I'm a bitter clinger

I did finally finish those papers a couple of weeks ago, and got them turned in. Lots of other stuff has gone on since then, but I'll mention it more later.



When I checked the mail today, I got a letter from my school's Financial Aid office saying that if I wanted to keep my scholarship I'd have to write them a letter explaining why they thought they should renew it, since my grades for this year weren't good enough to be able to keep it. Since I hadn't actually checked my grades yet (I wanted to make sure that I would have my philosophy one in, and I was kind of afraid to see how bad they might be), I went to go see how bad it was.


It turned out not to be bad at all! I got a 3.14 (pi!) which, while lower than anything I ever got in high school, is still my highest GPA ever in college by quite a significant amount. Since I had 11 papers this semester and only ended up turning 3 of them in on time, I though that my GPA would have gone down this semester. Amazingly, I didn't get anything lower than a B-. By some miracle, I got an A- from Dr. Martinez. Last semester, I got a C- from him (I had a B until I failed the final) and about a week or so before the end of the semester he told me that I was in danger of not passing Market, State, & Institutions this semester since I was so far behind in it. But I turned in a bunch of stuff right at the end and did well on the final (which was entirely extra credit), and somehow he gave me a grade that was better than what I could have hoped to have. So thus far, Dr. Martinez has given me both my best and worst grades in college. (Not counting the A's I've gotten in choir and voice, since those are only 1 credit each.) Fr. McTeigue gave me a B in Ethics, which was astounding considering that the closest to on-time I ever turned any of my papers in for that class was about 3 or 4 days late. 2 of my papers for that class got in the latest I'd ever turned in anything by a factor of 4 or 5. My average for the past year turned out to be a 2.98 and I needed a 3.0, so I'm pretty confident that the school will let me keep my scholarship, especially since my grades have gotten better every semester.


Most of today has been spent watching Anime with my brother. Over the past several days, he's introduced me to Cowboy Bebop (seen 1 episode), Gundam 00 (seen 2), Code Geass (seen 12; so far its my favorite), and Bleach (seen 2; my second favorite). This evening, my mom and I wen contra dancing, which was enormously fun. All in all, I'm doing quite well. Still need to find a job though!

Still writing my last paper, argh. But I thought I'd share with you a baker's dozen of the music that has currently taken over my brain. It's a very eclectic mix, so I don't expect anyone to like everything on there. Let me know what you think! I have a song parody about local politics to the tune of Guysborough Train in the works, so stay tuned. Madison residents, see if you can guess what it'll be about!




Also, the weather was really lovely here today. Too bad I have to spend my time cooped-up inside at the computer!

It's in the wrong key, but this is one of the pieces we sang this morning in choir. Obviously this isn't us singing, but I love the song so much I wanted to share it. I <3 Thomas Tallis. On somebody's sheet music, there's a little note written above the line "another comforter" that says "an extra blanket."  A lot of the sheet music is 30+ years old, so it's not uncommon to find jokes and notes written in the margins by people who are  now long-gone from the choir.




Still finishing Philosophy. I'm done with one paper and partway through the other. Hopefully I'll finish today. I have my ups and downs, but I think I'm happy right now. Life is beautiful.

This is the fourth night in a row that I've seen the wrong side of 4 am. Definitely ready for the semester to be over.

On the bright side, there's a very good chance that I may finish 2 of my 6 papers by the end of the day tomorrow/today (whatever you want to call Wednesday, April 23rd, 2009. It's 6 am, but I haven't been to bed yet. :p )




Since I'm not normally awake at this time, I'm going to take advantage of it and say the Regia Coeli and then go to bed. :D

This may sound like an odd request, but I'd like recommendations for highly motivational music. I have 5 papers that I need to finish in the next two weeks or so before the end of the semester, and I had a brilliant moment of revelation this afternoon while writing a philosophy paper and listening to The Final Countdown. I need more exciting, motivational music! I especially like classic rock, techno, folk, and classical music, but I'm fairly open-minded and will try anything you recommend to me. I think I'm kind of looking for stuff with lyrics, but instrumental will work too. I think I want things that are kind of fast and loud.


So what should I listen to?

Like last year, I'm giving up the internet for Lent, among other things. I'm also giving up dessert, as well as trying to go to bed earlier and go to Mass and pray more.



This means that other than school-related stuff, I'll only be checking email. (Things would get out of hand very rapidly if I didn't check that.) I will not be online other than that until April 12th, 2009. If you comment here during that time, I will get it, since comments all get sent to my email, but I won't respond to them.

Hopefully this will also give me a chance to concentrate on my schoolwork and get my grades up.



See you in 40 days!

So far this semester is good. I have lots of work, but I'm really trying to do well this semester, and I like all my classes, even the one where I have to write a paper every two weeks for most of the semester. (That's Market, State, & Institutions, which despite the confusing and unwieldy name, is about political and economic philosophy.) I'm also taking Intermediate Micro (light-years easier than Intermediate Macro was), American Civ, Ethics (I love putting the smackdown on moral relativism!), and choir. My mom came down at the beginning of the semester to visit, so she stayed with my godparents. She was glad to get out of the -35 F windchills in Madison, and she also wants to get a job here when my brother is done with school there. (School was actually canceled for two days because of the cold, so thanks to that and two snow days in December, they'll have to have extra school at some point this year.) She was here for ten days, from Saturday the 10th until today.

I watched An American Carol tonight, for the third time in about two weeks. It's still hilarious. My favorite part is most definitely this. I actually wish that there had been more songs in the movie, since this one was so good. The main character of the movie is actually played by the brother of my preschool teacher. (More famously, Chris Farley is also their brother. I met him twice, and actually got his autograph, but I lost it years and years ago.)

Over the weekend, my mom and I saw Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, which was excellent. It alternated between hilarious and very creepy, but overall I loved it.


Currently, I'm knitting a pair of black fingerless gloves for my roommate. I made a pair in purple for myself this summer, and I'm almost done with the first one of hers. She gave me a cold this week, but I still love her. :)

I get to keep my scholarship! Hooray!

Hi everyone! I am still alive. I just haven't felt like going on the internet much lately. I have a week left of winter break. So far I've spent most of it knitting (mostly lace dishcloths as Christmas presents for my mom's many siblings) and watching Stargate (my brother got all 10 seasons of SG-1 for Christmas!). He got me into the show over the summer, and it is nothing but awesome and only gets better over time. I'm on season 5 right now. I've also watched a bit of Babylon 5, although I'm still woefully behind. I've read some too, but not a ton. I did finally get to finish That Hideous Strength, which was excellent. I highly recommend all of C.S. Lewis' Space Trilogy.

The weather has been ridiculously cold and snowy. December was the snowiest month ever here, with a little over 40 inches. This is exactly why I left Madison, and the midwest in general! Speaking of which, please pray for me. Everything is all up in the air right now over whether I'll be able to keep my scholarship and go back to Ave. My grades last semester were not as good as I thought they were going to be. (Especially in Macro--I went down more than a letter grade because of the final.) I have been told that there's a possibility that I can keep my scholarship, but I haven't heard anything whatsoever from the school. If I can't keep it, I don't know what I'm going to do. I desperately want to both stay at Ave and avoid debt. At this point, I have no idea what will happen.

I have now been awake for slightly over 30 hours, thanks to Theology homework. Thanksgiving break has started, and I don't have anything I have to do, but now I'm oddly not tired. I'm definitely never pulling another all-nighter again. When I'd been awake for about 24 hours (and hadn't had any tea for the past 4 1/2), I started uncontrollably twitching, almost falling asleep, and typing badly-spelled semi-coherent notes in my philosophy class (some of which I don't really remember writing down at all.) But I had two more glasses of tea at lunch, since I had more homework and two more classes to go. In total, the past 30 hours have been fueled by adrenaline and four teabags of black tea (mixed with my regular decaf tea, since I can't stand black tea on its own. Anyway, homework is turned in (although I have 3 papers due in the next week or so, 2 on Monday), I'm done with class, and my family didn't pick up the phone when I called them, so I guess there's nothing left to do but lie down and try to sleep.

It irritates me when people who have no knowledge of economics whatsoever try to say that we're in a depression just because they heard it on the news. No! We are in a recession, but we have not actually been in it very long and it will probably not be as bad as everyone predicts, because economic forecasts are usually inaccurate and overly pessimistic. The reason you hear on TV that the economy is the worst it's been since the 30's is because bad new increases TV viewership. Wilting cable news programs are trying to increase demand for their product by making you pessimistic. Argh!


(I'm irritated about a whole list of other things too, but I'm venting about this because it's something I keep hearing over and over again. I don't blame so much the people who believe this stuff as the news outlets feeding it to them.)

A quick list of other things bugging me right now:
-Crazy stupid people on the internet
-My nice headphones malfunctioning
-Not sleeping enough
-Homework
-People who tell too many dirty jokes
-The fact that I am too cheap for yarn prices at just about anywhere but garage sales

I'm really not a very angry person. It's just been an irritating and unproductive couple of weeks.

Happy election day! I already voted two weeks ago by absentee ballot. I think that even without the icon, you could probably guess who I voted for if you know me at all. But yes, I did vote for McCain/Palin. McCain was by far not my first choice (in fact, one of my three last choices for the Republican nomination), but I knew I'd vote for him in the general election anyway. Sarah Palin made me excited to vote for McCain. I had actually heard of her before she was chosen as his VP. In fact, this summer when my brother and I were bored one evening, we came up with our dream cabinet and she was part of it. :)


I don't expect to convince any of you one way or the other, seeing as you're all a group of generally intelligent and opinionated folks, but here is a video that sums up some of the reasons I did not vote for Obama:





Also, don't trust exit polls. They've been wrong for the last several elections and show no symptoms of being any more accurate this time around.

We spent half of calculus today talking about riddles and logic puzzles. I love calc! And no, not just because we spent half the class not working, I actually like it as a subject and a class. Go figure. I failed it in high school, and now I'm getting all A's.

Yes, I know I haven't posted in months and months. Perhaps I'll update you on what I've done in the mean time, perhaps not!

You may or may not have heard about the awful weather that's been going on for the past week or so in the midwest. In Wisconsin there are 30 counties that have been declared in a state of emergency right now. We had severe weather over the weekend and again today. It's been severe thunderstorms and some tornadoes, which has led to flooding all over the place. Fortunately, both my parents live on very high ground, so we've been just fine other than some very soggy carpet. One of the windows in my dad's basement leaked, but my brother and I managed to stop it with a very large amount of duct tape (Red Green would be proud). At my mom's house, water keeps coming up from under the house in one part of the basement, and water leaked in under the back door, but both of these have happened before. My mom's car got stalled on Sunday night due to water on the road, but two passers-by helped push her car and jump-start it, so everything worked out all right.

From what I've seen on the news, a whole lot of people, especially outside of Madison, have it way, way worse than we do. Lake Delton has completely disappeared. There's video of entire houses from there floating down the Wisconsin River. It's crazy. There's huge flooding in Baraboo and Columbus, as well as lots of other places. Pretty much all of southern Wisconsin is absolutely soaked.

There's been so much rain since last weekend that after tonight, the record for wettest June ever will be surpassed here, with the month less than half over. And this is following the snowiest winter ever and the wettest August ever last year. There has certainly been an overabundance of precipitation!

Last weekend, before all the rain started it was incredibly windy. Joanne, the lovely organist at my parish, who is a very sweet lady in her '70's, was blown over by the wind (she's very tiny) and broke a bone (my mom heard arm, I heard hip, but since she was only in the hospital overnight, arm seems more likely). My mom and I are going to go visit her sometime this week and take some flowers from our garden.

I mostly just wanted to let people know that I am indeed alive and unharmed and extremely grateful that my parents live on high ground and have finished basements to go in when the tornado warnings come. :) Please keep everyone who was been affected by the storms, tornadoes, and flooding in your thoughts and prayers, since there's tens of millions of dollars of damage just in Wisconsin, and a bunch of other states have been hit by this same weather too.

I went to Festa Italia with my mom this weekend. We were there on Saturday because her Italian folk dance group (which I was in until I went off to school) was performing twice. The group has the most incredible costumes, which of course they got after I stopped being able to come. :P But I have plans to rejoin, at least for the summer, since I think I'll still be here for their performance at Triangle Ethnic Fest in August. That way I get to dance, and also get my hands on one of those delicious costumes. Yay!

We also ate some seriously amazing food on Saturday. My favorite dish was thearancini. I don't normally like peas (except for split pea soup), but these were delicious.

We came back on Sunday just to hear music: Joe Scalissi and the Dry Martinis (and his wife Deb) and the Italian rock band Dolcemente Complicate (the name means "sweetly complicated"). All were excellent, and I bought a CD from Dolcemente Complicate.

My godparents are having a baby today. I have a cold today. I am also packing. No time to say more until I get home, probably.

I'm done for the semester! All papers have been turned in as of several days ago, and I had my last final yesterday morning. Both my roommates have gone home, but I don't leave for a couple of days. Now I just have to relax, clean, pack, and try not to get sick. (I feel like I'm coming down with something.)

More news coming at a later date, when it's not my bedtime...

I'm done with my Sacred Scripture paper! Now just 1 ½ papers left to go before finals. I say 1 ½ not because I'm partially finished with a paper, but because I have one sort-of paper which will require me to spend time, but not actually write anything of my own. It's really hard to believe that I'll be done with classes for the semester by next Wednesday, then done with finals by the Thursday after that, and then home on Monday. Time just flies.

Juries for my voice lessons went well. It's basically a final where you do your piece in front of several of the music professors. I managed not to screw up, other than forgetting The piece I did was the Qui Sedes from Vivaldi's Gloria. Here's a video of it if you'd like to hear.


Apologies for the bad quality, but it was the best-done version I could find on Youtube. Quite obviously, that is not me singing.



If for some odd reason any of you Madison people would like to hear me sing it, there's a pretty good chance I'll do it for Mass sometime this summer.

Also, aaronpike's post on sports and gaming is awesome. As a general geek with an interest in both sports and gaming, (but gaming not as much), I thoroughly approve.