Saturday, March 08, 2003

 

Hmmm, not a very happy Saturday. It's been one of those days where I woke up in an icky blue mood and just haven't been able to shake it all day. I got up around noon (yes, I'm lazy -- we also stayed up until after 1:00 watching DVDs last night), took a shower, and basically spent the entire remainder of the day working on my taxes. Now that's a mood-lifter. The good news is, they're all done -- federal, California, and Oregon -- and I'm getting refunds! Quite substantial ones from Fed and OR. For CA I theoretically owe them $2.36, but since I didn't make enough money to be taxed, they should refund that and the other $6.50 that was withheld -- ooh, goody! :} It feels good to have those over and done with.

My next un-fun task that I'm not looking forward to very much is that of reviewing my health insurance plan to see if there's somebody I can get to refer me to a sports doctor or somebody to help me figure out what's wrong with my knee. I'm staying home from the contra dance tonight because of it, which especially sucks because it's a special dance -- the band is so big they have to hold it at the big PSU ballroom (where the English Country Ball was in November). What is this band? you may ask, and how big is it? They're called the Portland MegaBand, and I believe the membership totals somewhere around 75 musicians -- which is why they can't hold the dance on the basketball court at the community center! I was joking about tonight, saying that they were going to have to put the band out on the dance floor and have everybody dance up on the stage. :P I'm really bummed that I can't go, but I hope it's fun for everybody else.

Time to go eat some dinner and start looking through my health insurance policy. Oh joy.
# posted by Lacey 8:42 PM

Thursday, March 06, 2003

 

Oh, I forgot to write -- I got a cool (read: geek) book at the PCC library book sale yesterday. They've had this thing on for quite some time now, just a small rack of books off in the corner that nobody ever looks at as far as I can tell. I finally went to browse it yesterday, and ended up buying one of the first books I saw. It's just geeky enough to have the possibility of being extremely useful (either that or it will be completely useless). It's called "MATHEMATICAL TABLES from HANDBOOK of CHEMISTRY&PHYSICS", copyright 1964. It's a little hardcover jam-packed full of tiny-print tables and formulas and all sorts of mathematical jibberish, along with some things I might actually use, like the trig identities I knew really well in highschool but can't seem to remember now, and logarithms and Laplace transforms and that sort of thing. All in one convenient little volume. Yes, I'm officially a geek. :P

Hugo just told me that he's been downloading "Doctor Who" episodes on his PC, so it might be fun to watch some of those again. Wow, that's been a while! He also got "The Neverending Story," so that'll be fun to see again. :)

That's about it. Time to get ready for morris practice!
# posted by Lacey 6:21 PM

 

Well, our internet connection is down so this won’t get posted tonight, but I wanted to write anyway.

I took Pa’s advice (from quite some time ago) and went into the career center at PCC between classes this afternoon. They have a bunch of big books on specific careers and things like that lying around, which can be very helpful…. if you know exactly what you want to do. It was rather daunting. I didn’t spend much time looking at those, but I did make an appointment to take a couple of career assessment tests on Monday afternoon. It’s probably along the lines of the questionnaires that we did in highschool that give you choices of careers such as "tree farmer" or "fish hatcher" or "phlebotomist," but I thought I’d give it a try anyway and see what it came up with.

We had a group quiz in Diff Eq this evening, one of those matching things where you have to match some parameters with a phase portrait with a time graph and then justify your choices (for a forced harmonic oscillator, if that means anything to you). Part C of the quiz was something like "Provide a poetic description of the motion of each of the masses." We had pretty much done that in our justification section, but we decided to be poetic anyway, and wrote a limerick:

A mass on a spring with no friction
Was whacked by a man on a mission.
The mass oscillated,
Our brains all gyrated,
And then we described its position!

Pretty bad, huh? We were very proud of it, though. :P

I made cookies this evening, and have started hemming and hawing over the hewing and hemming of my black pants into knee britches for RR kit. I’ve had these things for so long, and just haven’t done them because I haven’t figured out how I want to do them. Well, that and my sewing machine is currently sitting in the basement, broken. Poor thing. It’ll be a miracle if we all manage to get kit together before the gig.

On another happy note, I got a letter from Cristie today! Yay for cousins. She sent me another picture from the Hallowe’en party I went to last year, where she, all of her housemates and I all dressed up as a boy/girlscout troup, complete with den mother (that was Mike.) It was very silly. It was good to hear from her. We should get together again some time soon. It’s funny, last time we saw each other we were remarking on how funny it was that all of our family were so excited that I was moving up to Portland because I’d be closer to Cristie and could see each other all the time. And the funnier thing is that we have seen each other more in the last six months than we have in the last couple of years, even though we live three hours apart now and we used to live 40 minutes apart! Funny how things work. :P

Okay, I think that’s enough for now. Back to the knickers. :P

# posted by Lacey 6:10 PM

Monday, March 03, 2003

 

Well, I guess there’s some truth to the theory of "third time’s the charm." Registration for spring quarter opened this morning, and I was actually allowed to register for what I wanted without the whole runaround of prerequisite overrides or professor approval or any of that! Huzzah! I’m only taking one academic class next quarter – another physics class, the last I have to take. I’m also signed up for a yoga class on Tuesday evenings, from 5:30 – 7:00, close enough for me to walk there after work. I’m very excited about that; it’ll be nice to get some more stretching and yoga back into my life on a regular basis. Unfortunately, it doesn’t start until April. Sigh.

I went to the contra dance on Saturday for the first time in a long time. My ankle was just fine, but my knee started up again, which tells me it may be time to start thinking about how important it really is for me to do contra, since that seems to be the problem. When I wasn’t doing contra for a few weeks, my knee was fine for running and morris, but it started hurting about the third dance in, so I’m pretty sure that contra is the culprit. Darnit!

I had a nice productive afternoon in the PSU library yesterday, and got all of my differential equations homework done for today. Now I just have to work on my physics and the rest of diff eq for Wednesday. Does it ever end? Yeah, March 19. I can’t wait.

# posted by Lacey 11:00 AM