It's Thursday!

Well, really it's Tuesday but being a Senior has certain benefits, one being that I get half days on Thursday and Friday. These quickly became off days once I found out that I wouldn't have Calculus, which, let's be honest, is the main reason I come to school now.

This weekend, I have a regatta and it is going to consume all of Saturday and Sunday. I have to be at the race course at 6 AM on Saturday and I am racing at 7:07 AM. Unless I make finals in that race (which is highly unlikely), I will have absolutely nothing else to do for the rest of the day but I have to stay until 5:30 or so. Sunday should be slightly better because I don't have to show up until 8 AM and I am racing at 9:30. Then I have to wait until 5 or 6 to row boats down to TRC. The fact that my weekend will be eaten by a regatta definitely influenced my decision to be sick on Thursday and Friday.

On a completely different note, we finished the Litmag this morning! It's been almost done for a week now but we've been editing and editing and then editing some more to try and prevent finding errors once it's printed. I'm still scared that we will have missed a comma or a colon, or used the wrong "too"/"to"/"two" somewhere but it does have to go to the printer eventually.

Yay for three-day weeks!

Forgot My Blog Post For Last Week

Last weekend was fairly busy. I performed at Coffeehouse on Friday night. I think my guitar sounded off, not loud enough and/or not perfectly in tune, but I've been told it sounded good and I'm not too worried about it. Saturday was a long day. I woke up early (for a Saturday) and went to the Farmers' Markets before practice because my mom, who normally shops for us, was at a baby shower. Then I went to a lovely rowing practice. The weather is so fantastic right now, perfectly sunny and wind-less and rain-less. I don't want the triple-digit days to come. After practice my mom, sister, and I went to the Old Settler's Music Festival to hear some good old bluegrass music, along with two of our favorite artists: Sarah Jarosz and Bob Schneider. The concerts were great, although we got too cold and tired to stay for Iron & Wine's concert at the end of the day.

On Sunday, I had lifeguard training at Lifetime Fitness, where I am hoping to work this summer. I worked there last summer and I have an official interview tomorrow. I'm pretty nervous because if I don't get this job, I have no idea what I am going to do for money this summer and next year at college. The aquatics supervisor introduced me as "Katie, who will be lifeguarding with us this summer" on Sunday so I am mainly just trying not to get overconfident.

As for classwork, I'm enjoying the labs well-enough. They're kind of like logic puzzles, which I like to a certain extent but usually frustrate me too much before I finish them. The labs work much better when I work with the people around me. Between the three of us, we can usually avoid most of the common error.

I'm beginning to get excited for graduation, still astronomically nervous about leaving home but excited to be done with waking up at 6AM and spending 7 hours in the same building. 

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.

4 day weekend.... last weekend

       Last weekend was our four day weekend and it was fantastic. All of last week I looked forward to Friday and it was perfect, as expected. I slept in and when I woke up, I rolled back over and fell asleep again. After repeating this until I started feeling antsy, I got up and went for a walk before eating breakfast/lunch and watching Big Bang Theory for a few hours. Then, I went to get a much-needed haircut before going for a lovely row in the rain. We're not supposed to be on the water when it is thundering or lightening-ing but it was just sprinkling while I was out. I love rowing in the rain because no one else is on the water and you can see the raindrops making tiny splashes in the water all around you. It was especially nice because we didn't technically have practice so I could go at my own pace.
       Then my family and I went to dinner at my Grandparents' house and my Grandmother and I researched cruises. We decided to postpone our trip to the summer after my freshmen year of college so that I could spend this summer at home and we chose which cruise we'll be going on. It starts in Venice, where we will stay for a day or two, and goes to 5 other cities before docking in Rome, where we will also spend a few days. After staying in Rome, we will take a train to Naples and, from there, we will go to Pompeii. This is what sold me on the cruise. Seeing Rome and Venice and the cities in between sounded amazing but getting to see Pompeii sounds especially exciting to me. I have watched documentaries about Pompeii and seeing the remains of the people who died while being covered in lava sounds interesting and profound. I can't wait. Too bad we postponed the cruise until next summer.