R is for . . .

Regalia! I have mine! Hat, hood, tassle, and gown with floppy sleeves. I tried it on in the bookstore, and went over to the mirror and had a major EEP moment. I'm happy and excited and terrified all at once, and I almost started crying. :-P

R is also for Rudi Lechner's, best German food in Houston, and I'm completely stuffed, as my dinner seems to be expanding in my tummy.

And finally, R is for READY to be DONE. Two more assignments to go, and they *will* go, I'm sure. But it feels like I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel for brain cells. I am soooooo gunna crash when all this is over. I think on May 15, I'm just not going to get out of bed. Hold all my calls. I'll bring a few cheap detective novels and some granola bars and a pitcher of water into my room Sunday evening, and stay in bed allllll day. Until the evening. When I'll take the longest bubblebath of my life!!! :-P

Thanks everyone for the support and good thoughts. I have the best friends in the world!

Edit: Heh, R is also for Rain. Rained half the morning and half filled the mixing bowls on my bedroom window sill. I really wish they'd figure out what's wrong and fix it. I don't like it when the rain comes inside. GrrrrRRRRRRRR

G is for . . .

God help me. I'm sometimes afraid I won't make it over the next few weeks, but without your help, I never would have made it this far! With your help, and with the blessings of friends, family, and talents that you have given me, I know deep down in here somewhere that I'll be just fine. I just wish I could really *feel* that optimistic.

First of the last four milestones to graduation complete. I presented on my paper in class today, and got a lot of good response and a lot of good and helpful feedback. Looking forward to getting down to that one after I finish the one for Thursday.

HONEY BEE SWARM

"Residents please be careful not to distrub [sic] the hive above the canopy in courtyard one - closest to Dincans."

Oh, this is what I wanted to see this morning. Especially printed in all caps when my eyes already hurt. I'll spare you the accuracy in capitalization.

"The hive is in the tree."

"They will re-locate hopefully over the weekend."

Well I'm glad to hear they were served an eviction notice! Ten bucks says they ignore it.

"The nest was disturb [sic] this AM - so they are just protecting the queen bee."

Oh, no, we can't blame the bees. Wouldn't anyone protect their queen if she was disturb? I mean, a bee's gotta do what a bee's gotta do, huh? I wish I had minions to protect me when I'm, heh, disturb.

"We have called a professional and he said he would be here Mon. if the hive has not moved on."

Oh, a FORCIBLE eviction! Heh, can I watch?

"Please be alert when outside this weekend."

Oh, I'll BEE alert all right! :-P. Maybe I just won't go outside. Bzzzzzzzzz.........

Yes I'm still awake . . .

. . . and no I did *not* meet my stated whiteboard goal. Apparently the whiteboard does not have sufficient authority. Sighhh. Let the insomnia begin.

Cuz the White Board Sez So

I mean, it's only, what? Wednesday? Noooooooo problem.

Promises, promises

Okay, I *promise* I *will* be going silent soon. But first I really needed to pull this one out and dust it off for a beautiful young lady closely related to myself. See the previous Betting Pool post. Hugs all around! Catch y'all later!

The young can love.
We know the power,
The sweetness, the depth,
As well as you.
Though you look at love
Through the years of experience,
That makes my love
No less true.

Going Silent Soon . . . even more than normal

Not that I update every day, but this really ought to be my last one for a while. I have two and a half weeks before one paper is due, and then two more paper things are due the weeks following. I really need to get to work. In the next two weeks I resolve:

• NOT to visit my usual blogs every day, only on Sundays.
• NOT to post comments to any and every message board I frequent.
• NOT to visit Myspace just to gaze happily at my cute little profile.
• NOT to watch any season of CSI on DVD.
• NOT to read any books for fun that I haven't already read and can therefore put down at any time.
• NOT to visit with Willie for hours in the band hall, except maybe on Fridays, and *maybe* this Thursday. We'll see how work is going.

This means I will be eating lots of comfort food (fried chicken, ice cream, etc.) and curling up on my couch reading and highlighting and typing furiously. If you wonder at any point in time how I'm doing, picture that and you won't be far from wrong. And if you want to come by and bring me ice cream or fried chicken, just call ahead. It's doubtful I'll say no :-P.

As a quick update, I have an interview on May 1 for a tech writing job with a company called PROS and I have an appointment next week to meet with the owner of IDI to talk about possible opportunities with her company. As soon as things calm down, I'm going to start bugging the prof who promised he try to think of people in the med center for me to talk to about proofing and cite-checking journal submissions.

I'm glad that lent is almost over. Of course, what I gave up for lent is not something I can with a clean conscience bounce right back into as soon as Easter hits, so I will have to have a long talk with myself as to what my goals are in that area. I kinda wish I'd just given up chocolate or something!

All right. Back to my reading. I'll give a full report sometime mid-May, I'm sure. See y'all on the other side!

To say it's complex is to grossly over-simplify . . .

Other than it's general applicability to life, the title really has nothing to do with today's post. My prof just said something like that in class, and I thought it was hilarious.

As for how class went, well, my head is pounding its way out of my ears, feels like, but I think I actually *got* something Edward Said wrote. This is a real break-through for me! That guy's brilliant, and makes his points deceptively clear. Ow. Stopping thinking now.

In other news, I have had two phone interviews with two different divisions of the same company who both managed to come across my resume (disseminated by a friend who works for that firm). One of them probably isn't for me. It involves lots of travel, which I like in theory, but that's *business* travel, which can get hectic. I kinda like visiting places at a leisurely rate and then coming back home and relaxing. It also involves a lot of face time with clients, and as we all know, I'm excruciatingly shy (no, really, I am!).

The other people I talked to are in the technical services division, which includes the technical writing team. They want to do an on-site interview with me now! Apparently they just don't hire entry level tech writers, but they are, according to my inside sources, all a-buzz about me. And that's just the *first* company I've sent a resume to. I still hate interviews, but this really boosts my confidence, so maybe I'll survive them!

My only real problem right now is the lingering "God, why am I here? What task do you have for me?" problem. I'm pretty sure I'll have that one for a while. All I can do is make the best plans for the future I can and work towards their fulfilment. I'm sure he'll step in at some point. But this lent I've had my own prayer that I thought I would share, now that lent is almost over. Okay, after this I'm going to go take my bubblebath.

May the nails of the cross fix my heart to your purpose.
As you took up your burden, help me take up mine.
Lord, guide my feet on the rough road before me.
Let it be done to me according to thine.

Phobias

It's really strange, sometimes, the things we're scared of, and the things we *aren't*! Me, for example . . .

Heights wig me out. I remember getting giddy climbing a 6 ft. stepladder when I was six to crown the statue of the Holy Virgin in church during a feast day/my first Holy Communion. We have pictures of my dad clutching my arm, and I remember that being the only reason I agreed to climb that ladder. I have nightmares about steep staircases with no handrails, and suspended ladders that end 50 ft. from the ground, and falling elevators.

Snakes, on the other hand, I have absolutely no problem with. Even the poisonous ones don't scare me. I know the Texas species by sight and have a healthy respect for them, but I'll pet and hold non-venomous snakes when I have the opportunity. Same goes for lizards and such. I think they're cute!

Fire . . . okay, this is a big one. Was in a burning house when I was little one time. No one got hurt, everyone got out okay, but I still get reeeeally nervous holding just a little bitty candle during the Easter vigil mass. The rest of the choir laughs at me :-). I'm starting to train myself to trust a lit candle in my apartment, and that's going well, but fire . . . still . . . scary.

Spiders, not a problem. While I don't just luuurve them, and again, I have a healthy respect for the poisonous types, the little guys are welcome to hang out around my pad and eat tiny bugs as needed. Anything that might potentially eat mosquitoes is on my buddy list. I even love bats!

Wasps, though, while they can't kill ya (allergies aside) freak me out. Flying stinging things in general freak me out. I blame my dad for this one. When you idolize your tough-guy father, and he's scared of wasps, I think it tends to rub off. Of course, the root of his complex was starting a truck that had been sitting out on the deer lease, and disturbing the swarm of yellow jackets that had moved in. Hundreds of the evil little buggers pouring in through the air vents would probably give anyone a complex.

All this I've known about myself. But I've just discovered a new weird non-fear of mine. One of my good friends posted on her blog about a tornado that took shingles off her apartment building, and my first reaction was "Oh COOL! Did you get to see anything?" I knew I loved storms with lots of wind and rain and lightning, and I've done stupid things like stand out on the front steps of Autry Court watching the sky when the campos were coming by telling people to go inside because funnel clouds had been spotted. There's just something about an ominously green or yellow cloudy sky and the eerie stillness that fascinates me. Something about the sublime power of nature in her more terrifying moods.

Or maybe I'm just insane, huh?

I Fail at Life . . . As a Hardcore Computer Geek

This should surprise no one. So I love Google, use GIMP for image editing and GAIM for instant messaging, so what? I just installed GAIM 2.0.0beta3. And I don't like the new sounds. And I don't like any other sounds on my computer. So I googled "GAIM sounds" and, well, I found some sounds.

But the ones on the GAIM pages ask me if I want to download them . . . as . . . text? Uh, why? And why can't I get the task bar button to blink orange when a buddy messages me and I don't have the window up front? Why does looking at these long lists of files I could download make me think of tar balls and having to clean the tar off my feet with Energine after going to the beach as a little kid? And what are all those files supposed to do, and how many of them do I need???? *whimper*

On the other hand, I suddenly find myself encountering deeper essential meanings in Moby Dick. This should frighten us all. This may be the sign of the apocalypse. I think if I couldn't comprehend sarcasm and irony, I would have long since imploded under the weight of my own internal contradictions and the fragmentation of my soul. Or something.

On an up note, I got some *incredible* compliments from the poets in my translation class. We workshopped the first 10 pages of my short story this past Wednesday, and one of the poetry students said he really loved a lot of my sentences, and another said of one of my characters, "He's kind of a brat, isn't he?" (yay, the brattiness translated!) and another said what she liked about my translation is that it doesn't *read* like a translation, it reads like a *story*! And the professor said she wanted to compliment me on the incredible progress I had made in quality *and* quantity of work since the sample I submitted. I actually did a happy dance *in class*! Thank you, God, and St. Jerome.

Now I think I'll go pound out the final ten pages, and maybe start fixing the stuff we all decided we *didn't* like. Happy Beer Bike weekend!