Emi's Journal

I officially survived my first biochem midterm, and even had time to answer all the questions! How it turned out is a complete mystery at the moment… It’s all dependent on whether I was on the right track with the calculation and long-answer questions, and I’m not sure, so we will see.

On a different note, I was in Washington this weekend, at one of my favorite places in the world…. Yup, Mnt. St. Helens! Worked with MSHI, just like the good ol’ days. Saw some people I haven’t seen for 8 years. And the mountain was gorgeous, of course. The weather was great, and we spent the day fixing the elk exclosure on the north side of the mountain. It was good. And we had a good time, I think… I know I did… The 2-day game of Phase 10 we had at the yurts was good too.

I’m not bailing us out this time. I’m done. That’s not my job. Why is it that I’m dealing with everything, at my expense? I’m so behind, struggling to do decent on anything. Is that my job to bail us out? Why? I’m done. I’m not going to shoot myself in the foot… Or the head… To get us out of trouble anymore. I’m done with that. I need to think about myself sometimes.

Funny thing. People think I don’t get stressed. Yeah right. I don’t let people see that I’m stressed. I try to calm other people down by being clam myself, but half the time it’s just a show. Would it help if I let it show? Do I need to have a nervous breakdown again? I’d really rather not, though I’ve gotten darn close many times in the past week. But that in itself is stressful, not to mention awkward, and I’d really rather not… I really hope I don’t… It did seem to help in the past. I’ll give it that.

I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to change. I can step back and take care of myself for a bit… That needs to happen regardless. But what’s going to happen to us if I do? Who will make sure we don’t fail? What’s going to happen tomorrow? Who will be there to take my place for the day? We might just fail… I don’t want to see that happen, but what can I do? It’s either that or I fail my test, and I can’t let that happen either.

I think there is where the problem is. It’s either me or the group that fails, and if I put the group first at least they are OK. I fail, but that’s my problem? No, it’s not. I feel selfish deciding to save myself rather than us. But then, why am I the only one making that sacrifice? Why am I pulling all the weight? Am I? I feel like it.

So I don’t know what I’m going to do. Besides panic attack. And write this. And I just talked to my mom for a while. The verdict was that I should call it a night and go to bed because having a panic attack isn’t letting me get anything done. Maybe I’ll watch some Quantum Leap with Ret. He seems to want to help.

Got my first “test” done today. It was actually a quiz. Oh well. I think it went well.

I’m pretty excited for this weekend. Newport! Staying at Hatfield! Home! Plus creel survey, which I’m kind of excited for. And of course whale watching. I’ll have to study a bit while we’re there, but it’ll still be a nice break. I’ll need t study for vert bio, but I wont be the only one… I have fellow vert bio people along to study with!

Finally, rain!
I love the start of the rainy season. After about 2 months it gets old, but I sure love the start of it! :p

I think things are getting better. Today I still goofed off a lot, but I have most of my dichotomous key typed up for the vert bio lab quiz on Thursday. I get to type mine because my carpal tunnel is getting really bad, and typing is better than writing (contrary to popular belief…). So most of that is done, and then I have to draw out the phylogeny, and then I’ll be ready for that quiz. Then I have to get ready for the trip this weekend, and a quiz next week. Yeah, I still have lots to do, but believe it or not it’s getting better!

Now I’m sitting here relaxing a bit, and watching NCIS. I have the next two hours booked with NCIS fun. Yeah, I’m starting to get into NCIS:LA a bit, though I can totally tell Belisario isn’t in on it, which is a sad thing. But I’m giving it a chance, and it’s getting better.
I also have cookies. Yay cookies!

Today I was so tired and brain-dead that I really didn’t get anything done. I have no explanation for this… I just was. I woke up late, missed my bus, so rode my scooter to campus for my other class. That was good. But then I spent the rest of the afternoon in the office, and I still didn’t get anything done. Tonight I need to finish up a cover letter for a part-time job… I’ve never had to do a cover letter for a student job, so this is interesting. It sounds like a great position, so I’m hopeful. It would be nice to be employed again, and especially with something relevant to my major… I am done with tech support.

I’m hoping to come home at 1:00 tomorrow and spend the day catching up. Being gone all weekend kind of threw me off. So I need to get on track, and hopefully without any late meetings I can do that! Fortunately these late Monday meetings are switching to once a month. I still have to do bi-monthly Tuesday meetings, but that’s OK. It sounds like I’m off the hook on Wednesdays… For the most part, anyway. So we’re down to three evening meetings a month. I can do that. Much better than six. Or worse, eight.

In other news, my mom got married yesterday. And yet I felt that posting about getting custom fields warranted the first post? Oh well. No one ever said I was logical.

The wedding was nice, and I am now happily thinking I will never have to wear a dress again. This may be denial, but that’s OK. It’s the thought that counts, for now… And also if I do have to wear a dress again we will get shoes that fit. Because my shoes really wanted to fall off. And I wont ever have to go dress shopping again, so that’s a good thing too.

For all the people waiting for photo documentation, you’ll have to keep waiting. It’ll probably be next week before I have access to any of the pictures.

Anyway, the wedding was nice, the weather was perfect, and the reception was a lot of fun. But I ate too much cake. Besides that it was a lot of fun. Dallas and PJ sang, and there was a great deal of eating and chatting. I spent most of the time talking to library people. And eating cake. Which reminds me that I have cake in the car still…. I should probably leave it there, because I by no means need cake tonight…..

Also yesterday, Shawn and I went to the haunted corn maze at Lone Pine Farms. That was a lot of fun, though I did not like the chainsaw guys… We only had one actually go after us (the others scared other people before and after us), but that was enough for me… It was also pretty fun because we were both wearing dark clothes, so I guess that made us scary. :p It was pretty cool, but there weren’t a lot of scarers this year. Must be budget cuts. There was some other cool stuff, like the caves and the doors and the AWESOME finisher which wasn’t scary, but incredibly disorienting. You walked through this tube with a pattern that was spinning counter-clocwise, so basically the walls were spinning and you had to walk through it and it was harder than it looked. I swear the floor moved, but it really didn’t. About halfway through I started stumbling, and had it been longer probably would have fallen down. Some people were falling. It was incredibly awesome, though.
And then we went to 7-11 and got slurpees, and that was awesome too.

All in all a good day!

Finally, thanks to this awesome blog post, I have my “Current…” custom fields working the way I want them to! It’s one more step towards getting the formatting on this done the way I ultimately want to, which is essentially mirroring my old livejournal. Except better.

I am also going through and doing all that fun stuff I have to do by hand… Like editing the custom field names and adding the avatars. It’s exciting stuff. Great multi-tasking job. On the plus side, I’ve been reading some fun old posts.

Almost a week ago I did something really cool. I haven’t written about it yet, so I will now.
Last Friday, immediately after Ichthyology (and while skipping biochem), I took myself and two other people to Newport. I seem to be back in Newport on a weekly basis… Oh well.
Anyway, I went to Hatfield. Because there was a shark there. A great white shark. A great white shark that was getting dissected, or necropsied, or whatever. It had been gutted, so it wasn’t really a necropsy, so it was more of a dissection. Regardless: AWESOME.
They let us get up close and touch the shark. They took off parasites, took bite impressions, took the dorsal fin, vertebrae, jaws (for OSU F&W!), and all sorts of other awesome. I helped take the bite impression, which was super awesome. Needless to say, it was amazing.

So that was the past portion of this. On to the present.
I rode my scooter to campus today. It was fun. Good stuff. I got home around 3:30, and haven’t been doing much since. Teresa brought me some pinkie mice, so I’ve been trying to get my baby snake, Henry, to eat. I figure I’ll give it a shot while I have a live pinkie, though I don’t want to have to feed him live… He hasn’t ever eaten, so I just want him to eat SOMETHING. If he doesn’t take it, I’ll leave him alone for a few days… But I figure it was worth a shot.

And future:
My mom is getting married on Saturday. Weird. It should be fun. I’m headed home tomorrow at noon to help with the final getting readyness, and what not. But I have to wear a dress… Yes, all you people that have always wanted me to dress up, I will share pictures…. Grudgingly.

Ah well. No big shocker there.
So since the last time I’ve written I have had the most amazing summer of my life working for ODFW, went to the TWS conference in Monterey (for under $125 out-of-pocket! ), and am now getting back into the swing of school. It’s a change I have to admit is a bit rough…. Who knew I’d want to go back to work so bad? I’m sure being unemployed again isn’t helping matters. We’ll see if I can remedy that soon. It always works out, and I promised myself I wouldn’t stress about it this time, but it’s tough. It has given me more time to get settled back in, though, and that’s not all bad.
It has also given me time to take up a pet-project with the club. I’m taking on an outreach program with the DE (distance ed) students. It’s been interesting brainstorming how it will be done, but I think we have it figured out and tomorrow I’m going to start kicking it off. We’ll see how that goes.
As I look at this blog I’m also hoping to finally iron out the final formatting issues I have here…. Like I haven’t been saying that for months. We’ll see. And maybe I’ll even start posting again… I hope.