Apartment redone!

I decided that instead of doing something productive like schoolwork, I would redecorate my apartment.  A couch, a rug, a nightstand, a lamp, and some frame prints later, here's how my living room looks now:

Other than that, not much going on.  School still exists, and it still takes up most of my time.

And now, cat in a bag!

Oops, you still exist

And I've completely forgotten to update this for the last month.  A lot has happened in the last month:

-Took a week and a half trip to California.  Flew to LA, hung out for a few days there, took the bus to Oakland, and then stayed in the Bay area for a few days before flying back to Seattle.  Saw lots of old friends, ate some food I really missed, bought some new Cal clothing, and found out how much Greyhound sucks now (my bus was 3 hours late, and the operator said most of their buses were running 2-4 hours late this summer).  Makes me really miss California now!  My decision about where to settle after grad school is going to be a tough one.

-I found out I got a position as a teaching assistant for Nutrition 300!  Nutrition 300 is basically Nutri Sci 10, basic human nutrition.  The TA position means I get tuition exemption for fall, and I get a fat paycheck to boot!  It is marked as a 20 hour a week position, and with 3 of us for 700 little undergrads, I believe that. 

-To celebrate, I got a shiny new road bike.  It's a Fuji Newest 1.0, bought on clearance at Performance Bikes.  Figures once I bought it, the weather turned to crap, but in riding it around the neighborhood, it's super smooth and fast! 

-Two days after dropping big money on the bike, my computer goes to crap.  The fan for the CPU had been making loud whirring noises off and on for the last several weeks.  Today, it finally crapped out.  9/10 times when I turn on the computer, the fan gets super duper loud and I get an error message about the fan.  The computer then turns off.  1/10 times it turns on normally and the fan behaves.  I thought about replacing the fan, but it's nearly $100 for a new one, and for an old computer with multiple issues that was going to be replaced soon anyways, it didn't seem worth the money.  Lenovo was having a big sale that ended today, so I decided to just got ahead and order a new computer a bit earlier than planned instead of buying a $100 part which may or may not solve the problem.  In the meantime, if I sit here long enough and keep trying to turn on the computer, it eventually works.  Until one day I fry the CPU.  Hopefully my new computer gets here before that happens.  If so, I can sell this one on craigslist as is, but with a working CPU still. 

-Summer has ended in Seattle.  After a week of sunny 80 degree weather, the forecast is all 60's-70's, cloudy, and rainy.  Man did it turn fast.

Swimming progress update III

One more class to go before completing my 8 weeks of summer lessons!  My front crawl is coming along - I have the individual motions for the arms and legs down, but when I try to put it all together, everything gets sloppy.  A bit more (read: a lot more) practice is required for that.  Learning to breathe would be nice, but that will have to wait until my form gets better.  I did discover that I can do 1/2 of a backstroke - I can kick and keep myself afloat and going pretty decently.  I'll try to add in the arms next time and see if that gets me going any faster.  Still can't tread water though - that and my front crawl will be my two big goals to finish up the summer.  Overall though, looking at where I was 8 weeks ago, I definitely feel like I've made some progress! 

Swimming progress update II

15 lessons into the summer, I can finally do something that resembles swimming!  For the longest time, I couldn't figure out how to hold my body so that I could float on my stomach - my front would float, but my legs would sink and pull me down.  Today, at the end of class, we played a game called Sharks and Minnows. The instructors stood in the middle of the pool and were the sharks.  We were the minnows, and we were supposed to swim by them.  If our heads were out of the water, they could tag us and we became sharks the next round.  Somehow, during the first round of the game, I figured out how to hold my body so that my legs didn't sink!  I already had my kick down decently, so for the very first time ever, I almost sorta swam!  I still can't integrate the arms without disrupting my legs, or breathe, but hey, progress is progress right?  At this rate, maybe I will learn to swim by the end of the year!

Swimming progress update I

Week 5 out of 8 of swimming lessons just ended.  It's actually the second time I'm taking basic swim.  I have a different teacher this time, but the TA for the class is the same.  Our first instructor mostly stood at the sidelines and yelled at us while the TA was in the water with us.  The new teacher spends a fair amount of time in the water with us and has a slightly different teaching style.  Hopefully that'll help me learn faster?  Only time will tell.  I can float for a few seconds before I slowly start sinking, so that's progress I guess.  I'm also finally getting a decent kick going, so hopefully that'll help me stay afloat longer.  Our new instructor is also very fond of making us jump in the deep end of the pool.  I've done it a few times, and I can get to the surface of the water after jumping, but I can't stay there long and need to cling to the side of the pool to not drown.  Hopefully I can progress to adv. beginner in Fall quarter, but I'm starting to think I might need to take basic swim for a third time before I can move on.  I'll get it eventually, I don't care how many times I need to retake this class!

One more month before my California visit!  I really miss In-N-Out, as well as all of my friends and family. 

And unfortunately, no new Pip pictures for now.  I will have more soon!

More randomness

-There should be a law mandating swimming lessons for kids in elementary school.  Learning as an adult majorly sucks.  Seven lessons in and I'm still struggling.  One more lesson left in this series, but I'll actually be taking basic swim for a second time right after.  So I'll have 16 lesson of basic swim this summer.... if I still can't get anywhere after that, it's time to curl up in a corner somewhere and weep.

-Isn't it summer?  Why is it still 60-something degrees and overcast/rainy?

-The battery on my smoke detector was running low yesterday morning, so I pulled the battery out to stop the annoying reminder beep.  It's still sitting next to me with the battery out.  I can't decide if I can put in a maintenance tag and have my building management company replace it or if I have to buy a new battery myself.  Either way, I should probably do something soon. 

-Just because it's been so long, here's random cat pictures!

Back from the dead!

I'll be honest, I've been too lazy to post lately.  Not today, here's my update on what's been going on so far:

-Spring quarter is over and it's summer break!  Not a day too soon either.

-I got a bicycle!  It's an old, beat-up Haro Escape that's been rebuilt using mostly Shimano parts.

It's a decent bike, not the best.  It was a mountain bike that I put road tires on.  I recently tried out a classmate's (very nice) new road bike however.... and all I can say is my bike looks like junk now.  The new, shiny road bike moved so gracefully and with so much ease, mines just feels like a lumbering elephant now. 

-Riding a bike inspired me to start training for a triathlon!  Just seems like so much fun, and a good way to get myself into better physical shape.  Of course, one component of a triathlon is....

-Swimming!  I couldn't swim at all at the start of the summer, so I started taking classes at the IMA (the school gym).  Two weeks and four lessons in.... I can kinda swim for a few feet.  I do have a bad habit of sinking however, especially my legs.  Or getting unbalanced and tipping over.  But if I get lucky and neither of those things happen, I can swim.... maybe 5 or 6 feet before I run out of air.  I haven't figured out how to breathe while swimming yet.  That will come later.  There are 4 more sessions left in the class, but I might sign up for another 4 week beginner swim class.  It'll be the same thing over again, but I think I'll need it since my fundamentals still suck.

-My sister came to visit for a few days.  Saw most of what Seattle has to offer - the Ballard Locks, Downtown, Mt. Ranier, UW, and a few other things.  Skipped the Space Needle, wasn't much interest in that.  It does make me realize how small this city is however, as we did most of the major attractions in the city in just a few days.

-I discovered my apt is like a heat sink of sorts.  It's always about 10 degrees hotter in here than outside, even with the window open.  This was great during winter, but not so great now that the temperature sometimes reaches all the way to 80!  For Seattle, that's bloody hot.  Opening my door helps, but I can only open the door so much when you have a curious and disobedient cat.

-After 5 years of faithful service, my old, beat-to-hell-and-back Nokia Music Xpress cell phone finally died today.  I could still make and receive calls, but the screen displayed all kinds of funny colors and static lines.  Sometimes I could see what I was trying to do, sometimes I couldn't.  It's been doing that off and on for the last few weeks, but today, I couldn't get the screen back to normal no matter what I tried.  So I went to a T-Mobile store and now I have a Samsung T359!  It's a dumb phone still, but it has a full QWERTY keyboard so I can text faster than ever!  Best part of course is that I can finally see the screen of my phone consistently.  The sometimes working sometimes not nature of the phone beforehand was just infuriating.  

-A couple of my classmates convinced me to join Match.com.  Met a few people so far, but overall I'm not thrilled with the site.  Most people don't even bother to respond to emails you send them.  When you get an email, there's an option to send a generic "thanks but no thanks" message back.  Is that so hard to click?

That's it for now, more to come later!

One month and counting...

....before summer!  Can't wait, it's taking long enough.  Saw Thor on Saturday, hopefully it's the start of a summer full of good movies.  It's definitely getting me excited about the upcoming Avengers movie.

Random thought of the day - a few days ago, I was at Uwajimaya, a big Japanese market in downtown Seattle.  I've been there a few times before, but this time I saw this on the shelf:

Fried fish with black beans.  Used to eat this a lot as a kid, but haven't seen it in stores in..... years and years and years.  Just had to buy some after seeing it again finally.  Had some tonight and man it brings back memories.

Caught Pip mid yawn!  Too bad the chair got in the way.

Another yawn!

Laser cat attack!

Promised post!

Well, I kinda shot myself in the foot promising a post huh?  It's one heck of a busy week... got a take home midterm to work on, an in class midterm at the end of the week, a debate to prepare for, a paper and a case study to turn in a few days, city policies to abstract (for $$ at least), and more.  So, I'll keep this short.  In short, I've been busy, and the next 2 weeks are going to SUCK.  Here to make things better are a bunch of cat pictures!

 Falling asleep while playing.  I want to switch places with my cat now.  He's got the life.

He absolutely LOVES this plastic cable tie I cut off an Ikea box.  Why bother buying toys when your cat likes playing with trash?

Hiding under the bed has become his new favorite past time.

 As has stealing my seat when I walk away for 2 seconds. 

More to come soon....

Sitting in a classroom, waiting for my biostats lecture to start in a few minutes, and I decide it's a good time to post again.  Sometimes I don't make the best decisions.  I will have actual new posts soon though... school and laziness have been keeping me busy.  And that's all for now!

My Life as a Guinea Pig

So the sugar sweetened beverage starts tomorrow, I and have picked up the first load of food for it.  I'm picking up 2 days worth of food at a time, which doesn't seem like much, until you see how much it is:

Seems like a lot, until you realize the cooler bag is loaded with these:

8 of them, 4 a day full of lemonade.  10 ounces in each container, for 40 ounces of lemonade a day.  Guess who won't be drinking lemonade for a while after the study is over?

The refrigerated stuff took up a whole shelf.  Luckily, it actually looks pretty good, but we'll find out for sure tomorrow.  The non-refrigerated stuff is mostly bread, cereal, and some fruits.  Also note how many Nalgene bottles of lemonade I have.  Sadly, the beer is not part of the study, can't touch that until afterwards.

I'll leave you with a picture of my fat cat.  I noticed recently he has a decided belly now, just 6 months after being rail thin.  Might be kitty diet time soon.....

Why hello there

Haven't been on here for a while.  School and life has been keeping me busy.  Just finished finals for this quarter, so I have the next week and a few days off before Spring quarter starts!  I'll be working off and on for the Center for Public Health, maybe going snowboarding, and probably gonna try competing in a local IDPA match.  Other than that, not much going on for Spring break.

Can't remember if I said this earlier, but I got into the sugar sweetened beverage study!  I'll be starting that later on this month, so many more pictures and details to come when I start it.

My whole class, together in picture for the first time.  This was right after our big WIC presentation, so I figured since we were all here and dressed up, we should get a picture of everyone together.

Cat's like beer apparently as well.  Oh the things we learn in college.

Look what I got!

Could it be the new Pearls Before Swine treasury?  In my hands a full day before it's even supposed to be released??  Yes it is, thanks to Amazon's fast pre-order shipping!  Happy late birthday to me!  Thank you Tami!

Random happenings

Lots of random stuff to stay updated on!

• The snow I was hoping for didn't really come.  We got an inch maybe total, and at any given time, there was only the tiniest amount that actually stuck.  So much for the great storm of 2011.  Bet those bus drivers felt silly for putting on chains and driving through a light dusting if anything at all.  We did see cars coming into the city with several inches piled on them... probably coming from Tacoma or somewhere else.  Lucky bastards.
• Did the initial testing for the sugar sweetened beverage study I mentioned earlier.  The fructose tolerance test went well, just waiting to make sure there's nothing weird about my blood sample that the lab finds.
• The pipes under my kitchen sink started leaking this weekend.  It was a slow leak, enough so that instead of dripping on the floor, it clung to the walls and kinda slid to the floor, if that makes sense at all.  So basically I couldn't catch it in a bucket or anything.  I would leave for an hour or two and come back to a puddle on the kitchen floor.  There's an emergency pager for the maintenance people my leasing company has, but no one responded of course.  They finally came by today while I was at class. The note they left says they replaced the faucet and pipes.  The faucet definitely looks different, the pipes I can't tell, but it's not leaking anymore, so I believe them. 
• I have a small file safe I keep important stuff in.  Last night, the latch mechanism on it broke in such a way that even though the safe was unlocked, the latch was still engaged, and I couldn't open it.  After trying to pry the safe open with no luck, I tried to pry off the latch/lock mechanism instead.  5 minutes later, I was in.  And the safe was destroyed.  What's the lesson here?  Don't buy a Sentry filesafe.  If you know how to, they are far too easy to break into.  And the fact that the latch broke in the first place isn't too great either.  
• On campus, we have this big ol' fountain, kinda like the one on Sproul Plaza but much bigger.  Earlier in the year, when daytime highs were in the 20's, the whole thing froze.  It was awesome.  But I didn't get any pictures!  Been waiting for it to freeze again, but no luck.  This weekend, it partially froze and I got this shot: 

• It's half frozen!  Probably the best we'll get till next winter.

And where would we be without a parting cat picture??

Time for a quarter life crisis!

So it turns out 3 of us had birthdays in the span of 4 days, so we threw a big joint party in honor of everyone getting old together.  Katie and Greg hosted, and there was plenty of beer and home made pizza to go around!

Always seems like there's someone not paying attention doesn't it?

I tend to bring out the best in people when I have the camera out.  Either that or the weirdest.

Pizza #2? 3?  Coming together.  I missed the first one because I was in the other room.

Easy to be happy when you're not being thrown into a 300+ degree oven....

And then being sliced apart.

Followed by cake with a match as a candle!

Followed by more stabbing.

Went out to play pool and bowl for my actual birthday since the planned snowboarding trip didn't work out.  Luckily, I didn't take any pictures then because I did really badly at both games.  Whoops...

This has nothing to do with anything else, it's just evidence that the cat likes to steal my seat when I'm not looking.

Wish I could get away with doing nothing but lying around all day.

Oh, and where's my damn snow?  Snow has been forecasted for the last few days but I haven't seen any yet.  Forecast calls for more snow the next few days, so keeping my fingers crossed, mother nature better not let me down!

Proof that he does more than sleep

I just realized that if you follow my blog, it looks like all Pip does is sleep, sleep, and sleep.  After all, 99% of the pictures I post look like this:

Or this:

Or this:

But rest assured, he does much more than sleep!  He also eats:

And cleans:

 And occasionally ambushes people in the bathroom:

Looks like I managed to spread our cat loving ways to some classmates also....

Amanda and her new friend, Zane!

Busy busy busy...

Sorry for the lack of posts lately, it's crunch time at school now...got midterms to take, papers to write, data to analyze, stuff up the wazoo to do. 

I did sign up as a test subject for a sweetened beverage study.  If I pass the physical screening, then for three 8-day periods, I have to drink a large amount of (provided) soda sweetened with either glucose, fructose, or a sugar substitute.  I get fed free food during those 8 days also.  At the end of the 8 days, they do labs, and then a 20 day washout period starts before I do the next sweetener.  Sounds like fun, plus it pays, so hopefully it works out.

Other than that, not much to report.  The Super Bowl was good, fun to see Aaron Rodgers win it all.  Might go snowboarding again in a few weeks, once this madness settles down... cross your fingers!

It's been so busy, I've had a hard time getting good cat pictures.  This mediocre one will have to suffice in the meantime. 

Thinking of titles takes too much work

Not much to report on really.  School is still going.  Actually went to a happy hour sponsored by the epidemiology department (Nutri Sci is part of Epi).  They served actual beer and wine there!  Made the half hour walk totally worthwhile.  And it was in a school cafeteria to top it all off.  So weird drinking where we normally sit and eat lunch...

And now for a ton of cat photos!

Pip really loves that bean bag chair.  He also loves the squid toy.

Monorail cat has been derailed!

And is now dozing off....

I have love/hate relationship with Excel

Random thought after spending too much time on Excel the last week.  It can do some really amazing things like predict (correctly) across multiple sheets what rows you to be summing up.  And then it does something boneheaded like have COUNTIF functions break if your variable has an apostrophe anywhere in it.  Really now???

Been a serious lack of real posts lately, school has been busy lately.  It did snow again two nights ago, but the rain yesterday and today has already melted it all.

Got maybe 2-3 inches total.  I would have liked a bigger number personally.  Maybe something closer to 10.
More posts to come soon.  In the meantime....