Saturday, February 08, 2003

 

Yay for fambly! I just talked to several members of mine tonight, and it was lovely. Greg (my uncle) was out visiting from New York and staying at Monee and Pa's (my grandparents), so Graham and Mom went to spend the evening with them. I called Graham and talked to him when he got home, then called Monee and Pa's to talk to everybody else. Greg was surprised when I told him that, yes, I actually had expected him to answer the phone. :) It would have been lovely to be there to see him and visit with everybody, but it was nice to talk to all of them.

It's bed time now.

And I still haven't gotten any homework done today.

Sigh.
# posted by Lacey 10:39 PM

 

Ah, the wonders of running – good for body, mind and soul. I woke up this morning feeling all out of sorts with myself and just wanting to curl up in a little ball and stay in bed all day. But Hugo (eventually) made me get up and go for a run with him, and that turned things around amazingly well. The actual act of running felt much better this week than last week, when I just felt I was slogging along and beating myself into the ground until I would finally collapse – I actually felt like I was getting into a stride and wasn’t totally exhausted afterward. And after a run and a shower my outlook on things is much brighter. I love taking a shower after I run – it makes me feel extra clean, somehow, a clean that I don’t feel when I just get up and take a shower in the morning before work. It’s like I have to actually get sweaty or dirty in order to really feel clean. Which, I suppose, is part of the reason I loved taking showers in the evenings when I got home from work at the Marine Lab all sweaty and filthy. I felt like I’d actually accomplished something and was rewarding myself with a nice satisfying shower. But enough of that. I’m clean and I don’t smell all sweaty anymore. Big deal. :P

Hugo’s quest for the elusive greencard has come to its crucial moment, and he should hear around the end of next week whether or not he’ll be able to stay in this country, or if he has to move back to England. There’s nothing more he can really do about it at this point, other than fill out all the paperwork and hope, so that’s what we’re doing – hoping really hard.

Time to go down to the dungeon (ok, the basement) and start some laundry, then wash the dishes from last night (oh, the joys of eating dinner at 10:00 and not having a dishwasher), and finally get started on some homework. Fortunately, our internet access has been spotty (in fact, it’s down right now, which is why I’m typing this in Word and will post it whenever it comes back up), so there’s less of a distraction for me there. :}

Happy Saturday!
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….. Later (since I still can’t get on the internet to do a separate entry)…..
So much for doing homework. It hasn’t happened yet. I did get some laundry going, but then I got caught up on tidying the apartment and sweeping the whole place. Hardwood floors can be nice sometimes, but, boy, the dust bunnies are a force to be reckoned with! :P


# posted by Lacey 5:49 PM

Friday, February 07, 2003

 

Yay for Fridays! Yes, I'm home on a Friday night writing in my blog instead of being out partying or dancing or some other such excitement. But that's perfectly alright with me. Life has been moving quickly and I don't feel the need to be out just because it's Friday night; a quiet night at home in my pj's is just peachy for me.

I've been getting lots and lots of happy wonderful letters and things in the mail the last couple of weeks. Things from some of my favoritest people in the whole wide world -- my big brother, star-sister, and both Mommies! :) It's very wonderful to get letters, and I keep meaning to sit down and write some of my own one of these days. Why does it feel like I never have time to do the little nice things like that? It seems that I'm always either working, in class, or studying, and when I'm not I don't know where the time goes because I don't ever seem to get anything accomplished that I'd like to. Sigh.

I was talking with Hugo last night on our way to the pub after morris practice, trying to figure out where I might possibly be going with my life in general, and what on earth I want to do with school in particular. Part of the reason for taking this year off was to try to get more of a focus on what I might want to concentrate on with the rest of my time at Stanford, by getting further away from it for a while (though it has turned out not to be so much a year "off" after all, since I'm taking icky classes all year -- sigh). I declared myself as an Earth Systems major about a year ago, and I like the ideas and principles that the program offers and supports, but when I really think about it I have no idea where I would "go" with such a major. I think I'm technically in the "Oceans" concentration at the moment, but I'm leaning further and further away from that. The thing is, I can't say for certain what I'm leaning towards. None of the other Earth Systems tracks particularly draw me, but neither do any of the other majors at Stanford. Hugo said he couldn’t see why I’m in Earth Systems at all to begin with, observing that I don’t posses either of the two traits that he would expect to drive somebody into choosing that major (driving being a good thing): a thirst for knowledge, and political motivation (or even an opinion once in a while). Which I suppose is true. I like to learn things, but my memory is abominable and I can’t seem to retain any knowledge from one quarter to the next, let alone anything remotely permanent (academically speaking – I remember dances quite well, thank you). And anybody who knows me will know that I don’t have any sort of political inclination, so I’m not going into Earth Systems to get into the politics of changing the world. So why am I in Earth Systems? I say that I like the broad variety of the program, yet I complain that I have to take a whole bunch of classes that I don’t like, such as differential equations, economics and computer science. To be brutally honest with myself, I’m beginning to realize that part of the reason I gravitated toward this major is that it allows me to stay unfocused; I get a little bit of everything, but come out not having a grounding or in-depth involvement in any of it. Which is just fine and dandy for the part of me that’s scared to death of committing to something as big as my educational direction (even if I don’t think it’s what I’ll do for the rest of my life, though I’d like to think it had some relevance); but for the part of my brain that is finally realizing this, it’s even more scary because it just reinforces the fact that I have absolutely no clue what I’m doing and I don’t have that long to get my act together and figure it out, at least on a two- or three-year time scale. But this is all too heavy for a Friday night. I think I’ll eat some more cheesecake and go to bed.

# posted by Lacey 11:41 PM

Tuesday, February 04, 2003

 

Mmmmm...... I should definitely make cheesecake more often.
:)
# posted by Lacey 10:58 PM

 

Mmmm, cheesecake. Yum. Just got it out of the oven, so it won't be ready to eat for a few hours, but it sure smells and looks good! :) Much more appealing than all of the various tax forms I've been looking at this afternoon. I have to do double duty on filing taxes this year, since I have to file in California and Oregon. What a pain. But at least I've got a while to do it still.

To continue my textbook saga: I got a note in the mail yesterday from the people that sent me the Differential Equations book, admitting their mistake in sending me two books and asking me to please mail one of them back. It's a good thing I hadn't tried to sell it yet! The weird thing was that one of them was sent by UPS and the other by USPS. Not very consistent, so not too surprising that they made the mistake. But I'm glad it was that way and not the other way around. :}

And to catch up on the adventures at the apartment.... Hugo, Kirsty, Robbie and I went to the contra dance on Saturday night, leaving Ellie in the apartment by herself. It was a good dance, but we were all tired by the end, and ready to just come home, have a snack, and go to bed. But when we got back we found a note on the door from Ellie, saying "Sorry I had to leave, but there's a giant grey rat-thing in your kitchen under the sink. Mommy picked me up. -Ellie P.S. Joe called about the truck." We found the cupboard doors under the sink braced shut with a stool, so we figured it must have been a fairly good sized rodent to warrant that precaution. The rat wasn't under the sink when we looked, but we found the hole he'd gotten in by and plugged it up with an old sock. We went down to the basement to see if we could find the other end of the hole, but couldn't. By the time everybody finally got over the excitement and went to bed it was about 1:00 a.m. Unfortunately, we still haven't managed to get rid of the rat. He pulled the sock all the way through the hole to wherever the hole goes -- the sock that Hugo wedged in as hard as he could until he couldn't push it any further. We hear him under there every once in a while, but haven't managed to get him yet. I think we should take our friend Beverly up on her offer of her live trap. But meanwhile, call the land lady.

I have a light load of schoolwork this week, due to an icky horrible differential equations exam yesterday, and a physics prof that's been in the hospital for gall bladder surgery for the last week -- our homework deadlines have been put off until he comes back next Monday. It's kind of nice, but won't be so nice when I have to get my nose back to the grindstone next week. Here's to early bed times!
# posted by Lacey 5:35 PM