oops

The $0.01 mandolin from Ebay came in on Monday (well, $30 once you add in shipping, but still...). I'm so excited :-D. I've been messing around with it all week so far. In fact, I spent about 4 hours making adjustments and restringing last night rather than studying for my final that I have in approximately 34 minutes. Oops. Oh well. It doesn't really matter - I could make a C on this test and still get an A in the class, and I think I studying just enough to pull a high B, so there. I love how apathetic I've become in the last two weeks. Isn't the end of the semester grand?

Good thing that's over

This week has been very, very long. Lots of assignments due. I haven't been able to ride my bike all week. :-(
But I do have a big ride tomorrow morning, then I'm going to hang out with Granny G and my mom and sister. It should be a good weekend.
Projects are done and papers are written. Now all I have to do is sit for a final on Wednesday and I can get out of here.
Oh, I bought the ticket by the way - May 7-18 in Central America (we're going to try and get as far down as Copan in Honduras), then Austin for a few days, then DI in Tennessee May 22-28, then the epic roadtrip to Oregon. It's going to rock.
Okay, off to the bike shop...

Room for one more...

... one more adventure that is.
This afternoon was comprised of a string of serendipitous encounters, by the end of which I had another pre-Portland adventure lined up.
Some of my friends have been talking for a while about a trip to Central America after the semester ends. This is of course only two weeks away (three really since we have to wait til after graduation). I wasn't going to go with them, though I badly wanted to, because I am already committed to the MS150 (and training is going well, by the way). But today, they came to the realization that it would be easier to fly to Cancun and take buses around to all the Maya ruins and other cool places - which means they won't be leaving until after the MS! And since they're also DI people, we'll be back in plenty of time for me to do the Tennessee thing before the roadtrip up to Portland.
This is turning out to be one epic summer indeed. Hopefully I'll be able to work out the details so that I can go on this adventure too, as it would be a shame to miss out.
Okay, I REALLY need to stop procrastinating - to the books.

A quote from the one and only Dr. Towner...

In reply to my assertion that she had made a little muggle girl very happy by teaching the Imagined Worlds class...
"Oh, you're not a muggle, Hannah; you just haven't bounced yet."
I have the best professors in the world.
(If you have no idea what I'm talking about, just skip this post)

Oozeball and other shenanigans

I think that it would be safe to say that this weekend was a bit of a fiasco. First, there is the pressure of looming finals. Though I have no tests to take as usual, I have a lot of final projects - and they're all due this week. Of course I didn't get any work done - I was too busy. Friday saw me playing in the annual oozeball (mud volleyball) tournament with the AModestProposal team. We kicked ass for the first two matches, but were swiftly eliminated in the next two. I think it was a combination of fatigue and teammates leaving to go work on DI.

Oh, DI. What a nightmare. We've been down as the hosts of the Texas State Destination Imagination tournament for a good portion of the last year, and Gina went through a number of channels to insure that we would have sufficient space to do so. Yet things seemed to fall apart this week. For some reason, the powers that be decided to double (and sometimes) triple book a bunch of our rooms, so that by Thursday night we no longer had SOM for Instant Challenges, but the Classroom Buildings (for a visualization of how disasterous this is, see the pictures of campus on flickr). Then, we found out on Friday evening that the stage of the Performance Hall is too small - so that competition site was moved to the Art Barn. What?! Hyper kids and their overly-competitive parents + six-foot-tall photographs hung with binder clips = a really bad idea. I have no idea how that worked out - I've been too afraid to look. But after all that happened in the student union ($20,000 worth of damage apparently), I don't really want to.
Add to that the tornado warning during registration and the all the high pitched squealing, and I'm ready to go into hiding for a couple of weeks.
Unfortunately, I still have to drive through these next two weeks. It will all be over soon.
At least the bike rides have been going well. Did 40 this Sunday with no trouble, though I think my ride buddies are backing out for this weekend's "Cruisin' de Hood" metric century. At least I'll get to hang out with Granny G at the finish line...

And so we continue where we left off...

After a little break due to injury (Iris', not mine), we got back to our regular training routine today - out the door at 5.45 and down to White Rock Lake for the ten-mile loop before Iris had to leave for work. The cold from this weekend still lingered, but this time I was prepared - I found long-sleeve jerseys and toe-warmers on sale :-D. Hopefully we'll be able to keep up the morning runs. Things are infinitely more complicated when work, kids, and crazy moms are thrown into the mix (don't worry, the kids and mom aren't mine).
But regardless of how things go in the mornings, I'm still going full-force on the weekends. I am officially registered for Cruisin' de Hood on the 21st. Hopefully Granny G and Pops will still be in Texas so that we can go for brownies at their house afterwards since we'll end up just down the road from them (hint hint).
Anyway, off to talk about Harry Potter some more. I love this semester's reading list :-D.

The twilight zone...

When I stepped out the door this morning at 7 am to leave for the Tour Dallas ride, I was sure that I had stepped back in time to a winter month. April in Texas is more than just a spring month - it's usually the beginning of that long stretch of hot weather that reaches into October. But not today. Monday reached 90, but today's temperatures barely got about freezing. As we hit mile 10 of the ride, there were even snow flurries falling! Some friends of mine were at Six Flags (an event planned long ago to celebrate Jono's 22nd birthday) and said the snow there was a little more than flurrying. Nothing accumulated (as per usual in Dallas), yet it was definitely a strange event for EASTER WEEKEND!
After one of the coldest rides of my life, I went home and crawled back under the covers to catch up on some reading. Then I headed back out for the second part of Jono's party - the Rangers game. I heard someone say that tonight's game was the coldest on record at the ballpark in Arlington, and I don't doubt it. Ironically, we were able to beat the snot out of the Red Sox, who should be used to temperatures such as this even if we are not.
Cold as it was, today was a good day. Got a good ride in and had fun hanging out with the friends. If only I didn't have so much work to do in the next two weeks...