Fall Break

This week was fall break, so no school but still work. It's been really relaxing not to have to go to school this week. I've been able to hang out with Austin a lot more which has been fun. Yesterday and today we were able to take my little brother to the park. Austin has been teaching us how to play baseball which is more of a workout than I expected it to be. I can tell he misses his son quite a bit just watching him interact with Owen. I hope I can meet his son sometime soon, but since he lives in California with his mother's parents, it probably won't be anytime soon unfortunately. Maybe my next road trip will be to California again. That would be fun.

Stuff and Things

Hello everyone. As you may or may not have already been aware, I have a new boyfriend. His name is Austin and he's awesome. He's pretty and smart and funny and silly and eccentric and we like a lot of the same things. I've been spending a lot of my free time with him and that has taken away from free time to write. But I have free time to write now so here I go. Fall break is coming up. (Woohoo!) This means that there's no school for a week. But I still have to work full time. (Boo.) I got sudden tonsillitis on Tuesday. Went into the clinic on Wednesday morning and the doctor had to give me a shot of antibiotics in the butt because the infection was so severe. My butt is still kinda sore. But my throat is way better. It's still pretty gnarly looking but it doesn't hurt nearly as much and there's no more fever. So there's that. I'm actually at work right now so I better get back to that since my break is almost over. Love!

Change

I really love it when the seasons start to change. Fall to winter, winter to spring, spring to summer, summer to fall. I don't know if I would be happy living in a place that's consistently just spring or summer all the time. I love each of the seasons, I can't pick a favorite.

I'm so incredibly excited for the events of autumn. I have very fond memories of pumpkin patches and dressing up for Halloween.

I love the abundance of Thanksgiving--how it leads into winter and one of the most important holidays of western culture. Christmas.

I think it's important to remember the symbolism of the changing of seasons. If I never experienced the chill of autumn gales or the freezing over of winter, I don't think that I would treasure the rebirth of spring or the warmth of summer as much as I do.

Variation is good. Change is good.

Summer is starting to die, but don't worry... we'll see her again someday.

Let's appreciate the birth of Autumn while she's here.

(Because for those of us who live in Utah, she'll last for like two weeks and then winter will be like "Oh hayyyyy!")

Interwebs, Finally

It has been an extremely busy couple of weeks. My roommate and I are getting along very well. We finally got our mail key (we've been waiting for it for two weeks) and we also got our modem! It's been really hard not having internet access at home.

Earlier this week we tried to go to the UPS store to pick up the modem directly since it was supposedly being held there. When we got there, the boys at the counter told us that there wasn't anything they could do to find it because the address had been changed. (Apparently Sophie forgot to include the apartment number in our address, and when she called to find out why we hadn't received it yet they asked for address verification so that must be when it was changed.)

We were really frustrated at that, so we went to the Southeast Asian Market on 900 S and got ingredients for Chinese dumplings. They were delicious. It was really fun listening to Sophie speaking Mandarin with the butcher there. She later told me that he taught her how to say "Thank You" in his hometown dialect.

School has been going pretty well, but a lot of assignments are dependent on having the internet. On Friday I will be giving my first speech for Public Speaking. It's going to be about why I am taking the class. There might be video of it to follow if anyone is interested in watching me embarrass myself. Heh.

Short update

It's only halfway through the week and I'm already so exhausted that it feels like an entire week has gone by. I feel lucky that I was able to do my genetics homework at work today. It would have been a nightmare trying to do it before class tomorrow. I really like the professor but she is going to make us work for our learning. I'm struggling trying to remember how to calculate probabilities from word problems that aren't clear as to how they should be solved, but I have a lot of helpful coworkers who had to take the same class so they're very willing to assist.

I'm sore all the time but I think that's just because I have chosen to cycle everywhere. Hopefully my muscles will adapt soon. I look forward to my day of rest.

Back in the Saddle

Short update because I feel like it. I have an apartment. My roommate's name is Yun-Chen Wu. Her american name is Sophie. We don't have the internet hooked up yet so I am at the library right now. It's a nice library. My classes started today. Acting for Non Majors and Principles of Public Speaking. Tomorrow will be Professional Writing and Genetics. And work. (Still doing 40 hours a week.) I timed the ride from Stadium TRAX to Fort Douglas TRAX to my work on a bike. This may be the busiest semester of my life. Wish me luck!

A dream

I was in the lab, helping a work friend from Oncology get DNA extracted from one of her weird gross cancerous specimens. I told her that I would make sure it got taken care of. She offered to give me a ride back to the main lab in her airplane. I asked her if she was certified yet, and she said no that only the officers had flown with her before--nobody else. I expressed concern about letting her fly me back (we'd already started flying but it felt like we were in a regular car on a regular road) and then I noticed another work friend walking with an unknown person along the road. I opened the door and yelled a greeting back at him as we passed. The pilot stopped and let me out. The work friend approached and got into an intense conversation with the pilot. I was a distance away but overheard "--she doesn't want to fly with me does that make me a bad pilot?--" I walked away from them and found my purple jeep so that I could drive the rest of the way to work. (None of these roads I drove looked anything like the proper way to work.) I was driving along the shoulder, about to turn right, when some people started screaming at me to stop. I stopped just in time *not* to run over a body on the side of the road. I put my jeep into neutral, pulled the parking break, and got out of the car. The body was face down, I could tell it was a young woman and she was just rocking back and forth. There was another young woman in the street who had a swollen face. She looked fine other than that until I looked at her feet, which were grotesquely amputated so that a few toes still were there. Someone asked me to help to triage people. I turned around and there was a line of children lying down, becoming unburied. Many of them were fine. There was a little boy of 2 or 3 who was blond and had Down Syndrome. He was a little cut up but he smiled at me and I smiled back at him and I asked if he was hurt. He sneezed a massive wad of yellow snot. I picked him up after he stood up and walked toward me, and examined his injuries which were few. Suddenly there was nobody else around but me and this little boy. Everyone else had driven off in ambulances and fire trucks. I asked one lingering person if we should take this boy to the hospital as well, and they said his injuries weren't bad enough. So he stayed with me and I brought him to work. Work wasn't work, we all just played Halo and let the kid run around. Then my boss came in and said that after this round we'd have to really do work. Then I was with the work friend in a place that really looked like work. "We just spent the whole day playing video games. We didn't hire a bunch of derps, they're just following our example."