Pointless Rambles

What Melinda Means

You are confident, self assured, and capable. You are not easily intimidated. You master any and all skills easily. You don't have to work hard for what you want. You make your life out to be exactly how you want it. And you'll knock down anyone who gets in your way! You are friendly, charming, and warm. You get along with almost everyone. You work hard not to rock the boat. Your easy going attitude brings people together. At times, you can be a little flaky and irresponsible. But for the important things, you pull it together. You are relaxed, chill, and very likely to go with the flow. You are light hearted and accepting. You don't get worked up easily. Well adjusted and incredibly happy, many people wonder what your secret to life is. You tend to be pretty tightly wound. It's easy to get you excited... which can be a good or bad thing. You have a lot of enthusiasm, but it fades rather quickly. You don't stick with any one thing for very long. You have the drive to accomplish a lot in a short amount of time. Your biggest problem is making sure you finish the projects you start. You are very intuitive and wise. You understand the world better than most people. You also have a very active imagination. You often get carried away with your thoughts. You are prone to a little paranoia and jealousy. You sometimes go overboard in interpreting signals. You are balanced, orderly, and organized. You like your ducks in a row. You are powerful and competent, especially in the workplace. People can see you as stubborn and headstrong. You definitely have a dominant personality. You are usually the best at everything ... you strive for perfection. You are confident, authoritative, and aggressive. You have the classic "Type A" personality.

So, bonnie_kate put this up and I can't resist, so it's apparently the top 100 books read or something like that. But, it looks fun, and let's see what I've read and how many I like.

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your own LJ if you want.

( Lookie here! )

So, my penultimate shift has just ended. This was perhaps the most ideal haul, because we had lots of seven different species, and it took about 3.5 hours to sift and pick, though sorting them took hours more. Last night, there were more sea cucumbers and lots of starfish, including one of a half foot diameter or so. Then, we saw there was a school of squid at the aft of the ship, so one of the ship's crew fished and caught a squid, so I got to see one up close. This morning, we also saw an ocean sun fish in the water. I read on Wiki that the only known case of death caused by one of these fish was one a guy was crushed to death, because these things weigh up to 1200 pounds (I think). They're round, with no tail, and two fins sticking at the top and bottom of them. They are often mistaken for sharks, because their top fins look like a shark's fin.

The rain pants and jacket I bought for this trip finally conked out. The started tearing on about Day 3, but I used duct tape to patch them up. It didn't stick well, though, but it was alright, because we were doing less sifting and more picking, so there was less splashing. Unfortunately, by last night, my pants were attempting to turn into shorts, and my jacket had developed a huge hole from my arm down to my stomach, and along my pocket, and worst of all, in the arm sleeve, which entered the water the most. But, a crew member saw the sad state of my pathetic rain gear and offered some extra in storage, so I borrowed them, and today's shift was so much better--no holes! :D

One of the grad student's sister-in-law is an artist/illustrator in France, and he showed me her website, and there are some awesome stuff on there--if you want to take a look, the website is http://huguettemania.com/. There are photos and paintings, but the really best stuff are her illustrations--for posters, her children's book, and in general.

We had a 6.5 hour shift today--it was, dare I say it, the most ideal of hauls--very dense, concentrated mud and sediment. All we needed was a half spoon of soupy mud to cover an entire sift with various sea creatures (mostly brittle star bits and pieces). Usually, we can shovel 3-4 loads of mud into a sift. Unfortunately, the long time equals extremely COLD.

And, along the way, our sled must have hit upon a population of sea cucumbers, because we had about 15-20 of them in our mud. We found two right when we transferred our bag of mug to the cooler, and when we were digging in the cooler to put more mud in the bucket, we came across 11 more. Then, about two hours in, we came across four more. We had to clean them all off, so we picked them up--they were ranging in size from 8 inches to 1.5 feet--and hosed them off, before dumping them into a bucket of sea water. They were huge and long and turgid, barring the ones that had holes so the guts were spilling out. It had antlers and the head looked vaguely cowlike, though clear and milky, and the there were two openings on the bottom, as a sucker to suck mud in and an exit to let the mud out. It's odd because they just eat the mud and all, and the animals get digested in the digestive canal, and then the mud and debris is discarded. I could live without holding another one of them again.

We did find lots of mollusks--I even picked at least two sifts, and found about 12 mollusks in each. I somewhat dread the last two shifts we'll have before returning--the shallower it gets, the more we'll probably find, and with our improved technique, more hauls like this are not unexpected. And so ends our easy days...

The puzzle is finished!!! Yesterday and today, people began pitching in, after I finished the trees, and JZ, one of the professors, and I finished the last of it today. All in all, MW, BB, and RE and maybe BS all contributed one piece each, and DL, RJ, JZ, and I covered the rest (until about halfway, it was just me all by my lonesome. So, a 1000 piece puzzle, and it took...about 2 weeks to finish? It's a gorgeous picture, with mountains in the background leading to a foredrop with a lake and a moose and forest. The mountains are somewhere JZ climbed before in Wyoming or California, though the name of the mountain (T something or another) escapes me now.

Sifting is also going well! We had our shift this evening, and we had about 1 bucket of mud (usually we have about 10 or so buckets at the least), but a half scoop of watery mud resulted in so much stuff! The coolest find was a hermit crab in a snail shell with an anemone stuck to it, but a deep red shrimp, some crabs, and a giant snail (still alive!) were all also amazing finds in this one. I got to pick for bivalves, and in one of them, I picked out about 10 or so! So, little mud but much to find--ideal haul.

I slept so late last night because I was helping with the recovery of the sled for Shift 1--they started their shift at 2:30 am, after we recovered the sled. I got up to help launch our sled at 6:30 am, but I was let off to go back to bed because I helped last night.

We watched The Bourne Ultimatum last night, which was enjoyable to watch again.

This morning, we had a problem with a pipe on the ship, so people had to go on a little boat to the port side of the ship to fix it. To balance the weight of people going over, they put to use the 1200 lb weight that we brought to use with our sled (we ended up using the 600 lb one so the bigger one just sat there the entire trip). They used a crane on the ship to life that over the starboard side of the ship, and so, we were tilted to our right, and it was really weird walking, because the floor was slanted slightly. That was really cool. Now, with no puzzle, my book finished, and far too many cups that I feel guilty doodling on another one, I am quite at a loss for something to do. Maybe I'll go shower...

061508
1323

The waters have been pretty choppy lately. It's an odd feeling to be walking and then to suddenly shift to the right or left as a wave hits the ship. We've reached the deepest area, and we're doing two launches into 5200 meters below sea level. We're on the second one right now. After this launch, we'll be heading back, doing more launches at levels we skipped along the way. MW is dreading crossing the Gulf Stream again this evening, because she's been sleeping badly, but I don't mind too much. We finished LotR last night, and while I had planned to be in bed by midnight, I ended up staying awake two more hours, and I finished drawing five cups! I'm making headway on the puzzle--I'm over half way done the trees, though I still have the mountains to work on...

EP, one of the grad students, nicknamed Killer by one of the crew members who works in the galley because he was going to kill a crustacean by dropping it in ethanol (which is done with all of them, but EP said he was going to do that to the galley guy, M, so M started calling him that), has asked if there was pizza every single day, and everyday the answer was no. Today, we had pizza for lunch and he slept through lunch. Haha.

The moon is getting fuller, so the sky is getting really bright, and it's been getting harder to see the constellations, which is sad. However, the glitter of the moon's gleam on the dark blue/black waters is gorgeous, so at least there's that.

6 more days at sea!

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2134

Just another add-on: the water has gotten really choppy, and the ship has started steaming, because we have to cross the Gulf Stream again and go back to a station at 3700 m. We were finishing up our shift (basically nothing with hard to sift mud), and the wind outside was huge! I could barely walk in some places, and waves crashed onto the boat. The sea was magnificent in its fury, and what we're experiencing is but a small taste of how the sea can churn. The sky outside is pretty clear, so it's only the wind and the fast speeds. My head's feeling a little funny due to the rolling, which is not good.

We were told to make sure everything was fastened down, and they made us stop filling up buckets with water outside due to the craziness. Wow!

I did new work-related things yesterday! I helped in the launching and returning of the sled, which catches all the sea creatures we're interested in. I worked the A-frame and the trigger, and I guess I'll explain what that means by detailing the entire process.

When the sled is all ready for deployment, it's sitting in the aft of the ship, under the A-frame, a gigantic construct that moves things from the aft of the ship to the water right behind the ship. The sled is connected to the end of a 10,000 ft wire, and the winch is what pulls it up. They pull it up a little, and whomever at the A-frame moves the A-frame out (aka, me, that time). Then the sled is sent down 200 ft. The A-frame is brought back in, bringing the wire back in, and a weight is attached. The weight we've been using is about 500-600 pounds, I think? Anyways, it's really really heavy. Then, we let it go out another 50 ft, and then we put in a sonar, which can detect the ground. We send it all down to the various depths we're at (we are pulling up the launch at 4800 ft right now). The wire goes out at a maximum of 40 ft/min, and we tow underwater (the ship moves, pulling the sled along the ground, catching the top layer of mud with-hopefully-the bivalves we want) for about 2-3 hours (1 - 1.5 miles), and then it goes up at a maximum of 40 ft/min. Thus, one launch and return can take 7-8 hours. The trigger was just another little machine that lets rope out, and sometimes we need to string the rope around the wire, because the current is pushing it too far from the boat to easily attach the weight or sonar. The return is all the above, but in backwards order.

I've developed a new stratey for working on the puzzle--I'm trying each piece in a more educated manner--I've put the pieces in order based on where the prongs sticking out lie on the middle, right, or left (one side is always thinner than the other, so I can designate one end the top and the other end the bottom), and then I only try those pieces that seem like they might fit the shape of where it would fit in, rather than looking at the picture and fitting that to the bigger picture. If you can believe it, progress is being made, albeit slowly. We also watched some LotR:FotR last night, and I thought I'd still have a hard time watching it, since I last watched them all 1.5 years ago, all at once (actually, in retrospect, that's been a while), but it was really nice to watch it all again. I wish I could somehow watch this for the first time again, and not know what comes next. I've forgotten the feeling from watching it the first time. Oh, well. There's plenty of other movies I could experience that feeling for again.

That's all for now, folks!

We got 117 protobranchs, and 12 different species of bivalves--yay! And, the sifting was the shortest ever! I tried my hand at picking and found a whole bunch of bivalves, tiny scallops, and gastropods, though most of the gastropods were tetrapods, which we didn't need. Some bivalves were tiny and just over a millimeter long.

Afterwards, MW and I went out to go look at the stars again. We printed out a star map, and went to the bridge to go look at the sky. We had just entered the Gulf Stream, so the water was really fast and choppy. I saw the Little Dipper, and part of Draco, the Milky Way, and we suspect the brightest point was Jupiter. We're going to look more using a better star map soon. We were using one for about 10 pm in June when we were looking at 2 am.

On the puzzle, I've resorted to trying every single leafy piece in a spot, and using this method, though it's tedious and slow, I've found another 10-15 pieces already. Maybe I'm being too hopeful with 15 pieces...

We (or rather, MW) convinced one of the crew members, P, to take us on a tour of the boat. We learned there were four generators on the boat and the order of the decks on the boat were, from bottom to top, main deck, 02, bridge, top bridge?, high mast?, and crow's nest, though, as you can see from the question marks, I've already forgotten half of it. We saw where the main engine room was, though we'll get a tour of that later, from the Chief Engineer. We visited the place where the captain navigates the ship, of which the name of the room escapes me. P showed us the radar which showed where other objects are in the vicinity of our ship. There was one about 2 miles away, which we could see from outside.

I'm returning to my puzzle now, so farewell!

061208
1250

So, last night, the internet was spotty and not working very well, and we had nothing to do because we were switching things up (trying a new lighter sled, so almost everyone was free while people got that ready), so we watched Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. I thought I had watched it a long time ago, so I mixed up stuff from this one and the other two, but I think I've actually never watched this one, whereas I've watched the other two a few times. It was remarkably bad and wonderful at the same time, and it was fun to see all the references to this movie from the new fourth one.

On other things, the number of samples we've been getting have varied a lot, and we can't figure out why it's been so different. Unfortunately, we're getting far less than we were anticipating, and it has been frustrating for the professors on this trip. We're at a depth of about 3700 m, I guess, and soon, we'll be moving to deeper waters, heading to the Gulf Stream. I'm going to go draw on cups and work on my puzzle now. :D

The past two days have been surprisingly easy. Yesterday, we got an unexpected day off, because Team 1 had a really big find--they found over a hundred specimens. Today, we were expecting the same, but we got barely anything, so we were out of the cold room in three hours (usually it takes at least five hours). I spent most of my day working on the puzzle, talking to people, and reading. MW and I sat outside after supper yesterday night and tonight, reading as we watched the sun go down. The weather has been wonderful--rather hot in the day, but beautiful and sunny and clear.

My puzzle is going slowly. It's a scene of the mountains, with a lake and forest in the front. I have all the outer edges and the lake done, but the trees are proving an arduous task. All the leaves look the same! I have about 100-200 pieces of puzzle that look like leaves. AHH~!

B/c we didn't do anything yesterday, shift 2 finally got to do a day shift. I might prefer night a bit more, now that I'm used to it. We have to wake up early (5:15 am), and we work in the afternoon. At least, we finally managed to wake up for breakfast, which was delicious.

I was told by RJ (a funny post-doc from UMass) that when the sun sets, and the sky is clear, you can sometimes see a green flash on the horizon. I am determined to see that flash, but both nights I've been out, there's been a haze right on the horizon line, so the sun sets beautifully, but right at the end, it's obscured by clouds. Hopefully a clearer evening will come before we leave the ship. So, there's a lot of things I'm determined to do--finish the puzzle, see the green flash, see more dolphins, see a whale? (not sure about the chances), catch a sunrise. I saw a Portuguese man-of-war today in the water, which is related to the jellyfish. It was pretty cool looking. That's most of the interesting things that happened recently, so that's that. See y'all!

060908
1307

The internet is working!!! So, all my entries are up! :D

Last night was a relatively light sample—one cooler, little specimens. We started at 2230, though, so we still got to bed really late. The stars were all out last night, and they were beautiful! The sky was so clear, and MW showed me Cassiopeia and the Big Dipper, as well as a planet that she thought was Venus.

I started a 1000 piece puzzle yesterday; I’ve been working on it quite intently since then, and I think I’ll go back to that now. Due to the low level of samples, they’re putting in a longer tow of the sled. That means shift one won’t start until 4 pm, so it is unknown what odd hour we will be starting. Last night, we got pretty ridiculous and wrote some messages to shift one on the wall with the mud—on the wall by the sink, “Team 2 Rooks (Rocks with mud dripping on the C)” and “Team 1 is weak”. On the door, “HELP ME” with a handprint dripping down. All in all, we had a good time.

060808

1453

Being at sea is so tiring. I basically eat, sleep, eat, work, and then sleep again. Yesterday, the sled did not come up until 2100, so we worked until 0230. I can work about 2.5 hours at once, but once I take my first break, I get cold a lot more quickly each time I enter the cold room again.

This is a really short entry, but I’m too tired for much else…

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1704

The sea is a gorgeous, magnificent body. I just went out on deck for half an hour, and the sun was out, making the sea glitter and the light dance on the waves. I just let the wind whip through my hair, and I stared at the ocean. The ship was moving, so the foam kept moving along the side of the boat. The sea was so blue, and it was perfect! Well, perfect barring that it was a little cold outside. Anyways, that inspired me to add on to this entry.

060708
1254

Day 4, and I’m so tired! Yesterday, shift one got a really small pile of mud to sort through, and we got a huge load, covering three coolers! (Usually, we get about ¾ of a cooler). We had put the sled in earlier than the day before, and started right after supper, so we thought we’d be done by 10 pm or so, but we still finished really late, because we got tons of interesting stuff, so the sorting went by really slowly. A lot of the time, we sifters had nothing to do because we were waiting on the sorters to finish with the sifters and return them to us. The mud was a lot easier to sift through though. We had a lot of chunks of hard clay, especially some white clay, but after a while, we just started tossing the chunks of clay into another bucket, because most of the critters weren’t in there, so that was a lot easier than mushing up the clay so it could be sifted through.

Due to the increased wait time, we started trying to sort through the ones we finished sifting through ourselves. We found a lot of different sorts of worms, a few brittle stars (named because they are the shape of stars but they have really easy to break appendages), and even a tiny starfish! There were also some amphipods (a type of crustacean), and we even found what looked like a baby lobster and baby crab. I didn’t have much trouble picking out the gastropods (snails), but it took a while before I was noticing the tinier bivalves (mollusks).

I saw bigger dolphins today—a whole pod of them! MW, my roommate—a British graduate student of my professor’s, called me out to go take a look. They were gorgeous, gray and huge and so graceful! We watched them until they disappeared, and then we went back inside because the mist was getting us wet. It’s really hazy outside right now, and I’m dying to see some blue sky!

Today’s first shift people got a load with less mud and more creatures, so hopefully, ours will be like that this evening, and things will move quicker! *cross my fingers*

060608
1323

Yikes, I had no idea what to expect when I was talking about our work during our shift. They started sending the sled down to gather a load of mud from 1000m below the sea at about 1800 last night, but it wasn’t until 2030 that the sled was finally pulled up and we had our box of mud to sift through. Then, for some reason (an airlock?), the water refused to come out of the hose, and so we spent about half an hour trying to fix that.

And then, we sifted for hours, through mud of which half was clay, which would not easily go through the 1 mm sifts we were using. We kept trying to smush all the little clay pellets that refused to dissolve and go through the sift into the sink, and from all that work, all we got was rocks and a few odd looking worms. All of us (our shift consisting of five, plus—

--sorry I just took a break because somebody said dolphins were outside, so I went to go look, and there were dolphins!!! Well, I only saw one or two. I got a pretty nice picture too, before they disappeared again. One of the crew members told me that the reason they liked following ships was because they liked to swim through the turbulence caused by the ship at the fore and aft. He said it sort of felt like their backs were being scratched.

Anyways, our shift was five of us, and also EP, from the University of Louisiana in Lafayette. He’s French, and a graduate student. He’s doing his own independent project, so he wasn’t included in our shifts, but he joined us in ours last night, and he was really enthusiastic—he was the only one of all of us who did not take a few breaks to warm himself up.

So, let’s talk about the temperature. The main part of my body was warm, but my fingers and toes were definitely freezing off. We spent the better part of our conversations last night angsting about the clay pellets and wishing we could stick our feet into a bucket of warm water. We have to use 2 degree Celsius water to wash our samples, because we wanted to keep them alive as long as possible, but we were using about 15 degree Celsius water to wash out the sinks when they filled with too much sediment, and it was sort of ridiculous how we all were so happy to be cleaning the sink, because then we could let that water run over our gloves and we could warm up our fingers.

Anyways, we finished at 2 am, when we finally decided there was nothing of interest in our load of mud. We think in this location, we dug too deeply into the sediment, and we dug past the point where the bivalves we were looking for are located. They changed the angle for the sled sampling this morning, and they did not get any mud pellets and they got quite a few interesting mollusks, so hopefully, our shift this evening will go as smoothly.

Food is still delicious—a sampling includes freshly baked muffins, salmon, salmon cakes, mozzarella sticks, and tonight, we have a choice between fish and chips or chicken pot pie. Pineapples are so yummy, and they put out a snack bar with cheese, sausage, and crackers, grapes, cherries, candy, and chocolate covered almonds.

060508
1000

It’s Day 2 of our travels, and I feel well enough to attempt to stare at the computer screen for a little while. Not that the internet is working—this is being typed on Microsoft Word because the internet connection is shabby. There’s too much cloud cover. Our departure was quiet and uneventful, but not long after, the up and down and side to side motion started to take its toll on me. I think I spent about 20 of the last 24 hours sleeping, because that was the only time I stopped feeling nauseous. I was told eating popsicles helped because there was little substance and lots of sugar, which beings me to talk about food at sea.

Food at sea is amazing!!! When we were getting ready to leave, we formed a train to pass the food along to the galley. I passed along boxes of various sorts of fresh fruits and vegetables. There was whole pineapples, oranges, grapefruit, blueberries, strawberries, etc. There was fresh celery, cucumbers, potatoes, tomatoes, broccoli. The first meal was breakfast, which was delicious, but hard to mess up. By lunch, I was feeling sick already, so I only had some fruit and a grilled cheese sandwich. I threw all that up. Dinner was spaghetti, garlic bread, and salad (there were a lot of options, but that’s what I picked), but I guiltily threw it all away when in the process of getting food, the nausea returned. Basically, all I did yesterday was eat very little and sleep lots.

I woke up feeling a lot better today, though I’m still not at my best. I had a bowl of fresh fruit, and I decided to risk it and try out some hash browns. They also baked some amazing muffins, and I tried one of those too.

As for work, I’m on the second shift, so I’ll be starting this evening, probably after supper. Shifts are 12 hours long, with two shifts to cover the entire 24 hours. I’m currently watching them pull the sled that goes down and brings samples up back up again. At this station, we sent it down to a depth of 700 meters. The next step is to clear the specimens of all the mud around it, which will be my main job (they described it as akin to sifting through for gold). Then, we will be separating the bivalves and snails out, before separating out the different species.

That’s all for now—wish me luck!

So, since I'm lucky enough to be on a ship for the next three weeks to sample for deep sea specimens (i.e., mollusks), I figure I would update periodically to tell everyone of my experience.

I arrived and dropped stuff off in my room, a double shared with a graduate student I have yet to meet. I got the top bunk. It's pretty neat, with a secret cubby at the head of my bed. I met the other science crew people--three professors, three graduates, three undergraduates (inc. myself), a post-doc, and another two people who's actual position is unknown to me yet.

BS is the other undergrad who's also in the UMass REU program. He's a pretty funny guy, and so far, I'm getting along pretty well with him. He's also an avid reader of fantasy novels, as is the post-doc, so we all bonded over LotR, WoT, Belgariad, and other stuff over dinner.

The room where we'll mostly be working is a cold room they placed on deck, which is actually pretty chilly (like a freezer), so I hope I brought enough warm clothes. I also have to always wear a rain jacket and rain pants and insulated waterproof gloves when I'm sorting samples.

So, as a fun lesson for people like me who know nothing about ships, the front of the boat is the bow, and the back the stern. To go to the front is to go fore or forward, and to go to the back is to go aft. Right is starboard and left is...port?

http://techserv.gso.uri.edu/ is the link to see the info about the boat, if anyone's curious. You can even track it real time! Meal's are pretty strict, at 0730-0830, 1130-1230, and 1700-1800. I'm going to bed in fifteen minutes, my earliest in a long long time, and I'm waking tomorrow at 0715. Yikes! We leave tomorrow at 0900.

There's a library with a surprising number of books and extremely exceptional number of movies (mostly VHS)--there was all three Indiana Jones, Godfather, Tales from the Crypt, The Sopranos, Dances with Wolves, and Titanic, to name a few. There's apparently even a "work-out" area, consisting of one bike and a rusted weight lifting? machine.

I should prepare for bed now, so here's to a safe trip and no seasickness!

My brother and I went to the mall this afternoon, trying valiantly to find gifts for a few more friends and our parents. After trailing through several stores, we finally realized that my mother's gift was simple--go to GAP, her favorite store, and buy her something there. We found a perfect hat for her to wear when she went out to the French Quarter, and moved on to look for something for my dad.

This proves impossible. Either it's too expensive, he would scoff and say it was stupid or unnecessary, he would scoff and say he could find a cheaper version somewhere else *coughsamscough*, he would scoff and say he could find a better version somewhere else *coughsamscough*, or he would already own it. He is far too practical for us to easily buy him a gift, and I have a vague hint about a book he wants, but I can't ask without him realizing that we're conspiring to get him a present. I want to surprise him, darnit! Bah, so my brother and I left without getting him anything, but with my mom's present in hand.

Of course, this evening, my mom had to go check out what we bought without asking us, and she pulled out her hat and asked why I would buy a hat like this for myself when I never wear anything of the sort...and she ended up getting her Christmas present three days early. At least she liked it...

I suppose I deserve the adjective 'slow', since I realized a quarter through the third book of Kushiel's Legacy, by Jacqueline Carey, that the entire world Carey created was set over the map of Europe, Africa, and Central Asia.

Terre D'Ange is France, and it fits so perfectly, with their focus on the pleasures and arts. Alba, considered "barbarian", but allied to Terre D'Ange through marriage ties, is England, and the Straits is the English Channel. Can anyone guess what the language of Hellene is? And, Aragonia can only be, and is, according to the map, Spain. What else can Iskandria be but Alexandria? And, they even encountered the inscription--"My name is Azhimandias (I'm disappointed if you can't figure out who this is), king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

There are so many other relations I'm only just now discovering, three books in, and my appreciation only sets deeper.

I drove from NOLA to Mobile (which I have the most terrible time pronouncing correctly), Alabama. I am quite surprised and pleased that I managed the venture, though waking for it at 7 am in the morning was not high on my list of pleasures.

I bought a pair of shorts, a pair of jeans, a really nice jacket, and the gritty sort of hand soap (I've been wanting that for ages) for no more than thirty bucks. :)

It hailed on the ride back from Mobile.

I noticed some other people mentioning grades, and I wondered fruitlessly how they got them, and then I realized that MySwarthmore holds the key. I did tolerably well--as expected in some, slightly lower than expected in one, and slightly higher than expected in another. I'm satisfied.

Most noteworthy of all is that Kushiel's Chosen, by Jacqueline Carey, the second in the series, is finally finished, not half an hour ago. I plan to read the third once I get near enough to a bookstore to buy it, but as for now, I plan to finish Book Three of The Sevenwaters Trilogy, by Juliet Marillier, as well as Emma, by Jane Austen. Oh, yes. And write my essay for class, of course.