Graduation

Hook em horns.  UT Austin Class of 2009! Graduated with a B.S. in Human Biology.

Homestretch

Just finished my last ‘official’ day of college today! Went and absolutely smashed the exam then biked home. Such a weight lifted off my shoulders. All I have left is a cumulative final on the 19th but that should be a piece of cake provided I don’t procrastinate. At this point, I’m just aiming for the 70.3 I need to keep my B in the class.

I grabbed a stack of 5 textbooks that had been wasting space over the past couple years and took them to the buyback counter at the bookstores with the roommate.  Somehow ended up getting $193 for the lot of them. That kind of cash windfall just made my day, although $49 of it went to purchasing my cap and gown for graduation. New camera lens or hard drive time.

I also received a precious gift in the mail today along with an incredibly sweet letter from down under.  Missing my other half.

Visiting Fort Worth

After dropping Amy off at a wedding reception in Keller, my father and I drove down another 15 minutes to our old house.  This was my parents first house that they bought and built.  I grew up here and my sister was born while we lived there.  Lots of old old memories.  It looks like the current owners have kept it looking nice.

The backyard.  I’m sure I was trespassing when I opened the back gate to take a peek.  Those trees were little saplings last I remember.  They ripped out my old swingset and put in a new one, which is slightly upsetting.  Mine had two swings, monkey bars, a slide, and swinging rings, so much better than the new one.  Our neighbors would jump the fence to play on it.  I miss this yard, lots of running through sprinklers and setting up slip and slides in the summer.

My old elementary school, I was here for 5 years.  Many skipped classes to hang out with the gifted teacher and read at the library.  I also remembered the dreaded school plays and musicals, which consisted of the music teachers making children do horribly embarrassing things in terrible costumes all for the amusement of the adults.

My middle school where I was at for only grade 7 (Grades 5 and 6 were at Chisolm intermediate which we didn’t get to visit).  We were the inaugurating class and picked the name, mascot, and colors for the school.  I remember our US history teacher making a case for navy and gold vs. maroon and gold, saying that the maroon would fade and our football players would be running around in pink uniforms.  The name was extremely creative….the school address was Parkwood Hill and thus our school name was Hillwood Middle School.  They couldn’t use Parkwood because then our initials would have been PMS.  There’s a plaque with my name on it hanging on the walls for being among the top students of our year, that’s right.  While driving here, even my dad exclaimed that I was a spunky kid for biking 5 miles here at 5:30am in the morning for track practice, every single day.  Our house was at the far edge of the zone for bus service, literally only a couple houses down and I could have qualified.

Random tangent: Me sitting in the car under the 121 overpass at Preston in Plano for half an hour.  Accident in the intersection, the firetrucks came and blockaded us in.  I was lucky enough to be right at the front.  The cars were totaled but no one seemed to be terribly hurt.

Craigslist and moving

New hauls from Craigslist

$50 forum posting gig at Toggin.com
$15 for a purple bike that just needs air in the tires
$10 for a 4×6 slatted bamboo rug
$15 for a brand new desk
$30 for a brand new hand vacuum. Yes, expensive but it’s pretty and works really well and is cordless. And I couldn’t put off vacuuming bird seed and feathers for much longer.

Now just have to cut a deal for cable and internet because paying shitastic Time Warner $102 a month for sub par service is robbery.

On another exciting note, I have peroneal insertional tendonitis.  How do I know?  I did the hypocritical thing and self diagnosed my injury.  But having taken a human anatomy class, and sat through a 2 hour guest lecture by a podiatrist, I think I have more leeway than the patient who storms in the waiting room with googled printouts saying he as cancer when it’s only a strep infection.  I failed a quiz because I couldn’t remember what the peroneal tendons were.  And now it’s coming back to get further revenge.

I started wearing my really worn in Aeropostale ballet flats again, that I bought four years ago for $5.  Wore them religiously for the longest time, hiked through a rainforest, ran through Sydney beaches, in airports, around campus, you get the drift.  They were the most comfortable shoes I owned.  However the soles are worn down to almost nothing and the glue is wearing off.  So walking around dirt and gravel on shortcuts through campus wearing them this past week put a ton of stress on my tendon and eventually inflamed it.  And now it hurts like hell to put any pressure on it, so walking is agonizing.  Sharp pain that throws off my balance if I try.

Funny twist is, I have an excuse to wear my high heels now.  Seems counterintuitive since heels are the source of a myriad of foot problems, but the treatment is to wear ‘heel lifts’ to keep stress off the tendon and let it heal.  They’re foam cushions you’re supposed to put under your heel to lift it up.  Why do that when I have a massive collection of pretty shoes I never get to wear?  And lo and behold, I slip on my sexy pumps and it DOESN’T HURT TO WALK ANYMORE.   The pain completely goes away.

ESB

MANIACAL LAUGHTER.  THIS BUILDING HAS PLAGUED ME FOR THE PAST TWO YEARS.

Before

After…

Wordle

So, I have a major lab practical worth 10% of my grade tomorrow, which means hunkering down and studying.  Aka browse random sites on the internet until it’s 2am and your eyes are bloodshot and getting nothing done, pushing you into an all nighter.

Wordle.net is a cool little image generator.  Type in a bunch of words, out comes this artsy cloud of pretty words.  You can mess with fonts, colors, distribution.  Easily amused I know.

So I pasted whatever was on my clipboard (study materials for my Anatomy lab), hit “Create” and voila.  It’s like one of those poetry magnet sets people put on their fridge to seem all intellectual and hip.  I’m sorry mister, $7.99 at Barnes and Noble does not make you coffeehouse artsy.

Cupcakes

Smashed my final this morning, felt pretty damn good about it. Came home, studied for another five hours straight for the one tomorrow. Decided to do a little procrastinating and bake some cupcakes, because if I’m going to be up until the crack of dawn, I need my sugar fix.

Jess + Amy + Boredom =

Amy attempted to write our names. “Amy” worked fine, until I warned her squeezing in seven letters for “Jessica” wouldn’t work too well.

I’ve uploaded pictures, written this thing, I suppose I should go back to reading about Listeria monocytogenes.