antimony

Woo Hoo!

Perhaps the lobbyist wanted to ask you out but didn't feel comfortable asking you out on a "real date" Today, I've got a full 8 hour day of studying, and tommorrow I have to go into work, since the year-end reserve analysis is due on the 15th - though thankfully I do get an extra day of vacation in return.

For three days before my period every month, I go into this wild phase where I will scrub/swiffer/sweep/etc anything in the house that will sit still long enough to be cleaned. This is the time of the month when floors get mopped, closets get organized, etc. I have to say, if I had to pick and chose my PMS symptoms, this is definately the most useful. I am fairly tidy the rest of the month, but not stepford-clean-freak. Unfortunately, my fairly tidiness would be enough if I lived alone, but I don't. I live with the king of the slobs. The guy who tells me, "oh, no, honey, you don't have to clean up after dinner, I'll do it." But two weeks later, the pans would still be on the stove if I left it to him. He left a 2 square foot pile of Magic cards right in front off his side of the couch for over 2 weeks, so he had to sit down at the middle of the couch and scooch over. Every time I suggested he move them, he informed me he wasn't done sorting them yet. (the baffling part is that he bought two huge boxes of Magic cards on Ebay to replace the collection he had as a teenager - but doesn't know anyone here who plays, so plays the computer game version instead!) Anyway, he's been all like "I don't have time to do anything other than cook because I work 50 hours a week" - Except I work 40 hours, then study for another 12+ every week, and I still find time to keep up with the dishwasher, take out the trash, change the cat's litter, and do all of both of our laundry. Of course, he also sleeps 12-13 hours every friday and saturday night, routinely waking up well into the afternoon. But he refuses to acknowledge the fact that if he took better care of his body, by quitting smoking, eating better and working out, he would need less sleep to recover. He's 30 freaking years old, It's time he started to realize his body's not going to hold out forever. And the part that makes it the most frustrating is that he's a computer security engineer. He's smart and capable of rational analysis. He'll sulk and be moody for a week if he put on enough weight to have to go out and buy 3 new bigger pairs of pants. But he isn't willing to give up his 48-64 oz per day of Minute Maid Lemonade (why not just eat the corn syrup with a spoon?) and wonders why he puts on weight. He thinks he'll get thinner doing situps, but thinks cardio is useless and horrifying. Why is he willing to put in so much energy into a job he despises, but is completely unwilling to put any effort at all into us having a nice, relaxing, and non-chaotic home... whoich I would have thought would be more motivating than the world's most soul-sucking job?

I love the "notes" feature in Flickr. I took pictures of my brown, dead winter yard, and notated where I've planted all of my bulbs (or at least where I think I've planted them) The pictures are kinda boring, but I'm excited and looking forward to a few months from now, when things start sprouting, and I can match them up to the pictures. Have a look at all the ugly landscaping I'm trying to work around!

Don't sweat it... speaking as a person who majored in math and works in the math field now: You don't need a calculator on an algebra test. You'll always have to do all of the actual algebra yourself (even the fanciest graphing calculators can't do the intermediate steps for you) and the calculator could only be useful for plugging in the numbers and doing the basic arithmetic at the end. And because of this, your instructor will write the test to make the arithmetic straightforward enough to do quickly by hand. And even in those cases, every professor I had who didn't allow calculators still gave generous partial credit if you did the algebra right but flaked on the arithmetic.

Seriously, where the hell did 2006 go? It was a big year for me. I went to England, I passed an actuarial exam, my mom had her hip replaced, I bought a house - I feel like there were even more big things that happened, but I don't even remember anymore. But needless to say - It was quite a full year. This year, I'm hoping for a little more simplicity. I still want to pass exams, but I'd be happy to let the rest of my life chill out a little bit, and spend a year on personal growth and stuff. I set some pretty ambitious dance-related goals, but I've resisted making "resolutions" for my regular life. I do have some plans, though: I mentioned it in my dance goals, but I'm working the Couch-to-5k plan already. I'm a week in, and it's so gratifying, though it's hard to believe that I will ever be able to run 3 miles at a time. Once I can, I'm hoping to enter a couple of local 5k races this spring. I've been putting together my study plan for my next exam. I'm starting 4 months in advance, so I can take it easy with just studying a couple of days a week, and still make it to 400 hours of study time by the time I sit for the test. If I can put in 400 really, honestly committed hours, I should have no trouble passing. I'm putting a moratorium on buying stuff. No BPAL, not bath/body stuff, no tea, no books, no yarn, etc. I have more than enough of all of the above, and I'm just not going to buy more until I use what I've got. It's all just sitting around waiting to go bad or go stale, and taking up space. This way, I save money, I don't let the things I already have go to waste, and most importantly, I get back the space I was using to store all of that stuff. And I am 100% sure I need less clutter in my life. There we are, no resolutions, just a few straightforward goals. (and I think there's a huge difference between goals and resolutions.)

In just over 4 hours, I will be a home owner! The scay part is getting the enormous cashier's check. I've been just staring at my bank account balance all weekend, all of my down payment money is in there, and I've never had so much money all at once. I'm going to own a house! I'm so excited!

I wax my armpits. I've let them grow before, but I found that there was an inverse relationship between the amount of armpit hair I have and the effectiveness of my antiperspirant. And I hate the feeling of moist armpits. I would not be freaked out by a guy who shaved his pits, and honestly, I would love to see all guys at least trim to their pit hair occationally.

I've signed up to fund two different loans so far (I'm sure I'll add more over time) I love the concept, and I'm enjoying being involved in the whole micro-loan thing. Araceli Romero Herrera Walter Siavichay I am looking forward to watching these business prosper. And I can't wait to see how far they expand into more countries.

I put in an offer on a townhouse yesterday. Holy crap, this attaching an album to an entry thing is *cool*. Only it seems to only have 9 out of my 11 pictures, and it doesn't include the captions. See the full gallery for more details. Anyway, check out the pictures. It's an end unit, so I only have a neighbor on one side, and there's no neighbors to the back, just a stand of trees and way back behind those is the fitness center. I ran out of charge on my camera before I got pictures of the bedrooms, but there's really nothing exciting about those. It's hot a new heating/ac system (with a digital thermostat! so I'll be able to program it to heat when I'm nome and not when I'm not and stuff) and I'll have a full-on laundry room in the basement, where I can have a normal, not stacked washer and dryer. I'm excited. And this is the development it's in: Chesterfield Village Townhomes

I've never bothered with the "insert link" thing, I just code the links in myself. It takes the same amount of time and always works.

Oh my god, I dropped the ball. I undid a ton of really hard work with a little oversight. Something no one in their right mind should have done. So you know those exams I talk about periodically? And you know how I've been studying for this one, and my company sent me to Chicago for a week to prepare, and bought me hundreds of dollars of books? I forgot to register. It would have taken me 10 minutes, and I forgot to do it. My boss has been fairly supportive. That is, once he finished laughing at me. I know he didn't mean to be mean. I can certainly see the humor in it. And they're not making me pay back the money or anything, unless I quit my job before next fall, which I doubt I'll do. I feel like an idiot, a bonehead. And the sad thing is that telling my boss was the easy part. Now I wonder how I'll tell my mom! She'll be disapointed and angry, and I just won't be able to bear it. Even though there's nothing she can do to me. And I'll here about it for the rest of my exam-taking career. My mom will nag me about every one, reminding me to register because "remember how unhappy I was this time", every sitting for the next 3 or 4 years until I'm done. Worse than that, for *at least* the next 10 years, she'll bring it up whenever I have to remember something important. I won't get to live it down. She'll ask me if I am depressed. I am not depressed, I am exhausted. I have been traveling far too much lately, and I hate it. It throws off my schedule, it throws off my rhythm, and I just don't enjoy it. 3 of the 4 trips were to see my parents, and it's great to see them, and they want to see me as often as possible, but they don't really understand how much it wears me out. They don't get how hard it is on me to be away from my home. And my mom is having her hip replaced in a week and a half. My parents don't really understand that this is stressful for my sister and I. After all, we're not the ones going through surgery. And yeah, it's a planned thing, not an emergency, but seriously, it's my mom. I am not so excited about facing the fact that she's getting older. And I'm buying a house. And that's kind of daunting too. I have great credit, and I can afford it, but it's still a really big deal. I want to do it, but I'm afraid of moving again, afraid of change. Afraid of messing something up because I've never done this before. Or what if I forget to do something minor but crucial, and mess up my mortgage the same way I did my exam? I am so damn tired. I want my mother. (except I want my mother when she's sweet and supportinve, not the way she is when she's all disapointed and disapproving.)

A girl I knew from a knitting club who was left handed said she had started out by finding a book with detailed pictures, then scanning them in, and mirror imaging the pictures from right to left.

are you left handed?

Ok... imagine you have a length of yarn aranged into a zig-zag of alternating mountains and valleys. The cast on edge anchors each valley, or the bottom of each zig. Now, imagine you lay a length of yarn behind the zig zag. Reach under the first mountain, and pluck a loop through. Then reach under the second, and pluck a loop through. Once you've reached the end of the row, the second piece of yarn is just a second zig-zag interlocking with the first. Then you would flip the whole thing over and go back the other way. When you are knitting, the loops on the needle are the mountains, and they have their backs turned to you. That's why you enter the stitch from the left side (that's if you knit western style, if you knit eastern or combination, it will vary - however 99% of books teach western style, so I'm assuming that's what you're learning). If you look carefully at the base of the stitch, you can see how you are opening it up to "face front". Then you use the tip of the right needle to pull the working yarn through to make a new loop on the right hand needle. To be sure you are pulling the yarn through the correct way, look at the new loop on the right needle, does it angle the same direction laying on top of the needle as the stitches on your left needle? then you have made the stitch correctly. I hope this explanation didn't make it worse! --- ETA: Purling is just what would happen if you laid the yarn in *front* of the zig zag, and made the loops by reaching from behind the mountain and pulling through a loop from front to back.