Monday Morning You Sure Look Fine

I am still here. I still exist.

It's the end of the semester and thankfully I am only taking one class, because even with just that one class, I've been feeling pretty under the gun recently.

I'm here in the lab this morning, having a cup of coffee and printing out the paper that's due by noon. I actually finished it yesterday--which may or may not be a first for me in terms of term papers--and I got a full night's sleep which sounds like a good thing only I was being chased by a zombie all around my dreams. He was a scary twenty-something zombie, but in the end, when he was attacked by a larger, scarier zombie, I kinda felt a little sorry for him. So it wasn't a particularly restful full night of sleep, is what I'm trying to say.

I haven't written a blog entry in about a week and I feel rusty.

Also, my ear is stuffed up and hurty and I'm afraid I have some kind of ear infection. I probably should go over to the student health center and have a doctor look at it.

Let's see what else?

The car went to the shop this morning. It's been spewing some evil smelling, brain cell killing fumes into the interior whenever we drive it for longer than fifteen minutes or so.

And I got a lot of my Christmas shopping done at the arts and crafts show that was being held in the student union building last week. So that's good. Supplemented with some of our own pottery, I think we might be almost completely finished with Christmas shopping.

Christmas seems so far away, and yet, it's only, like 19 days from now. Right?

So you're wondering what my paper was about, aren't you?

Well, it was the final write-up of the tobacco experiments I did in botany this semester. I worked with three other people (although by using the verb "worked," I don't mean to give you the impression that they did anything except stay out of my way and weasel out of doing even the simplest tasks). I had to do the stats and write up the results and discussion. (Luckily we had already handed in a mostly complete introduction and materials and methods section.) In the end, I had to cut it down from 12 to 10 pages. It was so long because the stats were a bear. A bear that I had to teach to ride a bicycle. They sucked. But mostly they sucked because I had about twenty different variables, which was about eighteen too many--and maybe eighteen more than most groups in the class had. The stats took a week to do, is what I'm telling you. The results and discussion sections took about three hours to write, but the stats were a forty-plus hour endeavor over the last week.

wah wah wah.

But so what? It's done. And it's Monday.

I'm going to make it through the day at least. That's something.