I’ve almost emailed the IT support at my school (due to their failings at keeping the servers running) as many times as I have my professors and TAs. I’m pretty sure that the emails to my professors and TAs does outweigh the number of emails to the tech support, but I’m not sure how long that will last. In other words – today has sucked when it comes to attempting to access anything on my school’s servers. Why? Because I try to log in, it takes about 5-8 minutes for me to get to the log in page, then another 5 minutes for the page to load to this great screen that says “Your session has timed out. Log in again.” Terribly not impressed. All I wanted today was to get the slides from my biology lecture today because Dr. B decides that ‘we can just read those slides on our own time’ and zooms right past about 5-7 of them… So not impressed right now. Does not help that I’m feeling overwhelmed and stressed and just overall kind of upset and lonely. I just wish there was more time. It’s already week 4 of the semester (there’s 12-13 weeks/semester) and we just finished review for my organic chemistry class. Not to mention that there are midterms coming up, along with a project being due, and two papers that I’ve just started doing research on. And I just feel like I’m floundering… Like a fish on dry land. </school rant>

Oh, I’ve also discovered that I can’t seem to print my slides properly (hah). Or rather, I managed to print out one set correctly (because well, turns out my biology prof skips a lot of slides!) and then the school server decided it wanted to quit working, so I couldn’t access the rest of the notes (note to self: once it’s back up, save all the PDFs and then print off my own computer). </… more school rant>

I so need something else besides school to talk about, I’m starting to be depressed by all of this. Oh! So has anyone been watching Dancing with the Stars or So You Think You Can Dance Canada? My sisters watch both shows, so often I can hear the music downstairs, even though the television is upstairs, and some of the dancers are pretty good! Not so much in some of the celebrities (although some are them are pretty light on their feet), but overall it’s fairly entertaining. I haven’t been keeping up too much on television lately. The only show I watch on a daily basis is General Hospital and I already fast forward through a large portion of it (it’s an hour long show, if you cut out commericals, it’s a little bit over half an hour and if I fast forward through the people/story lines that I don’t like, I can be done an episode in about 15-20 minutes). Then there’s Grey’s Anatomy, Private Practice (which starts up this week) and Dollhouse. So little television this year… Good thing too, classes are kicking my butt and I’m only taking four this term!

I really miss the summer (May-August for me). I miss Clay. I miss my friends (that I don’t see very often now). I miss work and the people there. I miss  only having to be mentally engaged in something for a set number of hours and not bringing work home (readings, assignments, review… sucky) and getting to do anything I want in the evenings (i.e. watch tv, or movies, or craft or read a good smutty romance novel) instead of getting home, reading for one course, eating dinner, then doing an assignment for another course. Then there’s a bunch of family-related stuff going on (uncle’s death, funeral arrangements, so many international calls at all hours of the day, birthdays, my other uncle [and aunt] are moving and want help in moving things from their old house to their new one). I just miss the whole relaxed feeling that I had over the summer, when I really wasn’t worrying (too much, anyways) about any one thing in particular. Now I’m worry about multiple things all at once and I just want to breathe.

And… just to top it all off… It rained today. A lot. I was at school from 8am to nearly noon (1 class plus loads of review for my plant biology class – midterm next week, meep!) and I was in a building that has relatively decent insulation and I wasn’t that close to the window so the only time I hear anything from outside of the building is the horn from a car. And all of a sudden I heard this big whooshing sound, followed by something that sounded like a crash. So I looked in the direction of the window and everything was just super blurry and it was raining so hard. It had been raining the entire day but it wasn’t quite as bad. Because, really, when your jacket soaks through twice in one day, it’s not the makings for a really awesome day. But… on the bright  side, I got a lot of review done for one of my classes today.

Question:

1. What are some questions that you have for me? Ask me anything!

I went shopping today (yay). K was nice enough to accompany me as I went to the bakery to place an order for a birthday cake and then to the store to get my gift to myself (and no, it wasn’t a birthday cake for myself!). And… just in case you haven’t noticed yet, there is indeed a new theme up (some new colours, a new header).

My (plant biology) lab partner R and I went mushroom hunting and found this lovely large mushroom (and I’m taking large, the diameter of the cap of the mushroom was probably nearly 20cm!) and it was perfectly intact (until we cut a piece out – on purpose) and smelled quite nice. Didn’t take any photos of that though, because after we cut out a piece, it wasn’t look so pretty anymore. Plus, I can’t really capture the smell of a mushroom on camera (sadly).

Feeling pretty overwhelmed still, when it comes to my organic chemistry class. I got perfect on the prerequisite review material (thank goodness! I’d be really worried if I didn’t at least get a decent mark on that assignment). However, there’s still a few more assignments (based on new material) and I’ve printed out 3 practice sample midterms (I have my first midterm – unfortunately in organic chemistry – next Thursday, October and I suddenly feel not so great about chemistry (at all!). Especially since a lot of the questions seem to be more theory based (like… If X and Y occur with compound A, which item will cause compound A to reaction – please state your reasons). So I’m pretty sure I’m going to be living, breathing, and sleeping organic chemistry for the rest of the term (starting now… only stopping to have flings with cell biology, plant biology, psychology and the boyfriend, of course!).

But umm… Yeah, here’s my little gift to myself:

I like my little indulgences… As long as they don’t occur too often.

Questions:

1. What is the last thing/person/event that made you feel overwhelmed?
2. What’s the last little indulgence purchase that you made for yourself?
3. What is something happy that you’ve got right now in your life?

Click to read more of this entry.

I just felt like showing off what my family’s been going on about since Thursday (that’s not related to death or travel plans… because that’s depressing. And I don’t need any help feeling down at the moment.)…

The plant above is a Nightblooming cereus. It’s a type of cactus and my mom obtained it via a cutting she took from one of her friends’ plants. It spends most of the year indoors, except for summer when it soaks up a lot of sun outdoors. It’s one of my favourite plants because once it starts having buds, they form very quickly (from just a hint of a bud to several inches long within 2-3 weeks). It only blooms at night and the flower is only around for one night. It’s incredibly fragrant and smells quite nice, there’s a lot of different variations of it (white petals, pink petals). The plant itself kind is green and yellow-green, the area around the flower itself is a really nice pink colour. My parents will make a huge deal about it every year because it only flowers one a year (and for only one night). So, needless to say, they had my uncle and aunt who live close by over on Thursday night, and some of my other relatives were watching the progress of the flower via the webcams.

This is how it looked at around 6am the next day (when I was about to leave the house for school on Friday). By the time I got home after volunteering, the flower had completely wilted. There were 3 flowers on the plant this year and all three were 9-11 inches in diameter. It’s a really gorgeous plant, and I’m not sure how easy it is to obtain it (via cutting or a whole pot). It seems to thrive fairly well in a pot (not as big as others I’ve seen online, but then again… it’s my mom’s plant and she needs to be able to actually move it from points A to B with something resembling ease).

Questions:

1. What is your favourite plant (flowering, non-flowering, doesn’t really matter)?
2. How much gardening do you do, if any?
3. What kind of camera do you use? (Somewhat random, I realize.) Click to read more of this entry.