Good day

      All week I have been waking up feeling horrible. Not sick or anything like that. It was more like I just wanted to climb back into bed and never get up. That feeling kept lasting longer and longer into the day and it was starting to worry me. Then yesterday I woke up in a wonderful mood for no apparent reason. Ironically, I was going to see the doctor that day to discuss the issue, among others. I was in a great mood until I got to the doctor's office and she said I should get my blood drawn, which bumped it down to an average mood. The nurse who took my blood was either completely incompetent or my veins were incredibly hard to find, and her bedside manner also left something to be desired.
    Anyways, I left the doctor with absolutely no answers. I know doctors aren't omniscient and, on the whole, I am glad that they don't act like they are. But yesterday, I really just wanted her to take one look at me and say something like "Wow, your 'insert hormone here' levels are severely low! I happen to have some supplement right here. Why don't I give you some and see how you feel in 10 minutes?" It didn't quite happen like that.
    I woke up this morning in an awful mood again. I was worried that my blood results would come back normal. If they did, I would be back at square one and I wasn't entirely sure I could handle that. But they didn't! My mom texted me during first period and said my thyroid levels has come back low. I am already on thyroid supplement so I just have to increase my dosage and hopefully things will get better. So that's kind of defined my week and put me a very good mood today.

   As for computer programming, I just finished Lab 8. Yay! It's so nice to see all the blue results, uninterrupted by red error messages. I was getting a little frustrated with the lab towards the end. Lists within lists make my head hurt like Inception. But it worked so I feel accomplished.

Second Weekend of Spring Break and Hunger Games

       Last weekend was the end of Spring Break and on Thursday and Friday, my family and I went to Auditorium Shores to see The Shins and Counting Crows, respectively. We also saw one of our favorite bands, Hey Marseilles, on Thursday afternoon and twice on Saturday. They were all great concerts and Saturday night around 8 PM we arrived home content with our SXSW. And my mom checked our message machine. Our neighbor had called to inform us that she had two free tickets to see Mumford & Sons play at the LBJ lawn on UT campus. The concert would follow a documentary about their Railroad Revival concert series. The documentary had started at 8 so my sister and I urgently begged our dad to let us use the tickets instead of him (our reasoning being that whichever sister got to go would be murdered by the other one) and rushed around the house getting ready to leave again. My mom drove us to the lawn and we hurried by the long line of people without tickets waiting to get in and exchanged our tickets for entry. We sat on the lawn until the movie ended and we listened respectfully as Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros played and when Mumford & Sons came out we were beside ourselves with excitement. The concert was fantastic and I'm still kind of in awe of the fact that we got to go. The band is from London and they have come to Austin twice since I first heard them but I had never been able to get or afford tickets. Getting the opportunity to see them for free was outstandingly amazing.

Speaking of outstandingly amazing: HUNGER GAMES.
My friends and I went to the midnight premiere last night and it was great. We got to the theater two hours before the movie started and the theater we were supposed to be in was pretty much completely full so we took initiative and switched theaters. The movie was a wonderful representation of the book, which I am now re-reading so that I can go re-watch the movie with the book fresh on my mind. I got the most sleep out of all my friends last night and I am still ridiculously tired. I keep forgetting things or making absolutely no sense when I talk. My attempt to do Calculus homework at lunch today was a complete flop because I couldn't keep my thoughts straight. But, of course, it was completely worth it.

Blog Post #.....?

I really like what we've been doing in class lately. I forgot if it has a specific name but it's cool to be able to see how what we're learning could be used to do something useful.

Last week was Spring Break but it feels like way more than a week ago. The first weekend, my family and I have to leave Friday morning for Dallas to see my cousin who was in the hospital. She had double pneumonia, which is apparently normal pneumonia but really really really bad. On Wednesday night, she went into respiratory arrest and has a really close call. Everyone there (her mom, dad and three sisters) were pretty emotionally drained when we got there around noon on Friday. My cousin, Alaina, was completely sedated and on a ventilator. On Saturday, the doctors started weening her off the sedation and she woke up enough to smile when we sang her "Soft Kitty" (Big Bang Theory reference #1). We stayed until Sunday morning, when she woke up enough for us to have a one-way conversation with her. She had about a million tubes coming out of her still but she could smile and nod in response to our comments. We were able to explain to her what had happened and she seemed calm enough. Although, her heart rate when way up when we started playing Jonas Brothers for her because she got too excited (she's 20 but they're still one of her favorite bands).

We talked to her over Skype on Sunday and she was recovering well at home. They got a puppy last week and named it Dr. Sheldon Cooper (Big Bang Theory #2). It was so nice to see her talking and in normal clothes instead of a hospital gown.

Sleepless Weekend Ahead

In class we have been working with the Finch robots. I like working with them because it reminds me of Jeroo in that we can see the effects of our code in a tangible way. However, it was frustrating today when we were trying to get it travel in a circle because it is not as precise as Jeroo. It would turn a different amount each time, even though the code was the same and it kept running into things. But after we realized that we didn't really need to do that, it got better and we read a very interesting article about Target predicting pregnancies. I had read the full article in the New York Times earlier this week and I enjoyed writing a reading reflection about it.

I am looking forward to a weekend of no sleep. Tonight I will be going to row boats down from the dock to the race course for our regatta this weekend. Then we have a team dinner for rowing, for which I spent an hour and half making Portuguese rice last night.
Tomorrow morning I will be at the race course at 6:30 AM where I will weigh-in and then promptly lay down in my sleeping bag again. I am racing a double at 9:55 and a single at 10:50, which is the order I was hoping for. It is apparently supposed to be very windy tomorrow morning which is horrible for rowing so I want to be done after my single race. Honestly, I will be happy as long as I don't flip my single. I am pretty much expecting to come in last in both races and then I will be pleasantly surprised if I do better.
As soon as I am done racing, I will be driving out a church retreat in Llano. I'll spend the night there (aka barely get any sleep) and then come home, where I will probably go for a hike or something before falling onto the couch to watch a movie or Big Bang Theory or Seinfeld. It should be a fun weekend although I can't imagine how I will stay awake for all of my classes on Monday.