ladyarkham

Listening to British book-on-tape actors do American accents is just about the funnest thing ever.

I've spent this afternoon cleaning out my room - sort of. This is really misdirected "I WANT TO BE AT SCHOOL!!!!" energy - I feel almost like I'm packing for school. And in a way, I'm preparing for school by getting my room straight enough to leave behind, and organized enough that moving out for good is on the horizon. (The distant horizon, but it still counts.)


( Roommate? I wish they'd make up their mind... )


I'm making some hard decisions as I clean. Like, I think I'm going to sell my fencing jacket. It is missing its chest pads, which I quickly lost because they were very... square. And looked fairly ridiculous. I was willing to risk getting speared. But apart from that, it should still be worth something.

And I'm throwing away some of my oh-so-comfortable clothes that are kind of strips of fabric around giant rips and holes.

And it's helping me figure out what I own that's really important to me. Like, my hundreds of paperback books that are in boxes in the spare room aren't really important to me. ...Right now. I'm afraid if I were to go through 'em, that would change - "NOOO! I'll want to reread this! Someday!" - but hopefully I'll be able to haul them off to a used book store without qualms.

I'm also getting rid of my sarcastic black t-shirts, which I got because they appealed to me and didn't mean them sarcastically at all.

Listening to the "Shopaholic" books helps - she has so much stuff and is in so much denial, that you want to be more responsible just to correct the huge, horrible imbalace in the universe.

Happy Independence Day!

So, I'm moving in to my new room on August 12th. I called them today to find out, and they were very much like, "yeah, none of the information on the website that specifically says it applies to MCV students actually applies to you."

So, I'll be moving in to my room on the 12th.

I'll be moving in to my room.

My room.

Note, it's not "our" room or even "the" room. It's my room. Mine, singular. MINE.

In other words (in blatant contradiction of the pictures of the room that are on the webssite, clearly showing two beds and two desks,) I do not have a roommate.

Thank goodness. Thank the Lord.

For reference, this is what I thought my room was going to be:




How on earth could i have gotten the impression that I would be sharing this room with someone else, you might ask? Well, I suppose I'm just that foolish.

I was cringing at the idea of having to live that close to another girl again - especially on a secular campus. But now I'm very, very happy. Unreservedly happy about my rooming situation.

PARTY!

So, I've had the experience of both teaching a Sunday School class for two-year-olds, and leading the twos' Worship Time. The former I do only occasionally, while the latter is a weekly task.

( twos )

Almost every Sunday is a cuteness overload. It's awesome.

Eighteen months.

So I have my rooming assignment for next year!!!

I'm in Rudd Hall, the dorm that's right next to the actual buildings I'll be at every day, unlike the aparments etc. that are at the Monroe Park campus.

So, now I'm really set. I've been accepted academically, I have a place to sleep and a meal plan and a way to pay for it all. Whatever else happens, I am going to the VCU School of Pharmacy this fall, and will begin my first professional year of school.

It's... unreal.

No.

It's suprareal. It's more real than my day-to-day of wearing a blue polo shirt and counting pills for ten hours. It's more real than catching up on webcomics and posting to PBP boards and playing flash games. It's more real than me blogging about it, it's a sense of reality that I can almost remember from the days just after I got accepted to Grove City. I know my place in life, I've done the right things, and very little of my by-myself life between here and there matters, quite as much. No mistakes are going to seem quite as awful, no bad customer or bad day is going to rock me as much.

All I have to do is finish the summer, and then life begins anew.

I want to be around my class - the other P1 (professional year one) students, the other people who've gone through similar experiences as I have, the ones who'll take my classes and labs with me, all of whom share this common goal of obtaining a pharmacist license.

I want to track down the VCU gaming club and figure out what they're about.

I want to join the Fellowship of Christian Pharmacists - I think that's their name - and figure out what they're about, besides the obvious.

I want to get used to living in a dorm again so that I can be all spoiled when I finally do get an apartment of my own.

I'm 22 years old, and I'm a pharmacy student. Life is good.

I trust my flist to at least occasionally visit Failblog.

But I wanted to repost this,'cause it's awesome.

In the style of engelhardtlm1 (I always have to remind myself "engel- Hard T"), I thought I'd post my to-do list for today.


1. Mail transcript requests to NOVA, LFCC, and GCC. - Completed!
2. Send book I sold on Amazon to purchaser. - Completed!
3. Go to the gym.-Completed!
4. Drop shot record form off at doctor's office.
5. Do laundry.
6. Buy recordable audio cds that will actually work in my car
7. Buy 250 red dot stickers and 100 Dixie Cups for our church's VBS

It doesn't look like that much when I write it out like that. Except that the gym is a half hour south of our house and my doctor is a half hour north, so that's a bit of a time investment, there.

I sent the last book I sold on Amazon through UPS, and it ended up costing a good chunk of my profit, there. This book is heavier and travelling further, so I'm going to see what will happen sending it through the good, old-fashioned Postal Service.

The Harry Dresden Files tv show took, what, ten minutes to make me mad?

Harry's relatively short. Bob is a gay British man instead of a wise-cracking, skirt-chasing skull spirit. The Blue Bug is a Camoflauge Jeep. Karrin is a brunette of average height.

...It would be so easy to get the details right.

Don’t take too long to think about it. Fifteen books you’ve read that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in 15 minutes. Copy the instructions into your own note.

I'm going to be markedly different from other lists I've seen by not including LOTR or the Bible, because the latter is kind of exponentially more important than the rest, and the former just 'cause it doesn't belong here.

1. The McGurk Mysteries
2. Caddie Woodlawn
3. Christy
4. Telling Lies For Fun and Profit
5. Shalom, Japan!
6. For Women Only
7. Les Miserables
8. Harriet the Spy
9. Five Love Languages
10. Easy Money
11. The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle
12. Speak
13. Jane Eyre
14. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
15. The Harry Potter Series

It was almost ninety degrees out today and my car's AC doesn't so much work, so between that and the advertising on the 7-11s, I stopped for a Transformers Bumblebee Slurpee. (Bumblebee apparently tastes like mango and passion fruit.) I am a sucker for anything mango-flavored. It was well worth the stop.


Firefly is on Hulu, so I've been reminding myself why I love it so. It's actually better than I remember. Hopefully, Whedon will take better control of Dollhouse and improve its quality up to standard.


Tomorrow is going to be the day that determines whether my time at the pharmacy is over for the summer or not.


I'm making dinner again tonight. I want to make something that I can pack up for lunch the next day - I know my family is probably sick of stirfry at this point - I know that they can't want any more rice. I may try a chicken paprika recipe...

Best bread recipe evar.

Amish White Bread

Reccommend me some recipes, people!


...I may be involved in a sensitive situation at work that might lead to me quitting prematurely if it doesn't improve in the next two days. If people could send up a quick prayer for me, that'd be cool.

So, I got an interesting email from VCU today.

Apparently a group called RAMPART is conducting a study of seizure medications, comparing which of two stop a seizure faster. They're doing this study on the whole of Richmond. And because seizure victims can't give consent to participate in the study, it falls under an exception to informed consent rules.

They had to get support from the community before they began, holding public meetings and stuff, and they did.

If you don't want to participate in the study and you're in Richmond, you're supposed to call them and get a special bracelet to wear so that the paramedics will know not to use the study drugs on you.


I'm not sure if that's really cool or kinda creepy.

Today I went hiking with my dad, to help him find flowers to photograph for his college class. (He's picking up an Associate's Degree in Nature Photography in his spare time.)

( cut for photos )

Exploring my.vcu.edu, I'm finding that there's a lot of information there that I couldn't access before having my VCU ID number that would have been very useful to have three months ago.

On April 1st or 2nd, they held the last of their "How to Live Off-Campus" fairs, where they had workshops on apartment life and paying for such, and then connected local property owners with students. If I end up needing to live off-campus, that would have been a very useful thing to attend. Possibly even a vital thing to attend.

I found out about this after extensive exploration of the website that I couldn't access until last Thursday.


Also note: the letter I received to acknowledge my payment of my matriculation deposit which is dated November 2008 says, and I quote:

"A Student Application for VCU Residence Hall Housing will be mailed to you when it becomes available in June, 2009."

I called them last week and spoke to the woman at the housing office:

"I was wondering if and when the application for on-campus housing will be mailed out?"

"Oh, we don't mail those out. It's all online."



I love this school, and I'm glad I got in, but I'm really frustrated and kind of angry at the moment.

Posting from my mom's iPod touch as we pass through Vermont - the highway's clear so we can go fast enough. No matter how much we run the AC that metallic smell of blood doesn't fade.

Juan and Ubaldo are asleep in the back of the SUV, so they're letting me hold the shotgun for now. My sister's got little Consuela buckled in with her, I think they both finally fell asleep a little while ago.

We can see great columns of black smoke rising up from just beyond the mountains, so we're not stopping. I hope we can clear the northern border before we run out of gas, I packed the lawnmower tanks in the back so we could keep going.

The last we saw of Doña Coatlicue, she and the monsters were marching off to the west, her wrapped in her scarves and perched on the front of a military hummer. I don't know if there was a driver inside or if the mob of bodies jus propelled it down the street...

If anyone wants to meet up in Toronto, leave me a message here. We have a generator and Mexican beer.

Power's still down so I don't want to waste too much laptop battery, but if you're reading this, head for Canada. They're coming from the south, is what people are saying - I've heard that it was some Amazonian curse and that it's a virus unleashed by the Cubans - the Cubans! Pfft. I figure it's started in Mexico and is spreading both ways.

They're eating the flesh, but taking the hearts. And no one knows where they're taking them.

They took down the horses out back while we were barricading the doors. Dad made Becca stop watching, but I saw them, and they pulled those enormous hearts out and carried them off. The Mexicans next door are flipping out as much as we are, building barricades and drinking beer - they have real guns, while all we have are my grandmother's pistols - but there's a little, wrinkled doña who's just sitting on their deck watching the carnage, wrapped up in her scarves, and every time she meets my eye I feel this chill through me. I think she knows what's happening. It's crazy, but I think she does.

Maybe I'm crazy. Maybe this is a nightmare.

I've got this idea for a water bottle ministry for hitchhikers and homeless people outside by the road on hot days. Its seed was planted a few days ago, and blossomed as I was driving home from the gym today.

I passed a homeless guy out in the shade on my way out of town, but coming back an hour later, he was gone - but, oddly, his sign was still there. Maybe somebody gave him a lift. Hopefully he got inside, the air quality is still really horrible, it even smells bad outside. Fresh mountain air my foot.

I saw a line of army trucks, camo hummers and yellow Red Cross vans, driving down 17. Probably heading towards the armory in Warrenton, but a bit startling to see anyway.

Is a good day to clean my room and play Fate/Stay Night.

So, as roberto_1212 reports, there seems to be some kind of rioting going on in Taiwan, but I can't find anything about it on the news. Maybe the government is silencing the media or something.


It's unbearably hot today. The news has one of those "bad air" warnings when you aren't supposed to go outside because of the pollution levels. I never understood how those can come and go - if pollution is that bad, shouldn't it be that bad pretty consistently?
So the sky has that unhealthy yellow tinge to it, and I think our hiking and picture-taking trip has been canceled.


Going back to the gym today! Going on Thursday was good for me, but left me in a lot of pain -I suppose the lesson is if you go to the gym regularly, you either have to keep going or quit forever.

I got my VCU student ID in the mail yesterday! And this afternoon, I sent off my on-campus housing application and deposit.

I have basically two possibilities - they ceased being options when they passed out of my control:

1. Apartment. I'd have a roommate, but we'd have separate bedrooms. Kitchen, washer/dryer, furniture all included. It'd be several blocks from campus, possibly necessitating bus use - it's hard to gauge from the minimap provided - but not impossible to walk, in any case. It'd be a 12 month lease, as well.

2. Dorm room. I'm unclear as to whether it has bedrooms, or is just a dorm room, but it includes Grove City style furniture basics: bed, dresser, desk, with the addition of a nightstand and overstuffed chair. They also specify "clothing racks for storage" and do not mention closets.... Hall bathrooms and a single kitchen for the whole building. It's a 9 month lease.


You're supposed to pick three possibilities and prioritize, so I did 1, 2, 1, basically. Any room I get, I can make work.

I'm disappointed that I have to have a roommate - I was not so long ago of the mind that "I am never living with another female ever again ever" - but meh, you know? We'll see what happens.

The apartments are clearly superior, even being a distance from the pharmacy school, but the 12-month lease interferes with some (premature) plans I was considering for next summer. But it'd also be a lot more like, you know, "having my own apartment." So that'll be cool.

Whatever happens, I will celebrate having on-campus housing if I get it - and celebrate the freedom to not have a roommate and seek out off-campus housing if I don't.

Yay VCU!