Tim Minchin's Christmas song, White Wine In The Sun, is now available for single purchase on iTunes!
Give this a watch/listen, and then go buy it! The iTunes version has some very beautiful string accompaniment too.
My husband will get all huffy and say "not until the 21st!" but to me, once the temp dips 35F and below and snow/sleet/ice start blowing around, it's winter. My least favorite season (I'm not alone there, I know) because driving is stressful and just getting anything done or going anywhere is a big hassle. Not to mention it's fucking cold, and as I get older, cold hurts more. Why can't I convince my husband to give up this farming gig so we can go move someplace warm? I don't care if we're poor, we'll be warm!
Right, now I've got that whining out of the way - who's ready for Christmas? Another thing I'm grateful for as I get older - Christmas/Holidays is FAR less of a big deal than it used to be. I do enjoy buying gifts for people, but no longer am I all excited/concerned about what I'll be getting back. Some might say the loss of that excitement is a bad thing - to me it just means I'm more self-sufficient, and that's a good thing! (If I really want/need something, I just go buy it now. Anything extra is nice but nothing to get all worked up over!)
I also gave up (pretty much before I ever started) the stress of holiday cards, decorating, and all that extra jazz. I send cards to the people closest to me (and the in-laws because they'll get huffy if I don't!) but we don't bother with decorations or parties or anything like that anymore. YAY. True, I'm still forced to do the holiday parties at work, but even those are low key and require very little from me. I show up with food, and all is well.
Speaking of food - damn I do hate this section of the year because no matter how hard I try to keep it from happening, the pounds pile on. That's what New Year's is for though of course, and like billions of people I'll be making that resolution to "get back to a healthy weight". If only just so my pants fit comfortably again. I'm annoyed that my favorite trousers are currently all too tight!
Sooooo. There we go, that's my boring update. Hope your lives are all well.
This morning a layer of ice covered everything and I drove 10 mph all the way to the gym (yes, I'm that dedicated) and now the sky is orange, there is a huge pile of leaves on the other side of my front door, a layer of dust everywhere else AND it's cold and windy as !#$%.
Less than a year to go right? I can do this. Thank heavens for the stash of huge delicious cinnamon rolls in the freezer.
I've got one more itty bitty test to take and then I'll be completely done for a month! I'm not really worried about this test. It's only 50 questions and the professor will more than likely just pull questions from old tests. There are two things due tomorrow, but--like a badass--I finished it all last night. I just have to print it out and turn it in. I won't even have to come up to school tomorrow. I'm so close to being done, I can taste it! And it tastes like sweet sweet victory.
Annnd I get to see my sweetheart in a little more than a week! Can't wait!!
Tip for college:
When a proffessor gives you a 100 question take home final with really difficult questions, they are probably directly out of a book. A book that is probably at the school library.
I missed one question and got a 99. Go me!
What a hard-ass. His exact words as he was assigning it were "Because I know yall will want something to do." psh. Whatever.
Oh well. I'm uber excited about going home and seeing the fam for the first time all semester!!! Gonna make a pumpkin pie, gonna eat lots of good food, gonna relax and laugh over a margarita. It's going to be awesome! And then I get to see the boyfriend as well!! I'm soooo excited! It's the little things I miss like going places with him and just being with him and talking with him that I miss the most. And cuddling. Not going to get mushy or anything, but I definitely miss my snuggle buddy.
It takes me for-freakin-ever to read nonfiction. Not sure why I can fly through fiction but nonfiction takes me at least three times as long to read. Am I paying more attention or something?
Anyway, right now I'm making my way through Moab Is My Washpot, which is Stephen Fry's autobiography. The
wonderful thing is that he did write it himself and it's completely in his "voice" so it's rather like sitting across from him as he tells you the silly tales of his childhood and school years. I always wonder how people can remember their earlier years with such detail. I certainly remember "scenes" but if pressed I doubt I could put them into an actual factual timeline. It's just as well since I doubt anyone would want to read my life story anyway. Although I did have a damn fun childhood.
I'm also plowing (slowly, slowly) my way through Bad Science by Ben Goldacre. I say "plowing" only because I read so dreadfully slow, not because the content is laborious. If anything, Goldacre makes what might be snore-worthy and makes it fun and interesting.
This is a book that has been known in the Skeptical community as a must-read... along with Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy, and Simon Singh's Trick Or Treatment. It reveals what commonly-held beliefs are misplaced and generally teaches you to question what often sounds too good to be true.
What makes reading both of these books even more fun is both of the authors are also on Twitter so I'm "getting to know" them both through their writing and through their day-to-day twitterings as well.
For a week at least.
So I see my last blog post was back in July. No one could have predicted the slew of projects and activities I got myself into since then. I guess it all started when I got accepted for the master's program I was trying to get into. The graduate school program that started 2 weeks after I graduated from my undergrad career that is. Quite the quick change. In a nut shell, with my dad's help I found a quiet place to live. Advertised as small, it is anything but. I have all this room to myself and it's private and quiet and I can do whatever I want, whenever I want to do it. It's a tiny little bungalow rent house, but it's the perfect size for one person and it seems even bigger since I went with minimal furniture. It is quite the cutie.
So I started school here. On the first day, they corralled all the new students into one big room, locked the doors and proceeded to break us of our silly undergrad habits. Any student to arrive to a class more than 5 minutes late will recieve no higher than a 75 on the next test for that class. Anytime a student is to be absent, it is that student's responsibility to contact the faculty coordinator before their first class to notify them of their reason for being absent. A student is not encouraged to work during the semester (I also think they should have warned us that our nutrition and rest would also need to be forgotten).
All in all, it's been a tough semester so far in regards to tests and the work load, but it's no more difficult than what I had imagined. My grades are lower than they were in undergrad, the professors make up tests from sometimes miniscule details in the chapters, and 99% of my free time is spent writing papers, finishing a project in lab, etc. I'm not complaining; I feel challenged to a degree I've never been challenged before and it's quite exciting. Today, for example, I am reviewing a classmate's 20 page paper on the genetics of neurological disease. I can't be too easy on her because my review of her paper is 20% of my own grade. If the professor finds things that I don't catch then I get docked points.
To sum it up, what i've been doing since July is finishing undergrad, studying for the certification exam and then attending graduate school. And while I've been in graduate school, I've volunteered to help a researcher on campus with her study and in return I get to use her study as the topic of my make-believe grant proposal (the 20 page paper mentioned previously). That went very well. I guess I expected too much of myself, because I thought I was the most clueless grad student she's ever had, when in reality, I was "the best grad student" she ever had. Her words to my professor! I'm flattered to say the least and I take back every bad thing I ever said about her.......
On to something completely different. Today I was perusing the christmas gift magazine I got in the mail when I found two things of interest. The first was Absinthe. No joke. They were selling an absinthe glass, spoon and sugar cubes with a description of the proper way to pour this famous drink. Never tried it personally, but I don't think I'd be too keen on trying anything green you have to pour over a sugar cube into a "special" glass.
The second was a kit to test your dog's DNA. You swab your dog's cheek and mail it to a lab to find out the breeds in your mixed-breed dog. Quite the variety of gifts in this magazine...
Helpful/useful information for us all.
Available free for one week via Skeptic's Society!
So it's been ages since I wrote anything...
