Must not kill students. Bad. Nice officers frown on killing.

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Dear Student Who Is Lucky I'm a Nice Person,

Why did you ask me to comment on and correct your first draft if you were then going to turn in your final draft without having corrected A SINGLE THING I pointed out, including the egregious typos and the goddamned Wikipedia citation?

Don't ask again. Ever.

No Love,
Rapidly Becoming Not A Nice Person

Overnight I've gone from accepting to hating our weather. Here's how the thought process works:

100+ degrees in September: Ok, well, indian summer, wev. Where'd I put that linen?
100+ degrees in October: OMG don't you know it's FALL??? What the heck is THIS?

Global warming, anyone? ::inserts tongue firmly in cheek and wanders off to melt quietly::

Read the financial papers the same day I have to pay bills.

So.

There's a woman in my class who is so... so... completely insane that literally 80% of the class refuses to work with her. And we're a fairly easy-going bunch, for the most part.

So.

There's a guy in my class who's got a really anxious personality naturally. The kind who goes through life one slim hair from a nervous breakdown. And, with the pervese humor of the universe, he's also the type that thinks he can handle things if he just goes along with the flow and doesn't get worked up.

You can see where this is going, right?

Anxious decided to be a Nice Guy and not blacklist anyone on our big project. So, naturally, he's on a group with Insane. And another groupmember who Insane will walk all over.

As a friend put it tonight, "You really want to do something, like change the train off the track, or like... look away, but you can't. You can only sit and watch, and chide yourself as you take mental bets on how long before the BOOM happens."

Finished one color on the Border of Doom. The other two should be easier since they fill in. Here it is:

( Spare the flist! )

That's the easier side to do. The other side is practically empty, and given how often I ripped huge swaths of this side out because I'd missed one row and not caught it until ten later, I'm very scared to do the side with nothing to cross-check to.

Also, if you've got sharp eyes you can just sorta see the black stitching in the lower right corner of this. It's more visible in real life than a bad scan.... but not by much. I've still got nearly all that space under the riverbank to do. There's a few grey rocks, the rest is black water.

When I picked out and started this cross-stitch -- cranes over a moonlit river -- I didn't think about the amount of black thread on dark navy aida stitching I'd be doing. I'm going to go blind before I finish this. *cross-eyed*

Please find some way to describe the Vice Presidency other than "a heartbeat away from the Presidency." Suggested alternatives include: "a short step", "one illness", and "inches". Thesauri are available on request. Your compliance is appreciated.

Sincerely,
She who is going to scream if she reads that phrase one more time

First day of classes, second class. Our professor, a real-live rocket scientist just ended his slideshow of family pictures with a picture of a half-grown chicken... the story of which he promised to tell us later.

Think I'm going to like this class.

Ugh. Not sure why, since aside from a lot of walking the first day, I haven't been doing physically strenuous stuff, but I feel like someone's been beating me up. My arms, shoulders, calves, and low back are just screaming at me.

First day of lab, and I'm TAing. It began when my 10-15 minute drive took me a full 30+ minutes to do, rendering me late to meet the breakfast delivery. The delivery person was very understanding, thankfully.

We had just about enough bagels -- some left over, but not too many -- but we had way too much coffee. Not sure what that's about. I was expecting 38-ish people, I wound up with 43; I ordered enough coffee for 50. Grad students at 8:30? I figured I'd barely have enough.

On the subject of food -- lunch was a half-hour late. I repeated, "it's not my fault" to myself a lot while waiting anxiously. We had just barely enough, though, so I'm glad I tacked on an extra half-dozen sandwiches yesterday when my prof casually mentioned that we'd have "a few more than 40" -- after I'd asked 4 times if the final expectation was 35-40 people, before I ordered food.

The real fun of the day was the computers, though. They broke. A lot. And when they did work they ran like molasses. The tech people keep saying, "Well, they're 5 years old, so you can't expect much out of them." Sorry boys*, that doesn't fly when the professor, both TAs, and several students in the class are running laptops 5+ years old (mine's 6) and having no trouble at all. But more than that, if these so-ancient computers are decrepit and slow, what possessed you to upgrade SPSS 10, which had been on them and worked fine (as much as they ever do) to SPSS 16, which wants 1 GB RAM to run at full efficiency??

And then you give us two carts full of computers that are barely charged at all -- but you had supposedly just checked and upgraded all of them. And I find out when I go bug you about the broken computers that one of the two main problems we're having is caused by a time/date error in the BIOS.... which breaks every time the computers run out of charge. Are we seeing a causal loop here?

I swear, there's some rule that tech departments must be populated by the dumbest people to ever handle tech. (agatha_b excepted.)

Also, I'm now soaking my feet, because while I wore my comfiest wedges, they weren't really intended for dashing all over buildings all day long tracking down tech people. I think I only sat down while I ate lunch.

Tomorrow, flip-flops. Murphy's Law being fully active, I'll sit all day.

*I can say 'boys' quite confidently, since our tech dept. doesn't have a single female on staff. This bugs me.

Have discovered small problem with mainlining tea to help with sore throat/congestion due to flu. When the fatigue symptom goes away and thus stops countering the caffeine intake, you end up with a nasty case of the late-night stares. So now I'm stuffy, sore, coughing, and awake and the only thing that soothes the first three worsens the last.

There's something really not fair about that.

So I have a(nother) job! Got the position I applied for. This is especially awesome because I had just convinced myself that there was no way I'd gotten it given the month-long silence on the subject. Happiness!

So after my little cleaning spree (which didn't include anything useful, like the laundry *eyes pile in distaste*) I went to bed around 5 am. Woke up at 10, and virtuously did not go back to sleep, but got up and went out to run an errand. This one didn't get done yesterday because it's a walking errand (no parking down there) and I was so not up to walking around in the heat the way I felt yesterday afternoon.

Anyway, I walked down to the Kinko's to fax some paperwork for financial aid -- specifically, the piece that tells the college to tell my lender that yes, I do want the money I've already jumped through five separate hoops to obtain. (Does someone sit up nights thinking of ways to make the aid process longer?) Unfortunately, the Kinko's near me has changed its hours. They no longer work weekends. So back home I go.

Upon arriving back at the apartment, I see the mail has come. So I open my box and flick through it. Hello, mail from my lender - what's this?

A notification that they'll be disbursing the loans as soon as I sign the promissories. Guess I don't need to send that fax after all. :)

It's 1 am, and for reasons I do not entirely understand the grime on the stove burner catch-pans has suddenly annoyed me to the breaking point. They've needed cleaning in a vague sort of "I should get to that" way for weeks, but why it snapped tonight I don't know. But in any event I took them out to soak and scrub. Of course, once you take them out, you can see the grime that collects under their rims. So then I had to scrub that. Next thing I know I've cleaned the entire stove, oven (mercifully I haven't had any major spills in there), scrubbed countertops and cabinets, and "mopped" (read: dragged old re-dedicated sponge over all 6 square feet of) the floor.

WTF, brain??

So I'm doing errands after work -- bank, gas, that sort of thing - and really struggling to force myself to do 'em because I've got a ferocious headache and feel like crap. I get to the grocery store (butter, hot dogs, grapes, milk) and in the middle of the produce section as I'm virtually entranced by the end-cap display of peaches, I realize: I haven't eaten today!!

That might explain a few things. *nom nom nom*

I cannot wait to move my bed back where it belongs. Another couple weeks of this and I'm going to have no pinky toe left on my right foot.

Just click on my ribbon where it says "Get a Ribbon" and post it to your LJ/Blog. When you do, Caring.com will donate $10 to the Alzheimer foundation.

Weather faeries!! Listen up!! It is patently ridiculous that I had my A/C running on Wednesday and tonight I have my chair blanket out to ward off the chill. Pick a temperature and bloody well stay there!!

I am breathing. Really.

I finished writing up and sent my project proposal to my new boss. I didn't have a whole lot of guidelines on it, and I didn't have any guidance on how many hours we were talking -- that was one of the reasons he wanted me to write up a proposal in the first place. So here I am, breathing, because I hate asking for things. God help me when I have to negotiate salary for the first time. Breathing. Yes.

Ok, so... it seemed like a good idea at the time.

But now my legs are telling me -- vocally -- that spending a day romping around the beach participating in many sports and falling on my butt trying to learn to skimboard followed by a day hiking around my old college town was Not A Good Idea.

It was fun at the time!!

*hobbles off*