing, considering the way it smells) (there's a reason why it's called the corpse flower).

Ah, a quick check at the conservatory's website tells me that Ted bloomed at 1pm this afternoon. I wonder if I can get pictures tomorrow?

It's a very large flower.

And it's a fare-thee-well to round 1 of the midterms. Round two starts either next week or the week after next week. I'm not entirely sure anymore. (Take them as they come seems to be my newly adopted philosophy.) My bio TA occasionally has trouble to mutant E. coli and Kate's concluding that most of the knights that she learned about in her class are, in fact, insane.

That will be all.

x2O

Okay, so apparently after a few days of rain the temperature is going to hop up to 94 degrees today. It's nice that we get a warning and all. I mean, besides the fact that it's May and Davis generally starts to get pretty warm in May (unless you take into account the occasional random shower in June). Then the Mediterranean summer sets in and all of the plants die a little. I wonder how many people are going to be around Davis this summer. It may end up that I'll be the one to water Botany Club's garden plot throughout June and July.

It also happens that I have another midterm at nine. However, I'm choosing to unwind (sort of) by updating my blog and informing my audience of the hysteria that's occuring within this household. It's mostly Annie, who has a tendency to start laughing whenever Kate looks at her a certain way...or smack her on top of her head (we hypothesized that there's a 'hysteria button' there somewhere). Then there was the other day when we all went for a walk and both of them have found sticks on the ground and started poking at each other with sticks. Sometimes I feel like I'm the most sane of the three of us under this roof. It's a little unnerving.

Hippo threw up on the carpet last night. I have no idea what's wrong but he seems fine otherwise and, like Jen had said, at least the kitty-puke's on the carpet and not in my shoes.

Oops. Did I just jinx myself?

Out for now.