This parrot is dead!"

bush meets bono

salon has a totally great picture of the president with his arch-nemesis, bono... with some really funny captions. The picture itself is worth a thousand words... you can just SEE the hate-rays coming out of bono's eyes. i guess that's why he wears those sunglasses, because otherwise the president's head would just *bam*

swish

so i aced the second bio quiz. and all is right with the world. exam on friday? no fuckin problem.

i'm all doped up on day-quil, so my brain's been a bit slow today. what follows is a complete non-sequitur. i had lab this morning. my lab group already absolutely loves me because i save their ass a lot. or just save them a lot of work. one or the other. i can't help it, molecular biology just makes sense to me.

the days are getting shorter and darker and I LOVE IT. i'm so excited for winter. too long has my snowboard languished under the bed in disuse. plus i got new boots (that actually fit) and real metal bindings (rather than plastic) last season so i'm good to go. i just hope we don't have another stupid global warming winter like we had last year.

grrrrrrr

oh my fucking god i am so pissed off at my bio ta. so on the first quiz, which was returned to us today, i got a fucking 19 out of 20. so i look to see what i'd done wrong because I KNEW i had aced that quiz. and I see that i've been docked a point because the o and the l in the word "Golgi apparatus" are a little close together so it looks like I wrote "Gdgi apparatus". OH. MY. FUCKING. GOD. YES I REALLY THINK IT'S CALLED THE GDGI APPARATUS. WTF.

I shouldn't be seething about 1 point on a quiz, BUT I AM.

before i die i will do this

dogsledding on svalbard

i was just playing with google maps, when i found this island north of russia and norway, about on the same latitude as the north end of greenland, and i was like, hmm, what is this place? so i wikied it. it looks beautiful. so i randomly found this site for this "resort" type place, where you can stay in longyearbyen, which is the "major city" on the island (pop. less than 2000) and take a 3-day dogsledding adventure to a ship frozen in a fjord. where they have modern amenities and a cozy little hotel. it just sounds so fucking cool... plus you get to pick your own puppies and take care of them for the duration of the trip!! puppies! just waiting, hoping you'll let them go on a trip running with their buddies across the arctic. and the only sound you can hear is the doggies running on the snow. i must do this before i depart this earth.

liek omg

the best thing evar happened before biology lecture today... a girl got up to make announcements about tri-beta, the biological honor society, and their goings-on. so she gets up and giggles and tells us about tutoring, and omg, like mentoring and stuff, and then the biology club meetings, the first of which is this thursday at 6pm, where we'll be talking about, um, intellectual design, so you should all like, totally come!

biology honor society my ass. intellectual design, omg! u r so smart. i wonder if she was just ditzy because she was in front of 200 people, or if she really has no perspective on what intelligent design is.

blogging from the starbucks on the ave. funny thing is, within the walls of starbucks, there are 3 available wireless networks, only one of which is starbucks' t-mobile proprietary pay network. so i'm sticking it to the man, and to everyone who thinks you should pay for wi-fi.

just got out of my first sociology section. everyone was really quiet. i hate sections like that, where no one ever says anything... maybe it'll get better as the quarter goes on. there's a girl in there who's a new orleans "displacee" (is that better than refugee?) and we talked for a few minutes about the hurricane and how it caused a diaspora... and the TA said "hundreds, thousands of people... maybe even tens of thousands." try again, blondie, it was hundreds OF thousands.

yeah, my TA in that class is this 5'9 perfectly groomed blonde princeton grad with a ginormous diamond on her left hand. how fucking typical.

bio lecture in an hour... i'll finish my coffee here and then get some teriyaki across the street. mmmm, teriyaki. and then it'll be time for class. whee!

the sounds of hell/school starts tomorrow

there's been the sound of someone playing a recorder very poorly floating through our apartment since i woke up at around 8. i'm guessing this is the doing of a third-grader, because i remember last time i was at my aunt and cousins' house, my little cousin zoe had a recorder and played it poorly. it's one of those things that you do in third grade. but why, for the love of god, has this horrid noise been going on for the last two hours??? it's pretty clear that the person playing the recorder knows no more than two notes, three if you count that god awful sound that a recorder makes if you just blow harder. if i were wearing pants, i might go investigate, and possibly throttle the little bastard. alas, i am pantless.

on another note, i think i'm really going to like this whole not-working thing. i didn't get out of bed until 9:30. my class schedule won't allow me to sleep in that late most days, but for one day it was really nice.

speaking of class schedules:

monday: bio 200 lecture, 12:30-1:20
tuesday: soc 212 lecture, 9:30-11:20, bio 200 lecture, 12:30-1:20, near e 210 lecture, 2:30-4:20, swim conditioning, 6:00-7:00
wednesday: bio 200 lab, 9:00-11:50, bio 200 lecture, 12:30-1:20
thursday: soc 212 lecture, 9:30-11:20, near e 210 lecture, 2:30-4:20, swim conditioning, 6:00-7:00
friday: soc 212 quiz, 10:30-11:20, bio 200 lecture, 12:30-11:20, near e 210 quiz, 2:30-3:20

soc 212 is "evolution and revolution: an introduction to comparative social change".
near e 210 is "introduction to islamic civilization".
bio 200 is intro biology. durrr

oops. changed my mind again.

sassy

avast, ye landlubbers. it be talk like a pirate day. ahoy, yarr, all that good stuff.

so thus begins my last full week of work. classes start next wednesday, the 28th, so i'm calling it quits after this week. well, i'll be coming in on mondays to help out with training and such for a few weeks, but it's not full-time so it doesn't really count.

today at work i laid out my 4 year plan - which turns out to only be a 2 year plan. it seems that i can get all the coursework i need into 7 quarters - so i'll take 10 units next summer, and a full-time load every other quarter - and graduate next winter or spring. well, get my undergrad degree then, as i fully intend to pursue More of the Same and then Pile it Higher and Deeper after i complete my B.S. degree.

edward is obnoxious; i have laundry; i think we're having tortelloni for dinner. not to be confused with tortellini. duh.

i am so punk rock.

i am trinity.

i have a dirty mirror.

fuzzy trees

been awhile. bad blogger.

had a good camping trip this weekend, one in which i got to cuddle with tessa and we saw lots of big trees. no one else would have noticed these big trees if i hadn't pointed them out, see, look there's a big tree. it's helpful to have a biology major along for these kinds of things.

better than big trees, however, were the fuzzy trees.

we went over to the olympic national park, up the elhwa river valley. it's not quite rainforest over there, but we were certainly in a forest, and it did rain a bit. just a bit, one night.

we hiked something like 6 miles on saturday, and boy was that a pain in the ass. we're going to have to get our stamina up before we can do that epic hike i keep talking about. i want to hike up the hoh river valley, all the way up to the glaciers at the base of mount olympus. one day, i want to climb mount olympus. it's only like 8000 feet.

this lake is going away soon. the dam holding it back was built in 1913 and frankly, it looks like it might be time for it to go away. the dam is all cracked and dilapidated-looking. we met an old couple at the lake overlook and they seemed pissed about the idea of taking down the dam. i say, we got a bit overzealous with our whole nature control back when the army corps of engineers was new and mother nature won't put up with our shit forever. so it's better to take down the dam in a controlled way than wait for it to go boom and send huge blocks of concrete down the valley at a hundred miles an hour.

tomorrow is haircut day. stay posted.

i've been pretty pensive recently. mostly because of hurricane katrina, i think. it's weird. i lived outside of NO in '92 - which if you know your hurricane history was the year andrew struck - and i remember it being a pretty wild ride, though it was only a TS when it hit louisiana, not the cat5 hurricane it had been thru florida. but still, having lived there for 2 and almost a half years during my childhood i know the lay of the land, i have many memories of that city and its amazing waterfront aquarium and the french quarter and the superdome and my dad's office off poydras. and now that is all under 15 feet of water and it just seems surreal.

the thing that makes me so mad is the revelation that the feds have red-lighted several projects to improve levees and shifted their focus away from hurricane preparedness. it's all a part of the integration of FEMA into the department of homeland security. and the shifting of all "available" funds to the iraq war. it's absolute, utter bullshit.

not a lot to write about recently, so i haven't. it's been a boring week. i had a fucking cold this week, it was lame. and i'm still hacking up wads of phlegm. earlier today a phlegmwad shot out of my mouth and landed on the couch. i'm sure you wanted to know that.

meh. still no update from school, except i got my transfer credits evaluated (but not for ger's) and i'm officially a resident it seems. not that there was much question about it, i live here.

bleh.

bombshell

wtf.

dept. of stupidity

man, i really hate bureaucratic crap. since i didn't get admitted the first time around, i was delayed by a month in signing up for my stupid summer orientation and registration day, and the next available one for my major is on september 7. that's 3 weeks before classes start. so basically, i can't count on getting the classes i want or need, since they're all already full. if i could register now, i could lurk on the registration page, waiting for someone to drop (or get dropped). but now, even if spots in either of the crucial classes i need open up, i still can't register. this really, really makes me mad. i'm probably going to end up taking a whole lot of bullshit fall quarter if i don't have incredible luck.

i just talked to my boss, too. they are really upset that i'm leaving, but they won't let me stay on in the same position part-time. which sucks. they offered me a part-time mailroom position, but to that i say FUCK NO. been there, done that, won't go near that again. hopefully the office of financial aid will come through saying i'm eligible for work-study soon, so i can pursue one of a few work-study jobs that look cool (most of them involve washing glassware and preparing specimens; one of them involves caring for zebrafish. i'm hoping to get that one). unfortunately, work-study jobs are generally 10-15 hours a week and pay about $10 an hour. which means i'd be bringing home somewhere in the neighborhood of $400-500 a month. which is entirely unacceptable unless i get additional financial aid offsetting my housing costs. bleh. so much rides on the anonymous decisions of faceless bureaucraps right now.

omgwtflol

kitty and kat watch fish.

christopher walken for president in 2008