A Note to Mississippians

To the Mississippians who read my blog: I hope you're all okay! I don't know where you all live exactly but I read about the tornado that ripped through Mississippi today and the damage it caused. As a native Californian I've never experienced a tornado and can't imagine what it's like (and hope I'll never know), but I really hope none of you were in its path. My prayers are with all of the people who were affected by it.

Please post or comment when you can!

Pass, you're done!

I successfully defended my capstone project last night and got the coveted, "Pass, you're done," from my advisors. (Versus the other option, "Pass, but...," meaning they want you to revise something in your document.) Yeah! I pretty much memorized my presentation so I'm looking forward to forgetting it and freeing up some space in my over-crowded brain.

Now it's onto my next assignment, something for my other class which is due today and turning into a bigger ordeal than I'd envisioned. It's always something!

A Big Day

Tonight I defend my capstone project—seems like the time has just flown by, doesn't it? (The answer to that is no, it doesn't, it just sounded good so I thought I'd try it.) Over the next two weeks the 12 of us doing our capstone projects this semester will be presenting them to the class, our advisors, and anyone else who wants to come. Three of us will be going each night; tonight is the first round. Each presentation is about 20 minutes long with a few minutes of questions from your advisors at the end. The class meets at 7:30 p.m. and I'll be going last, so I expect I won't get started until close to 8:30 p.m. I'll have to be pretty entertaining to keep everyone awake! (Then again, if my advisors choose to dose off that might not be such a bad thing, it could make the questioning session much easier.)

While getting past this is definitely an important milestone, I've still got assignments to finish up for my other class, unfortunately, so it's not quite the finality you like to envision with this sort of thing. And I've got that independent study to do this summer, and one more class to take next fall... Then I'll breathe that huge sigh of relief and say, "I'm done!"

Broken Blog and Other Things

If you've looked at my blog lately you've probably noticed it doesn't look quite right. The sidebars now have light text on a light background which makes them very difficult to read. Unfortunately, there's nothing I can do about it. It's happening because the colors are part of the template, and the template is drawing color blocks from other Web sites. Something must have happened to the page that has the sidebar color block. I've noticed it's happened before but it's always managed to fix itself. It's been several days now so maybe the break is permanent this time. The only way for me to fix it would be to put together a new template, and needless to say I don't have time to do that right now. So, I'm ignoring it. At least my posts are still readable.

In other news, this is how my hubby spends his time off:

Can you guess what this is?

That, my friends, is a pollen ball—pure pollen mixed with a little bit of water. After working seven days in a row this is how my hubby starts his day off, by making a pollen ball. I'm so proud.

A Word About Seasons

I'd like to have a word with the people who told me when we moved to North Carolina I'd get to experience seasons. News flash: "Too hot," "too cold," and "pollen" are not seasons. Geesh.

Last summer, when I sweltered in the humidity, my husband said to just wait until fall, then it would be nice. Well, fall lasted all of about 3 weeks before winter hit, and it was a long, colder-than-usual winter, so I'm told. Don't get me wrong, I like winter, but I think if it's gonna be cold I should also get to enjoy some snow. We did get snow twice over the winter but it was cold a lot more than that.

Then there's this spring thing, or so they tell me. Yes, things are starting to bloom and it's very pretty, but weather-wise we had about 3 days of spring before it seems to have turned to summer. I am just not into summer in April, thank you very much. It's been in the 80's for the past few days and supposed to get to 90 before it cools down toward the end of the week. Overnight we went from having the heat on to needing to turn on the air conditioner. Not good for the utility bills at all.

Last but not least, there's the pollen. Didn't have to deal with that in California. Something else that happens overnight: Yesterday everything started turning yellow. Today, all the cars are covered with it. I only wash my car twice a year here, it seems, and naturally yesterday I finally got to it because my car was so embarrassingly dirty. It's in the garage now and I'm afraid to take it out. SIGH...

Let me be clear: If we're going to have seasons here then there should be four of 'em, and spring and fall should get equal time with summer and winter. Pollen is not a season, it's just annoying. (Ok, maybe not for the pine trees.) And seriously, a couple months of not needing the heat or the air conditioner is required to keep up with the utility bills the rest of the year. Otherwise it's just not right!