clutteredlife.com: November 2006

previous posts
Goombas on the 50 yd line.
Now in color!
Halloween's most frightening skeleton.
Election Day mayhem.
Xmas lists.
Halloweeeeeeen.
And I'm in!
Chrome.
Matriculation.
Nope.

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November 2008

Wednesday, November 29, 2006

Where y'at?

Where have I been for the past month or so? Well, here, mostly. I've written clutteredlife like 100 times in my mind, I just neglected to use a keyboard.

Umm... so what's happened? Not a whole lot. Thanksgiving in Boston was fabulous despite the craptastic weather that made travel a bit of a headache. Driving home in the rain, I fought off tryptophan by singing Christmas songs that came on the radio. That was fun. Dinner seemed a lot more casual and subdued this year without Dad. I hope he comes next year.

Semester's almost over and I had the jolting realization yesterday that all the slacking I've been doing in my easiest class (computer science) has come back to bite me in the ass. I've accrued what amounts to probably six or eight solid hours of work to do to catch up. Yay.
That's what I'll be doing today, in addition to volunteering at the library and helping the kids check in/out books and use the computers. Oh, and studying for my third Stat exam tomorrow which is oh my good god so freaking hard and I hope I get at least a B in this class.
My brain and math are like oil and water. There are some parts of Statistics I'm just naturally good at, like the basics of probability. The other parts though? Bleh. The professor will stand up there and explain everything and I get how it's done, but I'm not exactly sure WHY it works that way and it's really freaking hard to reproduce on my own. It's like learning a foreign language by memorizing vocab words and then trying to put a sentence together to talk to someone.

Speaking of learning a foreign language (minor pun, haha)...
I'm taking Mandarin Chinese for free through a program that gets grant money from the state to sponsor students who want to learn Chinese, Farsi, Turkish, Korean, Arabic, and um, um, one more... Russian maybe? I forget. Anyway, I picked Chinese, and it's a lot of fun so far.
I'm kind of cheating a little I guess since the course is offered three ways and I picked the way that allows me to speak but not write. For example, I can tell you that "na ge nu ren zai pao," but if you showed me the same sentence in Chinese symbols, I'd have no idea what it said. If you said it to me, however, I'd understand that you were talking about a woman running. :)

Um um um, what else? Oh, the holidays! I'm totally into the holiday spirit this year, which is good since last year it was like December 23rd before I felt even slightly interested in it. Even before Thanksgiving this year, I was running around putting up decorations. Not the whole shebang yet (seems a bit silly to put up an advent calendar in November, ya know?) but piece by piece. This Friday I want to get a wreath for the door and this weekend I'd like to get a tree.
I'm heading to Dad's for Hanukkah this year, which is nice. I've already got his gift and everything. Maybe I'll make dinner for them over there too.

Ok, gotta go stick my nose in a book.
posted by hilary at 8:59 AM | 7 comments | links to this post

Friday, November 10, 2006

Happy Birthday

1775 - 2006
posted by hilary at 2:14 PM | 0 comments | links to this post