Friday, September 28, 2007

Catching Up

Sorry I have been so neglectful lately. It has been a whirlwind week. As I already mentioned, my parents were in town so I spent all of last weekend working so that I could hang out with them on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday nights. So I'd go to class and work frantically during the day and then hang out with them all night. It was worth it to be able to hang out with them, but man, I don't think I could handle that sort of schedule on a regular basis. I realized how much I rely on my evenings to wind down a bit and get a lot of work done. However, it was also nice to realize that if absolutely necessary, I CAN actually complete all of my work for my week's classes during the course of a weekend, I just don't have time to do anything else at all. So blogging/reading blogs was the first thing to go. Sorry!

Anyway, I had a great time with my parents. We mostly just ate a lot, and drank of course, although I was drinking very moderately, what with it being the middle of the work week. I did have the most delicious drink ever one night, though. It was pineapple-infused vodka, and it was dangerous because it didn't taste like vodka at all. I was expecting it to taste like the flavored vodkas you get at the liquor store, the ones that have a hint of whatever flavor they're supposed to be but still taste pretty strongly of vodka, but no. This was like drinking pineapple juice straight out of a can. There wasn't even really a hint of vodka flavor, and yet it was all vodka. Yum. The bar also had strawberry-kiwi and citrus flavors, so I think I'll be going back to try the other flavors.
We ate at a couple of very nice restaurants in City A and my favorite Italian restaurant near my apartment, and we took that tour of a building that I mentioned last week, and it was very cool. I'll post pictures on my Photobucket account later today and link them to my AIM profile for anyone who hasn't figured out what I'm talking about yet.
All in all, it was a very fun week, and luckily my workload for this upcoming week isn't incredibly huge so I can catch up on sleep today and tomorrow. Tomorrow my aunt, uncle, and one of their two sons are coming to visit (my other cousin is 18 now and would rather stay home and go to a party this weekend). They're driving to my neck of the woods to watch my cousin's favorite baseball team play City B's team, so they decided to come down on Saturday afternoon and check out my apartment and have me show them around the campus (since this school is one of the ones my eighteen year old cousin is going to apply to this fall and my aunt has never seen it). And now that my other cousin isn't coming down for the weekend, it turns out that they have an extra ticket for the baseball game, so I get to do that on Sunday. Fun times.

As for school, everything is still going okay. I'm in kind of a frustrating spot right now because I have two major projects due in November and I'm not sure what I want to do for them yet and it's always nervewracking to know that a project is hanging over your head but not to have had that inspired, "Oh! I know what I want to write about/study!" moment yet. However, I got up early this morning and started kicking around a couple of ideas and I'm feeling a bit better about the whole thing now. The class I'm teaching is going very well. The kids had a lot of fun with Wednesday's assignment, and they did well on their first round of quizzes. I also got my first paper from a student the other day (an extra credit assignment) and it is extremely well-written, which makes me happy. The only bad thing is my Tuesday afternoon class. The class itself is fine. Great, even. It's a class on teaching my subject. I'm learing a lot of useful information, and by the time I finish the course I'll have developed an entire college course of my own and have a teaching portfolio. I'm actually very excited about the course I'm developing, too! The thing is, there's this girl from another department that is auditing the course, and she is CRAZY. There is something wrong with her, literally, and it's to the point that it is making all of us extremely uncomfortable. I've never experienced a situation like this in the classroom before and I'll have to devote an entire entry to the whole situation once it (hopefully) gets resolved. I feel like maybe I have already mentioned this girl here in passing, but yeah, she definitely deserves an entry all to herself so hopefully I'll have time in the future to elaborate.

Other than that, I really have nothing to say. I need to clean my apartment and work out. I haven't had time to work out since Sunday and I feel gross right now, so that has to be remedied immediately. It's crazy to me that even though I don't particularly enjoy working out, my body obviously needs it. Two days without a workout is fine, three days is pushing it, and by the time I have gone four days without exerting my body I start to feel really lethargic and just gross. I don't have to do much to make myself feel better, even a 25 minute brisk walk counts in my book. Still, I have to do SOMETHING. It's a healthy addiction, I suppose.

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