Dan and I went to a meeting with Dominic's teachers today to discuss his troubles with getting homework and projects done.

At the end of the meeting, Dominic came in and we went to his locker to see how organized it was. It was scary, to say the least, but somehow he had 4 copies of his Spanish text book. WTF?!

I've been in Tucson since the 2nd. The first day sucked really bad. The travel part was horrible (long story, will tell later) and then when I got to my mom's house (she is in New Hampshire for the weekend, but is letting me stay at her house and use her car) the A/C wouldn't come on. Neither my friend Andrew nor my friend Star could get it to work. Finally we decided to leave--I rescheduled hanging out with Andrew and Star said I could spend the night at her house. The A/C guy said he'd meet me in the morning to figure out what was wrong. So I go to get in the car to follow Star to her house, and the car won't start. Totally dead battery. Good thing Star was still there or I'd have been trapped at the house. It was 90 degrees inside with nothing but ceiling fans.

So the A/C was a simple fix--turns out the door to the A/C unit was not on, and there is a kill switch on it. My mom thinks she may have removed the door to prevent the A/C from accidentally coming on while she was gone for 3 months--too bad she didn't remember that the night before! Anyway, even with the A/C, it's still too hot for me. I have a very low tolerance for heat. It hasn't even been over 100, I don't think, just in the 90s. That's not very hot for Tucson, but it's hot enough to remind me why I left! Yick.

The other thing is that since my mom is gone for several months, she had the cable turned off. So no TV but more importantly... NO INTERNET. I'm dyin'. I have to go to coffee shops and stuff to get online. It sucks.

Last night was the 20th high school reunion for my school's class of 1989. I graduated in 1990, but most of my friends were older than me--class of '88 or '89--so when I saw on Facebook that they were planning a reunion I asked if I could come. My mom had frequent flyer miles on Delta that were going to expire if she didn't use them by the end of May, so I got a free ticket to come to Tucson, and with a free place to stay and a free car, I figured what the hell. I have been enjoying seeing people that I haven't seen for years. The reunion was fun, but I've been having more fun just meeting people one-on-one here and there (and seeing people who were friends but not from school).

The reunion was very weird in some ways. People looked so much older, and after 20 years a lot of us were having the same problem: we would say "hey, that person looks really familiar... but did I actually know them? Or did I just see them all the time?" I met and had interesting conversations with a number of people who, while we agreed "I remember you" we didn't actually know each other back then, so it wasn't really a bad thing, it was just kind of strange and awkward. I saw a few people who I was close friends with, but they all left fairly early. There was a dance floor, but nobody would dance. I danced a number of times hoping each time that maybe people had finally had enough to drink that other people would start dancing, too, but to no avail. A number of other people shared my disappointment and wished that people would dance, but they weren't willing to go out there with me and be among the first to get it started. I ended up leaving about 11:30. I got a phone call at about 1am from someone I'd met at the reunion asking me where I was--he then apologized when he realized I had gone home and said he hoped he hadn't woken me up (he hadn't--I was reading).

One thing that was interesting was seeing the different directions people went in. For example, there was my friend Gerald, who I was in drama with but who I remember more from computer class. We used to sit next to each other and we were the only ones in the class who understood how to do anything. We'd finish our assignments in the first 5 minutes of class and spend the rest of the time either chatting with each other or going around helping other people. No surprise, he works in the computer field now. Then there was the guy who was a jock in high school (I didn't know him, but we talked a lot at the reunion and at the pre-party the night before) who ended up going into graphic design, and says he wants to get back into figure drawing. Who could have guessed? My good friend Andrew from drama, who was the biggest hippie I knew picked me up from the airport and he was wearing a tie! He works at the community college in administration. Never saw him as the type.

I am here until Tuesday, and have a few other people to see. It is fun seeing people, but it will be good to go home and see Dan and Dominic and the kitties--and get out of the heat!

So the professional photos from graduation are done and I got the little thing in the mail trying to get me to pay scads of money to order them in every shape and size. I did order an 8 x 10, but will be scanning and printing at home for any additional copies/sizes. Decided not to buy the $50 plastic frame that holds a 5x7 plus your tassel (5x7 and tassel not included) or any of the other totally inflated crap they offered :)

My mom and Dominic were sitting quite far away, though, and so I don't have any kind of good picture of me graduating, so it's worth it to buy one copy.

Here it is... all those essays and exams and projects finally paid off:
( Read more... )

This morning was graduation. Woohoo! I graduated summa cum laude with a BA in studio art.

This time next week, I will be a college graduate (finally!). I picked up my cap and gown today (they are out of stock on the tassels, have to go back tomorrow) and my honors medallion. The graduation is Saturday morning, and unless I seriously screw something up in the next 36 hours or so, I'll be graduating summa cum laude--hopefully with my 4.0 intact, but that remains to be seen.

This time two weeks from now, I'll be on my honeymoon.

Right now, however, I've been up since Monday morning working on school stuff (finishing 11 sculptures for class, for example) and I'm just now starting to write the 6-8 page term paper that is due tomorrow at 1pm in my religion class. I have to discuss what I think is the "most significant characteristic of inter-faith relations between Muslims, Jews, and Christians over the centuries"... (I'm going to argue for "politics" being the most significant.) Somehow I'd been operating under the misguided delusion that the paper was due on Thursday, so I'd been putting all my effort to finishing the art stuff, figuring I'd sleep and have a whole day to work on the paper. Then I realized it was due Wednesday, and so now I have to write it on no sleep. Yeah, yeah, I should have been working on it already, but honestly we really couldn't do much before last Wednesday, as that was the final day of lecture and discussion in the class, which was pretty critical to coming up with our thesis statements and so on.

Since last week, my universe has been finishing the work for Sculpture III and Sculpture Independent Study. (Yes, I'm the maniac who is taking 8 credit hours of sculpture as part of her 16 hours for the semester.) I was behind on the work because of being sick for the first 4 months of the year, and then when I burned my hand it really set me back. I kept putting off the Big Push in the hopes that my hand would start feeling better and the work would be easier, but it never happened. So I had to do a lot of work compressed into less time, and do it largely left-handed. I felt like Bobo the Gorilla trying to do some of the painting details.

Stupid bandaged hand. Stupid second degree burns! The blisters are all tearing apart and peeling off now, so in addition to the normal pain, there's this awful stinging punctuated by sudden spikes of random pain as a delightful bonus.


Of the sculpture pieces that I did, the disassembled rose is my favorite. I haven't finished it yet (the bottom edges need to be boxed in with wood and cleaned up/hidden) but the important stuff is done:

Early stages. Other projects litter the floor behind:


Almost done, side views, top view:


Front view through the picture frame, you can see the illusion:


My driveway this morning...


Oh, and happy birthday gingy! I can't wait to see you guys at the wedding!

After being sick for 4 1/2 months and having to leave a class halfway through because my constant coughing/gasping/wheezing was disruptive to the class (we had a guest speaker) I finally took matters into my own hands last week. Thursday I built up to a dosage of dextromethorphan (main ingredient in Robitussin) that actually made me stop coughing--the "recommended dosage" is a joke when you're coughing so hard it makes you puke and wet your pants at the same time, and it's been going on as long as this has. The working dosage seems to be about 4x the recommended one. At that level, the cough totally went away. So did a lot of coordination, mental clarity, etc, of course. In fact I was on the edge of seeing pink elephants and everyone sounded like they were talking in a tunnel. It was hard to focus on things well enough to read and physically my dexterity was just kind of sad so I stayed on the couch most of the time.

I did go to class on Thursday. I had Dan drive me and pick me up. I didn't get much done in sculpture, but in my logic class we learned 5 new rules and did proofs and I took notes and was able to actually comprehend and work the proofs. I can even read what I wrote! I maintained myself at that dosage through Saturday night. By the end it was really a chore. Being mentally confused for three days is tiring and obnoxious. Sunday I took the recommended dose, to keep some in my system for any lingering effect it may provide, and have been using my inhaler and sucking down cough drops like they're going out of style... but you know what? I am NOT COUGHING! I showed up to class on Monday and everyone was saying "oh my god! You're not coughing! You look so much better!"

Tuesday I had a follow-up with the doctor at the school clinic and she said my lungs sound great. I told her what I did and said I hoped she wasn't mad, and that I knew it wasn't medically advised. She said that yeah, she would not have recommended it, but that sometimes going "off label" is the only thing that works and she understood.

So while I was sitting on the couch doing not much of anything for those several days, I started nosing around on FaceBook and finding old friends from 20 years ago and joining discussion groups about "the old days". It was really cool. Also, Rob was in town the whole week because it was Dominic's spring break, and we had a lot of the same friends back then. I took some pictures of him and he finally got on FaceBook, and so we got to kind of nostalgize together. It was fun but sometimes bittersweet. I also hauled out my yearbooks and read all of the signatures. I should really scan some of these in. It kind of provides a good back story for people to understand how I came to be who I am today.

I have had several distinct stages in my life... the troubled child, of course. The totally weird, emotionally messed up teenager. The unmedicated bipolar young adult going through various experimental stages. The new mom trying to deal with stuff she wasn't emotionally able to handle... and so on and so on. I'm finally at the stage where I'm the functional and finally mature enough to handle life 30-something who is stable on medication and has an optimistic future... I've also found the art outlet that my soul has been seeking all these years. Finally going to graduate from undergrad in less than a month (OMG!) Going to get married again to a wonderful guy. My previous husband and my current wonderful guy get along great and we're one big happy family...

But knowing who I am now and looking back... I often feel a lot of self-loathing for who I was then, because I was so shunned for who I was. Rob was here (Dan actually left town for the weekend for his cousin's bachelor's party) and we had some time to talk, and he reminded me that while I wasn't stable, and I had my dark side, that there actually were positive things about me, even back in my fucked up days. When I wasn't in a depression pit, I was fun to be around and I was nice... and I have always been creative. He gave me some perspective that really helped me heal, I think. I am able to look back at the old days with something in my heart other than just shame and embarrassment.

I asked Rob "I'm a different person now than I am then, right?" and he said "No, I wouldn't say you are a different person. You're a stable version of the person you were. You're more mature and in control, but you were always this person inside." That was really an insight that I needed to hear.

Oh, and yesterday in sculpture class I walked up to the friend I lost (I posted about it a month ago)... recently he's actually exchanged a few civil words with me when we've been in a situation where it would be awkward to keep ignoring each other. So I walked up to him and said something along the lines of "this is stupid and it sucks. Be my friend again." And he said "ok." Then I made him give me a hug even though I was gassing him out with my menthol cough drop breath. We walked to our next class together for the first time in a month, and it was awesome. Unfortunately I had to leave class early because I was nodding off (lack of sleep--huge surprise) and I still needed to drive home. But anyway I think that situation is cleared up. He's even back in the wedding! He's going to walk the flower girl down the aisle.

Things are looking up!

Good news on the wedding front: I ordered my dress! It was over my budget but my completely awesome bridesmaids chipped in to cover the difference as their wedding gift. How amazing is that? The dress is so incredible. I'm so excited! And then Irina found just the perfect bridesmaids' dress online and they're all ordering it today. Everyone is going to look so pretty! I can't wait :D

I am a little less stressed out now that the student show/merit show stuff is up and done with, but I have to work my butt off to get my piece done for the Image + Object show that opens this coming Friday. That and I have to re-take a midterm (apparently the midterms were stolen before they could be graded.) and write a paper and all the other usual school stuff.

I am so looking forward to graduation! And getting married! And going on a honeymoon! And moving to Boston! And not being sick anymore!

Seriously. I've been sick for 4 months now. Enough is enough. Going to the clinic for the 3rd time tomorrow. My friend Sara (one of Dan's fellow podiatry students) thinks I should get a chest x-ray to see if I have pneumonia. I had walking pneumonia once in high school for months on end, so I wouldn't be surprised. The antibiotics that I got for the "bronchitis" (if that's what it is/was) seemed to make me feel better for a couple of days, but then I got worse again.

At least I got some decent sleep this weekend, for once.

Today in sculpture we learned to weld and use the plasma cutter. Whee!!! I burned a bunch of holes in the sleeves of my really cheap Target long-sleeve t-shirt. I need to get a special shirt that I don't care about to wear over my clothes for welding, since there pretty much isn't a way to not have sparks landing on your arms.

Ok I have pictures! These are links to albums with progress photos and also the finished* pieces.



Burden of Time (clocks and watches thing)



Paint Dance with Violin Solo (cut in half violin thing)
(I really need to set up a way to take photos of paintings without glare. I finally have a bunch of black fabric, and I know how to do it, it's just going to take some setup time.)

*technically the tortoise isn't finished as the body of the guy is going to be bronze, but won't be poured until next semester. What you see there is a very quick-and-dirty plaster casting that I've painted. I didn't bother much with it--in fact one his feet broke off and I just sort of glommed a lump of plaster in its place and said hell with it. I only made him so that I could build the shell in such a way that it actually would fit on him (and so that when I took it to scohol it would look kind of right rather than having to say "imagine that there was...")

I just got home from my sculpture class final critique. I'm done for the semester! I SURVIVED! Woohoo!

So I handed in my art history seminar paper today. Including bibliography, endnotes, and images it was 21 pages. Oi. Glad to have that done. I also took my psychology final today. I'm pretty confident I got an A. There were only a few questions where I wasn't reasonably certain of the answer, and on those I think I at least had an educated guess.

So that leaves two sculpture projects to finish, and then I'm done for the semester!

In other news, thwack is the most awesome friend ever. My Virtual Bubblewrap site has been sort of broken for a few months. I don't know if it's a change in the more recent versions of the Flash player or what, but it wasn't working properly. Anyway, over the weekend Thwack fixed it with a brand spanking new version that not only works (including a return to keeping scores! Yay!) but also gives you a snippet of code when you're done that you can paste into a blog or whatever and brag about how awesomely fast you are to all of your friends. Woohoo! Thanks, Thwack. You rock!

I got the comments and grade for my art history (Gothic Cathedrals Seminar) presentation today. I like my professor--I do. She rubs a lot of people the wrong way because she is one of those people who knows she's smart and can be a little snarky... and she's a grammar nazi... and she is a hard teacher in general. I've heard her described as "smug" and "arrogant" and both words do sort of fit. But at the same time I sort of "get" her and can appreciate her despite those things. Some of the stuff we have to read in class bores me to tears but some of our class discussions have been really fascinating for me. Anyway, that all said, there is one thing about her that bugs me: she gives no positive feedback. All feedback from her is in one of two forms: what you've done wrong or what you can improve. She never tells you that you've done something well or gives you any sense of accomplishment at all.

So as I said I got the evaluation sheet back for the presentation I did the Monday before Thanksgiving. I got a 90% which is an A, but every single comment on the page was negative or was at best a recommendation on how to do better. I ended up feeling extremely disappointed even though I got an A. I put a lot of work into my presentation and felt that none of it was appreciated.

One comment in particular got to me: she said I needed to look up more. Part of the instructions for the presentation was that we should be familiar enough with our script (yes, it had to be scripted) to look up and make eye contact with the audience some of the time. I did that a lot. Just about every time I looked up, however, I glanced over to try to make eye contact with the professor and she was looking down, making notes. So all the times I looked up, she didn't see it.

She also said that my powerpoint was "a bit too much for me, too much text, too many things going on. makes it too informal." As for text... I had captions under my images of cathedrals or artwork giving their name and location. I also had a few brief bulleted lists, such as a list of the Seven Liberal Arts (that slide had a total of 11 words) and a couple of times when I showed an unfamiliar vocabulary term on the slide (such as when I talked about quasi-periodic patterning) because I find it helps to understand new terms if you see them written down. There was a slide with a brief quote by an art historian and another slide with an even briefer (5 words) quote from Muhammad. There really wasn't much text at all--most of the other students' presentations had more text than mine did, I think.

As for too much going on...well... I had two animated things. The first was silly and designed to entertain: I was making a point in my script about the crusades bringing back booty from Islamic culture, and so on the powerpoint behind me I had a map of medieval Europe. As I was talking, a cluster of crusaders and a cluster of Muslims appear on the map--they're actually very intricately painted war gaming miniatures that I'd cut out in Photoshop to make them transparent--they looked pretty neat, I thought. Anyway, they crusader cluster goes down and encounters the Muslim cluster and then several "artifacts" show up and are carried back to Europe by the crusaders. Yes, it was cutesy, but this is a 20 minute presentation to a bunch of undergraduate college students and I wanted to make it not quite so painfully boring by throwing a little levity in the mix. The other animation I used was to show the 500 year gap between Islamic use of decagonal symmetry in tile patterning and western culture figuring out the math that made it possible. To illustrate this, I showed a timeline and had things appear on it really rapid-fire with images flying by--things like Columbus arriving in America, the World Wars, the inventions of the car and the airplane, and the moon landing--while explaining that the gap between them getting it and us getting it was roughly the same as the gap between the crusades and the founding of Microsoft. It was meant to be an overwhelming amount of information moving too fast to process; that was the whole point. I was showing how much history went in the middle, and how many advancements were made in that time, to give an idea of how far back I was talking about and show how advanced their math was at the time compared to ours. I also used a screenshot from Monty Python and the Holy Grail in the background while I was mentioning Europe being stuck in the "agrarian mire" of the dark ages. Apparently this stuff was "too much" for the professor but everybody that I talked to from the class said that those things made my presentation much more bearable and interesting.

So whatever. At least I got an A even if she didn't like it... though you'd think, since she gave me an A, she had to like some part of it, right? So would it kill her to have said that I did even one little thing even a tiny bit well? When she returned our rough drafts for our paper, mine had one verb tense change, one suggestion to add the phrase "into the medieval west" into a sentence, and a suggestion to break a particularly long paragraph into two. At the end she mentioned a few areas that I could expand on in the final draft (which has to be several pages longer than the rough draft). No comments at all about anything being good or done correctly or on the right track or anything. The only positive note about that was that of the few other of my classmates' papers that I've seen, all have been marked up like crazy, so at least I know she didn't hate it and/or it could have been much worse. Not having your teacher hate your paper is a far cry from your teacher liking your paper. She rather squashes enthusiasm and motivation with her grading style, I think. *sigh* So long as I get an A on the final paper (due Monday) I think I can get an A in the class. I think. Then it's over. Yay.

One paper to go, due next Monday. I've written the draft, I just need to edit it some and make it about 2 pages longer. Today I finished all of my classwork for the online course I'm taking. I have one exam left--my adolescent psychology final--and two sculpture projects to complete. That's it. Other papers have been written and handed in. Presentations have been presented. Just a little more and then the massive stress will goooo awaaaaay.

Remind me not to take 19 credit hours in one semester again when most of them are upper division paper-writey kind of classes. Thank god it's only 16 hours for the Spring.

So my sculpture project I'm working on right now requires me to make a French mold. This is a two-part rubber mold in a plaster housing and it's a pain in the rear to put it mildly. Monday I got the clay bed done. today I added the locks for the plaster housing, and put on the 1/4" clay blanket over the top half of the piece, got the vents in place, and poured the plaster for side 1. We got the plaster off and it looks great. We pour side 1 rubber on Friday, then on Monday flip the thing over and start again for side 2. This may well take me the rest of my natural life to finish.

In other panicky school news: I have to turn in my 8 page paper on the Ribera painting two days early since I will be out of town the day it is due. That means it's due next Monday. Also on Monday I have a 20 minute presentation to do in my other art history class, based on my 10 page research paper in that class. We got the drafts back on that, by the way, and she didn't tear my paper apart, which is good, and she gave me tips on what areas to expand, which is great, because the draft had to be 8 pages but the final paper has to be 10-12 and I was trying to figure out where to pull the extra pages from. Oh, the presentation? It has to be exactly 20 minutes. She is going to time us. And she wants us to be going off a script, not just winging it, which is how I usually (and successfully) do presentations. Oh well.

The 7-10 page paper for my psychology course is due December 1, which means I'll be working on it while I'm on Thanksgiving break. Yay me.

Other than finishing school, I have a new goal in life. As of today, my secret ambition (ok, since I'm posting it on the internet it's not so secret) is to recreate this scene with our Roomba and one of our cats. Oh yes.

Lastly, my sinus infection is getting better. My dentist thinks that some of the tooth pain I've been having since my recent (massive) filling may be partially because of the sinus infection. Apparently my sinuses are full of teeth. Well, their roots, anyway. He put some bonding material on the cheek-side of three of my teeth which were excruciatingly cold sensitive, as well as just acting up in general on their own (like when I'd wake up, the first thing my brain would realize upon un-clouding was "gosh, my teeth hurt!") with the hope that this will provide some extra insulation. He also gave me some fluoride goop to put on them at night to desensitize them. I hope it works because this sucks. I had a filling, right? A filling. On a tooth that didn't hurt before. And now it hurts so bad that I've had to take Vicodin a couple of times (good thing I am always extremely frugal with it when I get a prescription--see I always know that something like this is going to come up and I will need it!). It's just not fair! It's a FILLING!

Rereading that paragraph it makes it sound like I'm blaming my dentist which is so not the case. At all. My dentist is awesome. The filling was really big and it went deep, almost to the root of the tooth. This is just another case of my teeth having a deathwish for me and having only limited means by which to accomplish it.

On a happier note, Dominic and I went out to eat tonight at Red Robin with Dusty and Sara, which was very nice. Sara came over one evening last week which was a lot of fun, but I hadn't really gotten to see Dusty since Halloween. They're coming over to the house tomorrow for dinner. I'm going to make chili. Yay! (Like I ever needed an excuse to make more chili.) Dusty is going to help me close the storm windows because he's just such a nice guy. (The storm windows themselves aren't that hard to open and close, it's the main windows that you have to open to get to the storm windows... they're painted and they don't open or close easily at all. Several of them have cracked glass and I suspect it might be from previous residents hammering on them to open or close them.)

Yesterday my art history seminar class on Gothic Cathedrals (the one that I just handed in an 8 page draft of a paper for) went on a field trip to the Cleveland Public Library's special collections department. They actually have some really cool stuff. Before they let us in, they told us to go wash our hands. I could understand that just on general principals, but it was actually because they let us handle things. What kind of things? Medieval manuscripts. We got to page through handbound, handwritten books from the 1300s, etc. We saw handwritten manuscripts, early printed works, pages from books of days, music sheets, etc. Some on parchment, some on vellum, some on paper... it was crazy cool.

It's amazing to actually hold something like that in your hands.

Rob's surgery on Friday went well. It was well timed: he was out of surgery right around the time I got out of class, so I was able to pick him up without much delay. He's been sore, obviously, but recovering remarkably well. His hernia surgery was on Friday and today he's doen 4 1-hour walks and done fine. By tomorrow I think he's off the "restricted activities" list officially--he should just use his judgment as to what he can or cannot do, based on comfort level. This doctor really is amazing. Dan has had 3 hernia surgeries and the last one was with this guy and he said it was night and day for the recovery. This is why Rob drove out from VA to stay with us and have the surgery here. That and he'd have someone to help him get around, walk the dog, drive to the store, etc.

Anyway he seems to be recovering very well. He thinks he will leave Wednesday morning.

This weekend was so full it's crazy. Friday night we had our Halloween party which was a blast. There is an album full of photos if you want to check it out. Hopefully I can snag other people's photos and add them to it.

Mostly, though, I've been keeping an eye on Rob and making sure he's recovering, working on finishing my sculpture project (which is largely two paintings), preparing a presentation for my next two sculpture projects, researching 2 major papers, meeting with advisors and trying to figure out my schedule for Spring so that I can GRADUATE finally... and studying for an art history exam that I have to take in the morning. It's been a bit crazy.

On top of all of that, Dan left today to spend a month in Atlanta on an externship. So I miss him already. :(

Oh my god the stuff we have to read for my Gothic Cathedrals seminar is some horrid, horrid shit. Today it was a 34 page scholarly article about Canterbury Cathedral that discussed the differences between the original 1175 plan and the final plan of 1178-9, which is what actually got built. And every change in between, and why it was likely made. The author actually went pier by pier and discussed how this one was 8" further apart from that one than the original plan called for, and that therefore this other yadda yadda in the crypt yadda and the floor this and the stairs that and on and on. The only interesting stuff--the stuff about Thomas Becket and the political maneuvering in the church and the monarchy directly before and after his murder--was crammed into about the last 3 pages.

We've had to read similar articles all semester. No, I take that back. The first part of the semester we had to read a whole book that was as bad or worse, written by Henry Adams in 1904. You can see it for yourself. It's horrible. Anyway, each class meeting all semester we've had a reading assignment, be it a few chapters of the book or some long, boring article, and for each one we have to write a one page summary and a one page reaction. For tomorrow's class the reading was the Canterbury thing. For next Monday we have to read a 28 page article about Bamberg Cathedral ("Synagoga Tumbles, a Rider Triumphs: Clerical Viewers and the Fürstenportal of Bamberg Cathedral" by Nina Rowe if you care) and that is the LAST ONE! No more readings after that! From then on we focus on our major paper that is due at the end of the semester (along with an accompanying oral presentation) and we have a few field trips. Hoorah!

I've been so busy lately I haven't had time to update my journal as much as I'd like.

Last Friday I had my second exam in Adolescent Psychology. The class starts at 12:15, but my previous class got out a few minutes early and so I got there at about 12:05. The class before us was just leaving. There was a terrible noise that we could hear all the way down the hallway as we approached the classroom: the overhead projector, which is mounted on the ceiling, is equipped with an anti-theft alarm. It was going off. The professor from the class before ours said that he had called and asked that someone come shut it off, but nobody had come yet. We went in and sat down with this piercing siren going off. At 12:15 our professor arrived. At 12:20, we started taking the exam. It wasn't until 12:30 that someone finally came and shut the damned thing off. Holy crap that was annoying. I'm not sure if I could have finished the whole test with that thing going off. Anyway, there were 4 questions that I marked with a dot to come back to, and after going back to them I still was guessing on my answers. All of them were about the same general thing--from the one and only day I missed class. I had read that section in the book but since I wasn't there for the lecture, I didn't have my notes. I got someone else's notes but they sucked. We got the exam back today and those were the only questions I missed. No surprise. I still got a mid-range A on the test so I'm cool with it.

Last Friday was also a teacher in service day for Dominic's school, so he wasn't at school. What we do when he doesn't have school on days that I have to go to class is he comes to class with me. He read a book through my art history class, but in the psych class he took the exam along with me. I asked the professor at the beginning of class if he could take it if there were extras, and he said sure [it was just multiple choice on a ScanTron]. I finished mine fairly early, but Dominic wasn't done. I asked if he wanted to leave or stay and finish the test. He wanted to finish. So we stayed another 10 minutes or so while he finished his test, then the teacher gave him the answer key and let him grade his own test. He got 13 right out of 50. Not bad for a 13 year old who hasn't even attended the class. I'm just proud of him for finishing it. There were a lot of questions on there that had vocabulary that you wouldn't know without having been in class. My professor was also impressed that he finished the whole exam.

Saturday night we had a couple of friends over for drinks. We had a bonfire out back in the fire pit, which was awesome except that it was really cold outside, so we had to huddle really close to the fire. We eventually came inside and hung out until about 4am. It was good times. I slept in on Sunday until after noon which felt GREAT. I'd only gotten a few hours on Friday night and then up so late on Saturday... I was pooped.

Something interesting is happening down the street: since Friday there has been a house about a block from here that is intermittently on fire. There are signs up saying "Fire Training Ahead" and there are about eight kajillion firemen in that house's yard at any given time. Today as I drove home it was on fire again, with smoke billowing out everywhere. I don't know how they acquired the house, but apparently they're burning it down to give firefighters training in putting out house fires. It must be weird for the neighbors. I will try to remember to take a picture next time I drive by there.

Last week I also cut my violin* in half for my next sculpture project. I built the frames over the weekend and will stretch the canvases today. Hooray!





* the violin was obtained for this purpose and already broken

Today was a big day. Not as big as I thought it was going to be, but even so. I had a group presentation to do in my art history seminar. My group included the other three overachievers in the class, and I think our presentation went really well. It should, we put a hell of a lot of time into it. I think they were over here on Monday for about 5-6 hours, and they were here the weekend before that as well, in addition to all of the time that everyone has put in on their own. (Our topic was Amiens Cathedral.)

I also had to do a reading for that class, which was thankfully only 11 pages (compared to the 3x or 4x that length that they usually are). It was a scholarly article about the Virgin Portal at Amiens. 11 pages about that portal. Yes, you'd think it should only take a page or two. Really, it only should. Way too much detail was gone into. Anyway, whining aside, each class we have a reading assignment we have to have done, and for each reading assignment, we have to write a one page summary and a one page reaction, so basically for every reading we have to write a two page paper. So that was due today.

I also had to have read a 50-some-odd page chapter about Rembrandt from Dutch Painting for my other art history class.

And I had an exam in my adolescent psychology class.

And I have an assignment due every day this week in my physical geography class, as well as a paper due on Friday for psychology, and a quiz for physical geography.

Turns out the exam today was pushed to Friday. The professor said that there were 7 questions on the exam about things we hadn't covered in class, so we spent today covering that material and will take the exam on Friday. This sucked for me because I hadn't brought my laptop to class, or anything other than my purse. Normally I take notes in Word... but lacking that I didn't even have a notebook. I had to borrow paper from a classmate just to take notes. Plus I have to have two more days of test anxiety and do another review session tomorrow night to make sure I didn't forget anything. *GRR* I wish we had done the exam anyway. The stuff we covered was in the book, so likely I already was familiar enough with it to get the test answers right.

Anyway, the presentation went pretty well. There was a little trouble getting the projector to recognize my laptop, but once we had that sorted out we did a good job, I think.

In sculpture I finally got to cut my violin in half. I bought a broken violin over the summer off of a friend (for cheap) to use in an art project, and I finally got to take the first step: cutting the violin in half. It looks so cool. Tomorrow I have to go to Home Depot and buy wood.

But anyway, today is over. Several stressors are gone, though several will remain through Friday. Then of course there are the two major papers I have due by the end of the semester and the 6 page paper I have due next Friday, but I think I should at least be ok by this weekend. I hope.