Crazy Town

Since we last saw our heroine she has become an aunt and bought a house! How the time flies!

So first, let me introduce Eitan (pronounced ayt-on)!
He's adorable and looks just like me as a baby. This is him at one month.

Next, allow me to introduce my house!This is our ancient oven, which is btw older than my mother. We are working on a kitchen remodel as we speak.

In terms of school, due to an unfortunate chain of events I have moved my graduation date three more months into the future, but that's ok as it means that my semesters are much less hectic (9-11-5 instead of 12-13).

I may be the only one

I have come to a realization courtesy of Questionable Content that I may be the only woman in my class and educational cohort whose ideal man is NOT Mr. Darcy.  I find Darcy vaguely obnoxious, for all that he is sure that he is better than everyone else, he's not as smart as Elizabeth and he doesn't show himself to be introspective or an intellectual (in the current sense of the term). Thinking about it, I get the feeling that my "ideal" man does not, and perhaps could not, exist in literature. At least, not in good or interesting literature.

I prefer the people I associate with to communicate openly, honestly and authentically and let's be real, good communication kills a good plot 9 times out of 10.  My idea of a romantic partner is someone who makes me laugh and is unabashedly honest; all of this witty back and forth and all of the intrigue and he-said/she-said is great on the page, but bores me in real life.

Why My Hummus is Mild

For lunch today I decided to put my cuisinart to use and make some hummus, Boybee got me canned hummus-pea-things (what are these called in English?) and we garlic and lemon juice so I got to cuisinarting.

Just as I was adding the whole garlic gloves (in addition to the garlic olive oil we made from Jules) and the lemon juice to my partially cuisinarted hummus, a GIANT black spider jumped out from behind the toaster oven! I called the cats in to get it and they came but the spider had already darted *in to my cabinets* - ick!!! At that point, the hummus was done, and if it wasn't, I was done with the kitchen so I took my carrot sticks and my ~hummus and left. It isn't that bad since most of the garlic got chopped up, but it would be better if there weren't still almost whole bits floating around and instead being mushed and diffusing their deliciousness throughout the hummus.

The moral of this story is, if you don't like spiders don't live in a 100-year-old building in the spring.

The End of the Semester

It is official, this semester is about 9x10^3984598 times better than last semester.

By this week marker last semester I had written over 100 pages worth of papers that I barely cared about (painful for me and my poor professors) and could only sleep a few hours a night before I had to get back to the grindstone. This semester, I have written a few boring papers, but they were at least short and had a lot of relevance to what I want to do with my life and most of my assignments have been interesting and increased my learning. I have four major papers left to the semester and I have already started one of them (due in a week). After Friday of next week I have work left and will have work left until the last day to turn in grades for the semester, but at least I wont be killing myself and I will enjoy doing a lot of it.

I will keep my practicum at the Hospital, which I *love,* until the end of the summer. Right now I am starting the process of finding a practicum for next year and already have a few leads. Next year's practicum will have a big influence on my course work and my job prospects after graduation so it's really exciting.

On Fat, Beauty and Health

"I'm beautiful, and I'm also fat. And those two things aren't opposites." - a freind

I think that this should really be the take home message here. I cringe sometimes when I read articles about fat (both pro and con) because they rarely have anything to do with health and everything to do with looks and moral judgements.

There are three issues and I feel like it is harmful to *everyone* that they're not seperate and understood - the Fat issue, the Beauty issue and the Healthy issue. You can be fat, healthy and ugly; fat healthy and beautiful; fat unhealthy and beautiful; thin healthy and ugly; thin unhealthy and beautiful; etc. in any combination because those three things are related but not on a one-to-one basis.

By lumping those three categories together, fat people who are beautiful but unhealthy decide to eff their health because they are fat, gorgeous and proud of it, skinny people who are unhealthy but good looking do that exact same thing and to the same bad results for their health. Some fat people who think they're not beautiful but are in fact healthy put themselves on ridiculous, unhealthy diets (as do some skinny people who feel the same way) and that's equally damaging.

If everyone could seperate fat from beauty from health (the way those things are actually pretty seperate) it would make the whole conversation a lot easier and whole lot of people would be a lot better off.

Let's try that again

I keep starting posts, saving them as notepad docs and then throwing them away because I'm just not feeling it any more. Mainly it's this feeling that I don't have that much interesting to say or the time to say it in. It turns out that grad school is really busy.

The most exciting part of my life right now is the de-shed thingy we got for our cats this evening. It's a hair thinner and I think that it might be made out of magic and rainbows. Feanor *hates* being brushed and usually puts up a fight when we try so we cornered him in the kitchen and although he wasn't pleased he didn't hiss or try and run away from us.

In other news, if X happens and Y is a sure bet for Boybee and I acheive goal Z, then we may be stepping up our plans for Opperation Q to deploy at the end of this summer.... Eeeek! :)

It really is lovely

After class tonight Boybee ran to blockbuster and grabbed Michael Clayton. We missed it in theaters mainly because it didn't look that interesting - the magic of the Oscars showed us the error of our ways so of course we needed to watch it (he also renter Elizabeth: The Golden Age). It starts weird and artsy, then it hooks you in and becomes a pretty compelling drama. The best part is Tilda Swinton - I'm a big fan.

Now I am enjoying the beginning of Spring Break - I have a class tomorrow evening but work's cancelled and the class is a med school course so it means that there will be free indian food for dinner. Got to love how they bribe the med school kids, as if my 913$ a credit hour isn't good enough for them (ok, so I got a scholarship but still, it's the principle). We may go to a friend's lake house for a bit, but it's still up in the air. I also have this big project to take care of out in the middle of nowhere and a living will to write. At least this nowhere has wineries and Boybee is on hand to supply hugs while I cry my way through the written declaration of how I want to die, which is not in the least depressing to me, no sir.

Suboptimal Waffles: Stay in School

I just told Boybee that I was working on my paper, so obviously I should be updating my poor forgotten blog.

Recently I have been working the 9 to 5 in addition to school and to be honest, I really love the classes I am taking but I'm just not feeling the school thing. Oh well.  I've been taking refuge in geekery and have started a 7th Sea role-playing game with some friends. It allows me to be creative without actually be productive thus bipassing my over-active anti-productivity drive.

Now to go see why my kitchen smells like wet-cat mixed with burnt popcorn and a potato!

Making up for lost time

Thursday was my first day of work at the Big Hospital. It was a pretty standard but uneventful day and I loved it. The nurses on our floor are funny anf competent and likeable, my supervisor is sweet and I really like her.  If that were my real job (and not just my practicum) I would be really happy.

I get there a little before 9:30 and it's right on the light-rail system, so I can take the train. Then meet with the nurse who lets us know which patients to see and why they were referred to us. We make the rounds and do assesments, see who needs further referrrals or counseling, povide that and then write it all up in their charts. Then the rest of the day is taken up by working to get donations and putting together publicity packets and other little projects to help people out. It's really enjoyable.

So far, this semester is definitely good enough to make up for how aweful last semester was.

A New Semester

As of a month ago i was dreading the start of this semester - heck, as of yesterday I was dreading the start of this semester. I went to two of the six classes I am signed up for yesterday (the only two that will meet this week), and I must say that I was pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed them.

The first is a course on social work in health care - the professor seems lovely and recently served on the Big Hospital's ethics board, which just makes me all warm and fuzzy inside. A pet goal of mine is to be on an ethics board at a hospital; in my fantasy-world this would be my entire job and I'd work at one of the TV hospitals where everything is dramatic and exciting and I get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The second course is on feminist theory and practice in social work. I was really apprehensive about this one at first, but I think it will be ok. Two Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies professors from the university are in this class - one of them freaks the professor out a bit because she is older and the professor obviously has a lot of respect for her. The professor is a Gloria Steinem style lesbian academic feminist - she seems very nice and just a little fake, but I think I can deal with that. My only problem is that it will be very hard for me to not talk the entire time. This is a subject that I know a lot about and have very strong opinions on and that I believe my opinions are... more radical (not Radical mind you but rather using the word with its dictionary definition) than the teachers and most people I would think.

Next week I will begin my job at Big Hospital and have my first medical ethics class, which I am really looking forward to. The week after next, I will have my first seminar course which is a piggy-back onto the job at Big Hospital. My last course is a weekend course which will meet three long weekends sprinkled across the semester - it will be my last intro course and hopefully I will enjoy it, I hear the professor is amazing.

A New Year

This is the beginning of my first calendar year as a married woman, and my first calendar year of being in graduate school (should be my only calendar year in graduate school too!). So far it has been off to a lazy start with lots of hanging out with friends, going to the gym and catching up on webcomics, etc.

Right now I am officially starting to get ready for the upcomming semester. First, I am updating my google calendar with all of my classes and meetings, then I need to figure out which books I need to buy and when. Cash flow might be an issue this month (thank you to the gas company's clerical error and my boss for forgetting to get my time sheet in for me while I was out of the office for the holidays), so books will be more of a pain in the butt than usual. Last semester I spent 600 dollars on books, all but one of those books was a complete waste of money, so hopefully I can sell them off and get something back for them.

At the moment I am trying to decide if Opera, as a browser, is worth it and trying to figure out why Google is a jerk. You would think that a company devoted to open source would not go out of its way to make Opera useless on its site, but I guess that even a company that claims to not be evil can be a money grubbing jerk too. Oh well. I like google, I am often so impressed by google, and I sometimes forget that corporations are still corporations. Sad but true.