Words can't express the depths of my loathing I am 10 days away from my physics final, after which I will never have to take another physics class, ever. You'd think that having the end in sight would alleviate some of my chronic hatred for this class/professor/subject, but sadly such is not the case. I have never worked so hard for so little - no sense of satisfaction, no idea what my grade is (because this teacher, among his many other crimes against education, lost all of our homework grades, hasn't graded any labs, and added a few random quizzes that aren't represented in the grade formula in the syllabus). Hate hate hate. I have a test tomorrow, on chapters were were supposed to cover the last week of October but just completed last Tuesday, and which I still don't begin to understand. We will not be covering anything at all about optics, and while god knows I don't want to be responsible for even more information in this awful class, I need to know optics for the MCAT, so it would have been nice to at least see something about it.

I signed up for the MCAT last night - $225 for a sure-to-be miserable experience. It's like spending money on a root canal, or a new tire (oh, yeah, just did that too - stupid flat tire last week). I guess I'd better start putting together my study plan for that. As for now, I have to get back to studying for my craptastic test tomorrow, or there won't be much point in the MCAT.  ¶ 4:02 PM 2 comments

  Did you know I'm from Forks, Washington? That ought to bring in the page-hits, too bad I don't have google ads. It's so beyond weird that my crappy small hopeless poor dying hometown is now world famous. For those of you who don't have preteens (or don't admit to reading preteen literature even though I know you totally do), the hit book series (and upcoming movie) Twilight takes place in Forks, Washington. For those of you who have never been there, and I'm guessing that's just about everyone in the whole world, statistically speaking, it's a really really REALLY small logging town in the middle of nowhere in Washington state, about 4 hours west of Seattle (no, Seattle is not on the ocean, I swear easterners never look at a map west of the Mississippi).

When I graduated from high school (oh, about 58 years ago), there were only about 2500 residents in town. Logging had pretty much dried up and even liquor had stopped being profitable, to the point that the last solvent bar literally burned to the ground a couple years ago (the rumor is that the owners burned it up for the insurance money, but I can't confirm). The town is about 5 miles from a Native American reservation, and although I spent my whole painfully long high school tenure in town, I couldn't tell you anything about the rez, because PC or not, the twain just ain't meetin'. Don't buy everything you read in novels written by a woman who's never been there.

Our sports teams had to be bused up to 12 hours (no exaggeration) for meets, our homecoming dances and proms were held in not just a gym but the old gym, there is no fast food or movie theater within 60 miles, and (this is coming from a 1st generation Forks resident) the gene pool isn't all that deep, if you know what I mean. My close friends and I spent nearly every day that I remember dreaming of the day we could leave town without looking back. There's really nothing to do in Forks, and that is also not an exaggeration.

So it's something of a surprise to hear that people are choosing Forks as a vacation hotspot based on the Twilight books. Don't get me wrong, I love the books, but most of the excitement in them is caused by the proximity to vampires, not the proximity to mind-numbingly dull nothingness and constant rain. I guess it's just sour grapes - I wish I'd bought real estate when it was still about $2.50/acre.  ¶ 7:56 PM 2 comments

  A weird holiday feeling My emotions don't seem to know where to settle. I'm tired, after a long day, but it was good to keep busy while my nerves were fraying. I took my oldest boy with me to vote, and I hope he remembers this when he's older, the way our parents remember Kennedy (though hopefully with less death and horror). I start to get excited and hopeful, then dampen my enthusiasm with anxious watching, as if my own optimism could jinx the election. In short, I'm all over the damn place. I don't like that the first states to close polls are almost all too close to call - I want this to be decisive. I love that the voter turnout was huge. I want more sugar but I am already down to like 2 pairs of pants because of all the nervous eating I've been doing this week between school and the election.

PleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasewinOBAMA!

Ooo, champagne.  ¶ 7:31 PM 0 comments

  Toddler Talk I'm supposed to be studying for a test in, oh crap, 2 hours, and I'm sure no one's even checking this sad excuse for a blog any more, but hi! The inmates currently in the asylum are being ever so amusing and distracting me from memorizing one more boring-ass fact about cellular respiration.

I love this stage of talking, where you can mostly understand their babbling but can choose not to at will, and where every somewhat intelligent sentence seems like a huge and surprising accomplishment, not so much different than if one of the dogs sat up and asked for his dinner in English. It's even more fun with twins, because they've started to supplement their just-us-two crazy twinspeak with real words, so we can follow along for the first time. The dialog tends to go something like this:

Thing 1: Heah go, Bean! (offering some partly chewed cracker or a toy she does not want)
Thing 2: Go a-WAY! (haughtily turning face away)
Thing 1: HEAH GO, BEAN! (now shoving offering in her face)
Thing 2: Fank oo. (resigned, accepting unwanted object and immediately chucking it)
Thing 1: Weccome.
Thing 2: Let's go, Sibee!!!!! (jumping up, inspired by alien baby forces, and launching into a full-out run around the house)
Both: TEEHEEHEEHEEHEE (until they collide, trip, or otherwise harm themselves or others)

So you can see why I can not, CAN NOT, focus for one more second on the stupid Krebs cycle or photosystems I and II or the phases of mitosis. I much prefer the multicellular activity right here at home.  ¶ 7:56 AM 0 comments

  Here I am! I know, I know, it's been a really long time. The thing is, once more than a week or so has passed, I feel like whatever I post next has to be really good, either funny or meaningful or at least newsworthy, but of course I have nothing funny or meaningful or newsworthy to share, and so the time continues to pass unannotated and the pressure mounts until finally, I break it with just such a boring update post as this. And so on to the updates!

Kids - except for the cold that we've all been passing around for the past 2-3 weeks (we should have bought stock in Kleenex, that's got to be recession-proof), all the kids are doing well. Twins are chattering up a storm and thinking they're actual people. Big boys are both doing really well in school, better than I'd hoped. Biggest kids are, I think, also well, although I haven't seen much of them since school started.

School - if you'd asked me yesterday morning, I'd have said school was going well. Unfortunately, I got back my first physics test yesterday, so that appraisal is no longer exactly valid. Words just can't express how bad this teacher is, or the depths of my frustration at the very real possibility that his incompetence is going to keep me out of med school. It gives me a headache just thinking of it, so I'll move on.

Not much else to move on to, actually, my life mostly consists of kids and school. Speaking of which - the twins are trying to slam each other in a door and I have to get ready for school. And this is why I never finish a coherent sentence, much less a post.  ¶ 8:27 AM 1 comments

  Crazy neighbors I (mostly) like my house, I even like my city, and the neighborhood is much better than it used to be, but my immediate neighbors are almost all completely fucking insane. Today I will focus on the next-door neighbors, who resemble George and Barbara Bush in relative ages if not in politics (I don't know their politics or care to). When I brought my now-5-year-old home from the hospital, the husband saw us in the yard with the baby and said "I don't like kids." They both work from home and must have their groceries delivered, because I don't think I've ever seen them leave.

They must get bored living Boo-Radley-style, because they seem to spend most of their time looking out their windows and into my yard. We have a pretty big yard, and so do they, and our yards are separated by a fence, so they really could just choose to ignore us. God knows I try to ignore them. They collect feral cats by leaving food out on their porch, then complain when my dogs go eat it (the city rats, apparently, are welcome to the buffet). They collected OUR cat one day, after he had gotten out of the house, and kept him for a month without our knowledge, having him neutered and his ear notched before my mother rescued him. Ever since, they have insisted on returning the cat to us every time he gets outside, even though he rarely leaves our yard - they actually come into our yard to get the cat and bring him back. All. The. Time.

I just got involved in a pointless political debate (is there any other kind) with a friend from school and now dinner is cold and I've had more beer than I meant to and I have no time/energy to wrap this up gracefully. So, as my son would say, the end.  ¶ 6:18 PM 1 comments

  Shameless Substitution of Pictures for Actual Posting I'd like to say I haven't been posting because school is keeping me busy, but let's be honest - I'm always a slacker. So here, in lieu of really dull updates about my school, the kids' school, my recent alarming weight gain, my exhaustion, the increasingly shrill and incredulous voice in my head every time I see or think of either McCain or (especially) Palin, are two brief stories told in pictures.







































  ¶ 9:31 PM 1 comments