The Laursonian Institute

Didn’t blog yesterday… got home from doing my two friday sections and pretty much crashed.  Sessions went well, but not as well as my Wednesday one.   I think there are some things I can work on to fix that this week, but it’s more of a problem with timing, I think, than anything else, since they turn their homeworks on Fridays just prior to coming to class.  But whatever.  This will change in a couple of weeks anyway when homework switches to Mondays.  Yay.

Spent a few hours last night, and most of all day today grading homeworks.  I was supposed to get some reading done for my own classes but alas, it wasn’t to be.  This has really been another one of those slogged-through-the-day sort of days where there’s nothing I feel like I’m ready to blog about.  Though we did manage to hange a few pictures today, and tidied up most the house.  But really, when that’s your day’s big notable accomplishment… nada mucho to say.  Doubley so when it’s uncooth to talk about the silly things my students are doing in their work!  Much enjoyment on that front!

Well, here’s to sleeping in clean sheets, and for tomorrow being a new day.  The weather is decidedly fall-like, I’m excited about autumn, and my classes, and my life.  And when your days are all the same, those are the important things to keep in mind.  Look at how optomistic I’m feeling!  Great success.

October 11th, 2008 | Tags: autumn, chores, grading, same old, school, taing | Category: home, school | Comments Off

Nothing spectactular happened today.  I got up early, somewhat hung over from last night’s celebratory escapade.  I did morning chores, my least favorite of all chores, though this set ending deliciously in a mango smoothie.

Tire went completely flat half way to campus, and there wasn’t really any fixing it at the time.  So I walked it to campus.  I was pretty late to class, but I think I handled it fairly well considering I’m normally freaking out about being on time.  Thank goodness for Lewis, both for being adoreable and supportive, as well as for busting it to class for me so I could feel like missing class wasn’t really “missing” it.  We were discussing a paper I didn’t really get and I was really interested to hear what was going on.  Turns out… I still don’t totally get it.  And I still think I might right my final paper using it.  Har.  Why do I do these things to myself?

Fixed tire after lunch, got some reading done and some librarying, and came home and crashed.  Been feeling really down ever since I got home, and I mostly think it’s just that I’m exhausted.  In fact, it’s just past nine.. but I think I’m headed off to bed anyway.  I just can’t deal with having any more day in my day.  But on the plus side, we got some evening chores done, like getting kitty new food and dropping crazy old film off to be developed… and I got the whole kitchen cleaned.  Woot.

For as tired as I am… I really wish tomorrow weren’t my big two-section TA day.  I guess this is why I wasn’t supposed to volunteer for Friday sessions.  Whatever.

October 9th, 2008 | Tags: bike, chores, library, malaise | Category: life | Comments Off

I made roast beef tonight.  i did not realize this was possible until I had already done it.  I can’t wait to make myself some juicy sandwich action this week!

Other triumps today include (but are not limited to) attending a friend’s tea/bithday party, doing the laundry, mowing the lawn, and paying some bills.  Of the nontriumphant, I’ll only mention that the Boo got in a fight with a cat the neighbor (in whose yard said fight broke out) says fights with everybody.  He got a little scratch on his nose.  But tomorrow, Lewis will take him to the vet and get him the vaccines he should have to be an outdoor kitty.  Woot.

I’m not feeling very ready for Monday.  Let this be a lesson that my weekends need to be more restorative and less intense.  Word.

October 5th, 2008 | Tags: chores, cooking, fight, kitty | Category: home, life | Comments Off

Today sort of feels like the last day of freedom.  Tomorrow I’ve got a day-long TA orientation, followed Tuesday by a day of more orientation, then a day off, and then my first day of class!  Egad!  So I woke up this morning in a bit of a panic.  Sometimes I just burst awake in the wee hours, really feeling like I need more sleep, but completely unable to justify staying in bed any longer.  So instead I snuck off to the study and spent a few hours getting some pretty non-essential computer work done before Lewis got up and very sweetly made us breakfast.

I was a bit afraid to crash like yesterday, so instead I jumped right in to organizing the garage.  I’ve been wanting to set up a work area for myself out of the old kitchen prep table, and yesterday we got the last component – a bar stool so I can sit at my new “desk”.  Anyway, it was just about the last thing on my list to do before school starts, and today was finally the day for it.  I must say, after Lewis got his side together and we got all the various remaining furniture items assembled and put away the rest of the clutter.. it looks way better in there than I anticipated!  I’m really excited to have an excuse to hang out in there.  As an added bonus, I finally learned how to put together and use our socket wrench!  I’m never going anywhere without that thing again.  I should build some kind of holster.  Anyway, here’s our final product pictures of Lewis’ space and my space:

Laur side, with table and storage!

Lewis side, complete with desk and chair!

Still feeling a bit like I was being hounded by the Ghost of School Work Future, I tidied most of the rest of the house.  There are a few straggling boxes to be put away in the guest room, and our study seems to be in a perpetual state of near-disaster, but otherwise I got everything squared away.  When I think about these sort of chores I can just feel all my muscles tense up, but I need to remind myself that school is only so many hours in a day, and if Lewis and I could manage to have a fairly tidy and satisfying existence while both working 40 hours a week, graduate school is not going to destroy everything I love about life.

Now I just have to master this getting-up-before-8 thing again.  In a perfect world, I’d even get up so early I had time to go to the gym before class… phew.  Baby steps.  I only have to be on campus at 8:50 tomorrow.  The other thing I need to figure out is how not to carry stress in my teeth.  When I woke up this morning I felt like I needed a crowbar to unhinge my jaw, and at lunch today my teeth were so sensitive I could barely eat.  Everything was fine by dinner, which is great, but I definitely need to figure out some kind of strategy.  Arg.

September 21st, 2008 | Tags: chores, fretting, garage, teeth, triumph | Category: home, school | Comments Off

It’s been a very long time since I’ve been up (as in, slept the preceding hours) before four am.  I’m not sure I’ve ever had to be up that early, really.  This morning the Lawyers were headed to Hawaii and Lewis nicely offered to drive them to the airport.  Guess they had a 6 am flight, which meant we needed to leave Davis just after four.  Surprisingly we got to bed last night at a decent hour, and the 3:45 alarm didn’t seem as ridiculous as it could have.  We made some tea, drove to the airport, drove home, and promptly slept through the remainder of the morning.  Boo seemed confused about the going-back-to-bedness, but after a little jostling we all were sound asleep.

So needless to say, we missed our 9 am bike tour of campus appointment, but I’m not too bothered.  My theme this week has been to try and not worry about non-mandatory things.  All of this welcome week stuff is voluntary, so though we’ve signed up for lots of stuff, it just doesn’t seem like it’s worth stressing my last week before classes.  We did, however, make it to campus for our first seminar – an introduction to funding.  Just on time, too.  The funding situation for graduate students is really bizarrely complicated, and it feels so much better to hear the finance officers explain that it’s just really complicated.  It’s not that anyone is being a masochist about it, it’s just that all the grad programs are patchwork funding quilts and we just can’t expect that this stuff is going to be centralized.  So a sigh of relief there, and a double sigh to see that both Lewis and my tuition got paid right on time – yesterday!  I apparently owe them the “typical remainder” which I can feel satisfied not freaking out about now, since I know that if I’m going to be a TA they’re going to expect I pay this two hundred dollars of tuition.  I have no idea why.  We bought our books, too, and checked out the student union eateries for lunch.  I’m starting to feel like a real student!

King of his lair. Sort of.

Super productive afternoon after we came back.  I finished weeding the back yard gardens, and mowed the lawn.  Seemed like it was a good time to let the kitty out, so I watched him in the yard for a while. He’s really surprising outside, because I figured until yesterday that he would be off like a shot when we finally let him outside. I don’t know what gave me that impression, given his general nervous temperament, but he has completely proven me wrong. He sort of keeps an eye on us the whole time he’s out, and he didn’t even remotely try getting out of the back yard today. He actually seemed to get bored after poking around a bit and came and meowed at me to be pet.  Silly boy.

At any rate, the weather was really wonderful today, the perfect temperature for sitting out and reading, so I spent a while doing that to give Boo a chance to feel like he could hang out for a while.  We also trimmed up the front garden, and it’s really starting to look nice around here.  I can’t wait to plant some plants!  Made a delicious cobb for dinner, called my parents, and I’ve been chilling out and watching Mythbusters ever since.  I’m going to call this day a total success.    Anyway, here’s my picture du jour… my adoreable kitty poking around the newly trimmed back garden.  Yay!

September 17th, 2008 | Tags: chores, garden, kitty, orientation, school | Category: home, school | Comments Off

Good grief it’s been a busy day!

Another one of those getting chores done types, but they do leave you feeling like a tidying superhero.  I got our papers organized, and got Comcast to agree they sent me a silly bill for an account that’s closed.  Made breakfast, lunch, and dinner (triple play!), paid rent, tidied up the living room a bit, and finally took care of those bread crusts we’d been petrifying and turned them into gallons of croutons.

We also managed to kick up some neighborhood controversy today, because the arborists came to cut down our silly palm tree.  The Lawyers were thinking the palm tree had reached the end of its usefulness in life, as it was now taller than our house and thus provided only a view of the craggy trunk bit.  It also harbored a lot of screamy birds (not that this relates to it’s cut-down-ability) and was filling our lawn with palm tree seedlings.  I don’t really mind one way or the other about it, since it’s not my house to begin with, but it will be nice to be able to plant some more garden-like elements in that space, and to pretty up the fence and front yard at eye-level.  I do hope the birds don’t miss it too much.  I just about jumped out of my skin when they took it down for-really.  I assumed they were going to cut it down in hunks and take it away like that, but instead they just hacked it off at the base and felled it between our house and our neighbors.  For a minute I thought we were having an earthquake, it really shook the whole house.  Can’t imagine what it’s like losing a tree like that in a storm or something.

Anyway, we certainly felt like the bad guys around here.  The neighbor next door gave Lewis some grief about it, including about how we should have used it to put up an owl box… (standard answer: “well, we’re not the landlords”).  And our neighborhood busybody (and resident eight year old) was aghast we’d do anything that rash.  He saved us a couple seeds, one of which he has probably already planted, in case we change our minds.   He also mumbled something to Francie when she came over about having cut down a native plant… which of course isn’t true.  But really… he’s eight.  Sorry about the tree, Nate.

Tomorrow is our very first day of graduate student orientation activities!  All this week is pretty light stuff since it’s run by the graduate student body whatever and isn’t official university or department stuff.  Serious stuff starts next week with my manditory day-long TA trainings and the hopefully informative department introduction.  And I’m finally starting to get nervous!

September 15th, 2008 | Tags: chores, neighbors, orientation, tree | Category: home, life | Comments Off

I keep thinking I’ll get back to posting tonight closer to bed time, then I screw around on the internet for ages and realize that I’m already tired and I really do intend to keep blogging nightly… so here I am, bleary-eyed and with nothing to say but “i did chores today”.

Which is true.

It’s acutally been rather productive today.  This morning after breakfast I wrote up a huge list of stuff I want to get done in the near-ish future and completely covered our minuature white board.  But I have made a little progress, and none of it is particularly critical.  Just stuff I want to get done to feel like I’ve “finished” setting up the house.  It’s crazy how much stuff there is to do when you have all this extra space and outdoors to take care of in addition to the regular gettin’ business done sort of stuff.

This morning I spent a while digging out mystery overgrown plants in one of our flower beds.  I’d like to start planting soon, thinking that maybe it’s a good time to get stuff in before the winter, and before we can do that we need to dig up all the old crap that’s here and prepare our beds with something better than wood chips and dirt.  Lewis got a compost bin for his birthday (from his parents!) which we’ll set up pretty soon and finally have something to do with our food scraps and lawn clippings and such.  Anyway, it was rather gratifying working in this dirt this morning, and it’s looking a little better out there already.

I also put a little dent in the filing that needs to be done.  We finally got ourselves (rescued from the Lawyers’ garage, at least) an honest-to-goodness filing cabinet and it’s high time I got all our disparate files in one place.  It’s really oddly telescopic seeing your life through the lense of the paperwork you generate.  Why do we have 15 different accounts in our “finance” section?  What the hell has gone on that two kids can generate 15 different bank and credit accounts in this amount of time?  It’s also really funny finding uber-important documents like your diploma right after you’ve spent the last few minutes deciding whether I need to keep set-up instructions to items I don’t even own any longer… Sadly, I only managed to put away the files that were already somewhat organized and still have all the more important, less sane papers scattered all over the desk to get through.

After a day like that, there was really nothing left we could do but forage in the fridge and watch the remaining two Monty Python episodes I haven’t seen in our collection.   And of course, uploading pictures to the blog, and the aforementioned screwing around on the internet until I realize it’s already getting late.  I’ve got orientation to start in a few days, here!  This is no time to get in a stay-up-way-too-late-doing-nothing habit!   Jeesh.

September 14th, 2008 | Tags: chores, garden, papers | Category: home, meta | Comments Off

Got in a few hours late this morning, but still early enough (8-ish) that we saw the sun rise over Sacramento. Ben was kind enough to pick us up from the station, which was great. The only hitch we had was that the Amtrak folks forgot to get our baggage off the train! We were the only people getting off at Davis (tee hee) and it somehow just slipped through the cracks. The agent at Davis called the train and was supposed to have them pull it at Martinez, but it actually made it all the way to San Jose (joke here) before someone found it. They were supposed to put it on the next northbound train, but that too was forgotten, so all told it took it till 5:00 pm to show up. I’m not a bit bothered since we didn’t have to do anything today and there was nothing in it but dirty clothes. Amtrak always impresses me with the level of customer service, even if stuff like this gets messed up in the meantime. The Davis agent called us personally three or four times today to let us know the status, and it was clear that the issue wasn’t systematic so much as so-and-so was being absentminded and so-and-so was too busy to do this or that. It makes me feel like we’re all dealing with reasonable people, like some sort of rider-and-operator cooperative that works because everyone involved loves it. Yay Amtrak.

Anyway, this morning I crashed after we got back home since sleeping last night on the train wasn’t entirely restorative. I slept way better than the trip up, mostly owing to having a fully operational seat this time, but any kind of sleeping sitting up is sure to be suboptimal. So I got up this morning for the second time a hair before noon. We ran some errands downtown after that expecting our bag to show up by three. We hit up Sophia’s for lunch, the post office to mail something for Francie, Ace for some supplies, and finally the Co-op so we’ll have some essen tomorrow. Got a call that our bag wouldn’t be here till five and we came back home and unloaded.

I picked up the luggage when it finally arrived, and then turned right around and went to the Lawyers’ for dinner. They had invited us over to see the USC / Ohio State game and tell them about our trip, and it was lovely to catch up. They’re leaving in a few days themselves to go to Hawaii for a bit as part of a fundraiser auction they won. Should be nice! As for us… orientation starts early next week! Egad. Hard to believe we’re already that far along. Summer is nearly (actually?) over and the leaves are already starting to show evidence of turnage… it’s mid-September!

September 13th, 2008 | Tags: amtrak, baggage, chores, football | Category: home, life | Comments Off

Got so much stuff done today, it’s great.  I should probably also mention I just had a delicious cocktail and I’m feeling both sleepy and spunky.

Lewis made scones this morning, which was pretty much the best way to kick off a Monday.  Went to Woodland thereafter (to the very sad, very run-down County Fair Mall) to get some cheap supplies for the new bed in our guest bedroom, and curtains for ours. Boy do I hate shopping in those big department stores. When you’re looking for cheap, they’re the way to go, though, and that is definitely what was on the order of the day. Did manage to find some sheets for our odd-sized (single?) bed and curtains, and two new pillows to boot. Too bad it took us forever!

Came back to Davis to do a little Lewis-birthday shopping (while he got some bike supplies and more folk music at Armadillo). Feeling a little better about the inevitable belatedness of the major present, but it’s still rather silly that I mussed this all up. Anyway, wrapped some presents this evening on our awesome work desk and got a little bit of cleaning done – vacuumed, swept the kitchen, etc. It’s really starting to look pretty homey in here with our curtains and all that. Or I’m just getting used to where everything is. Finally!

I spent forever on Facebook last night, a thing I’m not normally apt to do. Perhaps I was feeling my having-nothing-to-do collegey best, or was just feeling disconnected from everyone. But I finally friended a ton of people who were in my “you may also know” list, and it’s pretty excellent seeing what everyone is up to. Making me excited to go back to Seattle next week! Good gravy, that’s next week already… we really need to get some stuff done before that happens. Like send in our residency paperwork to UCD.

Speaking of UCD… I told Lewis today if they were a service I was paying for (and not expecting something like my PhD back from) I would have cancelled them by now. I can’t figure out how to do anything, and I refuse to believe it’s because I’ve been out of “the school environment” for three years already. I have no idea what classes I’m supposed to take, should take, can take, must take… I got waitlisted on the class I was most excited about. The prereq-type class I thought I had to take (though now am unsure I even need to take, if it’s even a graduate course..) cooccurs with the class I TA for. All I managed to register so far is a class I’m rather nervous to take cause I’ve never been any good at it — Semantics. I’m really starting to get frustrated that I’m going through all this trouble for a bunch of classes I don’t even want to be in.

Every time we ask the department for help we get this crazy roundabout answer that leaves me more confused about what’s going on that I was before I asked. And that’s saying something! We both got billed (though only Lewis got an email about it…) and I’m not sure how we pay the school, since our funding packages both include our fees and tuition. Though the email I got from the department today told me I would be responsible for the (heretofore unmentioned) “remaining 214 dollars”. …sure. Whatever.

I really feel like I need an advisor just to get me to the point where I walk into campus and sit down in a class. You know, with my registration done, residency verified, fees cleared, and a paycheck in my hand. Oh. And why in the world does the first stipend disbursement happen in *November*? That’s six weeks after school starts! What the hell does everyone do for all that time, just sitting around waiting to get paid? Why would that take so long? Sigh. I wonder how much of this has to do with graduate school generally speaking, how much is Davis specifically, and how much of this has to do with being at a state school instead of a private school.

Sigh. This is nothing I should be getting worked up about right before bed. We have a breakfast date tomorrow to a pub in Sacramento, and I spent all evening working on an amusing geography project. Perhaps I’ll close this blog with the fruits of my labors: a map of California counties and whether Lewis (blue) or I (yellow.. nearly completely absent) or both of us (green!) have been to them. Criteria dictates that we had to have slept a night there, or done some kind of serious touristing to count as having “seen”. No interstate fly-bys. Viola:

Map of Counties Visited in CA

August 25th, 2008 | Tags: birthday, california, chores, classes, facebook, frustration, geography, map, school, woodland | Category: home, life, school | Comments Off