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Posts tagged bike

Laconicly

Finals week.  Things to say.

Awesome day off yesterday.  Got hair cut by favorite, Melody.  Much catching up.  Ethiopian dinner with Ben.  Major life questions deftly unanswered.  Mind-blowing free jazz concert at favorite Oakland club/cement box/accordian repair shop.  Home very late.  No studying at all.

Took Quechua final this morning.   Utterly flubbed oral portion.  Actually spaced out instead of answering questions in dialog!  Brain: -1.  More amused than bothered.  Feeling happy about pass-fail.  Confident about spending study time at Ethiopian + jazz.

Came home.  Celebratory (abashed?) sushi lunch.  Recieved email from neuroimaging professor / goon.  Surprise, your quiz *is* an essay!  Discomfited.  Rejected from working memory until semantics is attended to.   Worked outside on semantics paper all afternoon.  Did I mention, 75 degrees today?  Saw more birds than semantics.

Manual labor break to wash, clean, oil bike.  Feeling very mechanical.  Much grease under fingernails.  Hands well chafed, bike well tended.

Spent all night (is it midnight already?) working on semantics.  Triumphantly (abashed?) emailed Quechua professor all remaining lexical questions.  Feeling somewhat assified.  Isn’t this paper done yet?

Blink Blank Blunk

This whole week has been ones of those where at the end of my day my whole body just shuts down.  I sit down to blog, knowing I have lots of stories to share, and my eyes slowly close, I sink in my seat, and my brain starts to run, run….

The last several nights I’ve had a hard time getting to sleep despite being as tired as I am now.  At some point work tapers off and exhaustion sets in, but my brain never stops worrying about what I’m doing, or need to do, or should do, or might forget to do.  There are so many tiny pieces of input into my day I really need a better way to organize them.  I like to think I’ve got a good short term memory, but with as much reading and learning and the all-exhausting taing I’m doing, there just aren’t any neurons left to fill that purpose.  Things just fall right our of my head, like a sieve.  It reminds me of laundry day, where at the end of the day you’ve folded so many socks you can’t carry them all at once, but you try to anyway.  No matter how big of a handfull or armload you think you can carry, you inevitably drop a bunch of socks on the way to the drawer.  Those socks are my thoughts.  And they keep spilling on the floor.

Wednesday has to be my worst day.  I know Fridays I teach more, but they have this added bonus, a character of flippancy almost, because they’re Fridays.  I know that all I have to do is make it through that two hours of teaching, and I’m really off free for almost three whole days.  Nevermind that I do more work in those three days than the remaining four, but there are no social obligations which takes the pressure off quite a bit.  Except, of course, this weekend.  But sociolinguistics just wouldn’t be what it is if I didn’t have to do something as partially terrifying as asking pointed questions about strangers’ lives.  And this is the one and only time I have to do this.  In the forseeable future.  Ish.

I don’t really feel like talking about class today.  I did a lot today.  I’m now two-thirds done grading essays.  I remembered (whoo!  remembering anything!) to print out a bunch of papers I need for my 260 project.  I even read half of one.  I got my section done, and it went pretty well, despite my total lack of semantics knowledge.  I did a million tiny tasks this morning… tried to set up an email list, sent some emails I needed to do, and this evening I got my schedule for next week up. My schedule for next week looks, if at all possible, scarier than this weeks.  But I think after this, it levels out.  I present in 260 on Tuesday, and that’s the only thing I need to do (officially..) besides the final project in any of my classes.  Phew.

But really the only major happening of my day was that my tire was again (arg!) flat when I got out of section.  And I put new tires (actual tires, not tubes) on my bike just two days ago!  Anyway, it did make it obvious that my 5-times-patched tube was inadequate, and I was meaning to get new tubes anyway.  So I took it to the bike shop (by which I mean Davis has about nine..) and they had just enough time to change my tube before they closed.  Yay.  My bike always rides so well with properly inflated tires, and it turns out I was way under inflating the new tires.  My old ones were 65 psi, but the new ones go up to 100, which is way firmer than I’m used to.  Rode home like a dream.

Came home to my wonderful Lewis, who hugged my stressful day away.  And then made me delicious dinner.  The ol’ quinoa stuffed baked squash bit of heaven.  So tasty.  And I am so ready for bed.  Here’s to tomorrow, an easier day than today.

Autumntastic!

What a wonderful day!

Got up early, but spent most of my day grading the first set of homework.  That stuff really burns me out… but the kids seem to be getting syntax more than I feared they might, so that’s great!  Maybe we won’t have so much work to do this week to get syntax whipped into shape.  Yay. I also made cider this morning! It’s delicious and it makes the whole house smell nice while it steeps. I even used our own homemade apple juice from a big bag of jonagolds I juiced a few days ago. So tasty.

As soon as I was done with that, I was ready to get out of the house!  Lewis and I borrowed a car and got ourselves down to a bike shop to fix my poor tires.  Turns out I have an abnormal tire size, so the first shop sent us away with a referral to a different shop.  Second shop only had one set of tires that would fit me bike, so that’s what we’ve got now.  They’re “slicks” (as in, have no tread) which I’ve never ridden on before, but as the guy at the bike shop helpfully pointed out, the barely treaded and now worn down tires I was using were essentially treadless anyway.  Gave the bike a test drive this evening with the new gear, and so far so good.  It’s also nice to have brand new tires that don’t have any structural problems or previous wounds.  If only I could say the same for my tubes!

Anyway, after the bikeventure, we took ourselves to a pumpkin patch to pick out some halloween friends!  Getting there was a bit of an adventure, actually, since Lewis and I had borrowed the manual transmission Bug, and neither of us have driven stick for quite some time.  As it turns out, all my years of Giles (approximation here, not my car, but an identical looking one) played out in my favor. New VWs have touchy clutches, though the actual shifting is much smoother and less of a workout than my dear Giles. That poor guy had such shifting trouble! Anyway, I ended up driving to the pumpkin patch cause the stick was getting the better of Lewis. Must admit, it was fun!

Pumpkin patch was great. Lots of good gourds, lots of families and kids, and baby animals! In addition to a pumpkin patch, this particular place had a petting barn! We didn’t pay to go in (since going in pretty much meant the petting, not the looking portion, and it was mostly under-8 types), but we did wander the perimeter and admire all the cute things. They had baby rabbits, chickens, and kittens, and even a baby goat no bigger than our Boo. A very nice touch! So we made it home with our two-gourd bounty (mine, a traditional and stalwart looking pumpkin, and Lewis’ some sort of green gourd) for way less money than I anticipated. Yay!

Came home and sort of completely crashed, as is wont to happen. Failed on the dinner front, though I was all excited to make “Clare Hall Soup” today. Perhaps tomorrow. But importantly, I did manage to finish the reading I had set out for the night, and that puts me in pretty good stead for tomorrow. The Lawyers’ are coming over as well tomorrow for some general maintenance, so it ought to be a busy one. Ah, the weekend.

Flat tire, flat day

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.