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[12 Jul 2008|04:36pm] |
Oogh. I can hardly move, so what better time than to sit down and actually write a decent bit, eh?
Life has been a rather nutso-worthy whirlwind as of late. I literally haven't stopped moving since about the beginning of June. It's getting to the point where I'm going to need a fall vacation, or something, to get over summer... Not that I actually have time for vacations any time soon, feh.
I had my first big show for belly dancing - well, two smaller ones and one big one, anywhoo. There's a student night held between a few teachers at the end of June every year, whereupon all the students get up at a restaurant and strut their stuff. Nerve-wracking to the extreme, but pretty fun, and I did pretty well in my four major numbers - even got the veil over my head properly during the back-bend in Kecharitomene, and it hadn't done that ever, before, hehe. Additionally, my tummy-pudge behaved during the night, and I was most pleased about that. I think the costume treated it just right, aye. Might post pictures later.
The smaller 'shows' were at a hafla - a kind of Middle-Eastern dance party, so just in front of a bunch of dancers for the most part - and a small demonstration held at the local country fair thing. They were before the student night, so it was good to get a little experience in beforehand. I'm taking a break from the dancing for now, just while I'm so busy - probably go back at it come fall.
School's been keeping me hopping. In one of the classes, there are weekly assignments - and they take about six hours each to do, plus fifty pages of reading to understand what it is we're supposed to be doing. It's getting a little wearing, especially with the topics that they're on - optimality theory is a giant constraint satisfaction problem, but we're given very little help in identifying what the constraints are supposed to be. Barrel of monkeys, I can tell yer. There will be some criticisms on my course evaluation of /this/ one, oh yes.
Syntax isn't going so bad - but then, I like syntax - and neither is Socioling, if only because I've seen most of the material before. The problem with that class is the term paper that's coming up, and the associated research Ｉ have to do for it - gathering my own data. My topic's on the Interwebs and how it's changing the way people speak - so I've got a questionnaire that I need to finish up and send out to my recruited guinee pigz. Also will record my brother's WoW guild at raid and see if there's anything interesting there.
Then there's phonetics, where the class material and the homework assignments are entirely unrelated, and she seems to have an almost at-random scheme for deciding where things are wrong on said assignments - almost contradictory, at times. Marks've been slipping in that course, since I kind of gave up caring around midterm time, and haven't really had time to care since.
The good news, at least, is that if I pass these four courses, my next semester will be my last one - I was in to see the advisor on Wednesday, and it turned out my calculations were identical to hers.
I also just spent the last month planning a beer garden for the CSSS - it was discussed a few months ago that maybe having one would be a good idea, so I kind of spearheaded the entire thing and got it to happen. Such a runaround of paperwork and bullcrap, lemme tell you! We had the actual thing last night, and it went pretty well - there was fooding, drinking, and people seemed to have a pretty good time. Now I just have to deal with the leftover bullshit, along with writing a report so that anyone who tries to make one in the future will not make the same mistakes I did (the society had never done one before, so this was an entirely new experience). The bestest thing to deal with, I'm sure, will be getting facilities management to back down from their bill - we had to fence in the liquor-serving area per university regulations, which was no problem, except that facilities wants to charge us over 800 dollars for the set-up and take-down, which is nuts - they're complaining because they had to haul the fencing panels upstairs into the gardens where we were hosting the event, and needed four guys over three hours each way to do it, but it could've easily been done in one hour with two guys and a pickup truck, which facilities has in spades.
Idiots.
If we can get that bill negated (or get some help from the SFSS), then we'll probably have even managed to break even with our budget.
I will be entirely too glad when all the crap to do with this thing is done with - never again. At least I'll probably have made myself a shoo-in for the CSSS scholarship with this, which I will need.
The garden, by the by, is why I'm so sore right now - my shoulders and back are killing me, but not the usual stress-pain. Oh, no, this is a 'you lifted way damn too much, you stupid girl' pain. We were all workhorses yesterday, carrying beer and boxes of equipment back and forth everywhere, and now I'm paying for it.
Turns out I'm broke, ehe. Had to borrow a grand from my mom in order to pay this semester off. I have no real debt otherwise, which is kind of something to be saying after five years of university, but still. I need to find a job, and quick, but I've just had no time to look lately - and the few resumes I did manage to submit I never got a response for. Boo.
So, now I just have to worry about tying up those loose ends, get my stupid class stuff done - first things first, that questionnaire - and I might be okay.
Thankfully, it hasn't been all purely-stressful things going on - although there was the fight between my mom and dad that ended with the cops over, but whatever - there's been some fun (if stressful because of little time) things going on, too.
Travis and I were down to Seattle about a month back to see Avenue Q - that's the Broadway show with the puppets and the origin of the song "The Internet is for Porn". The show was a hoot, and the entire theatre was in stitches at times． You've never heard such a roar of approval go up when the finale's line of "George Bush is only for now" was sang - it was awesome. I totally itched to see how the set was put together, but alas, sneaking up during intermission probably would've been frowned upon.
The only kinda crappy thing about the trip was the hour or so we sat at customs waiting for the US border folk to finish inspecting Trav's truck - apparently they don't see a lot of propane vehicles, or something. Also, the interstate is awful and concrete and bumpy, and I don't understand how Americans drive repeatedly on those things.
I've also been trying to squish in time to RP and work on RPs in the meantime, too - DexNet is almost ready to begin accepting applications, thankfully; managed to get Hoenn's info all done, Guin's done Kanto, and we seem to have most of the general game information posts done too. Just need to get Johto (which Peter was supposed to do, but I dunno what happened there) up, and we'll be good to go. I still need to work on Sinnoh, myself, but we won't have that region open at the beginning of the game, so it's probably okay if it's a little bit late - I did finally get the userinfos all done, which was a celebration of sorts.
I've also been having fun in Furc lately with a new friend, someone I bumped into with Icy a month or two back. It turns out she just 'inherited' a dream from the player of her character's brother, so now we're fixing it up and making it all spiffy - a lot of things had gotten broken in it during the last update, like floors being made unwalkable and such. She doesn't know much about patchwork or DS or anything, but I've got the rudiments from working at AKP, so it should turn out okay. We still dunno what the place's purpose will be yet, besides our characters' homes, but...
And, finally, I managed to get a shiny new laptop in the past month, a little Asus Eee 900. I'm typing this thing from it as we speak. I really like it - it's tiny, but does just what I need it to, and even though I'm not too familiar with Linux, I've managed to get it to do what I want thus far. I've only even had to restore it after completely fucking it up once, so far! :D (Turns out Xandros does not like WINE 1.0, or something; I somehow managed to break most of KDE while trying to install it.)
Aaanyways, it's about time I go and get some work done on DexNet or the HoC or that questionnaire, or something.
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