busy week...

I've been having a busy weekend trying to get all my assignments done. I am almost done with the stuff for this week. I had a paper due today and three lab reports due the rest of this week. Thankfully I managed to get most of it done this weekend so I can actually do some research for the paper I need to write by next Tues.

Friday was my mother's birthday so I called her to say happy birthday, but I was a little grumpy from trying to power through three lab reports in one night. I think I was a little irritable and yelled at her for no good reason when I was asking for help on a student's t test I needed to conduct for a lab report. I feel like a terrible daughter. I should call and apologize, on my things to do list.

Saturday I shot my first full score for archery with a total score of 417. This was OK, but I should have shot better. Sometimes I would have 2 really good shots at 9 and 10 points in the middle of the target, but the third arrow would then be really far off in the 3 or 4 point area. It was really embarrassing. I also had one really terrible shot that didn't even hit the target... Need to get back and strengthen my arms and back to improve my accuracy and consistency. Hopefully I can get some good time in this week in the morning before classes.

Sunday was Iain's 21st birthday, so now when he comes to the U.S. he doesn't have to lie about his age to drink normally. He's having a céilidh for his birthday this Friday so I am trying to get as much work done before then since I will have archery the next morning too.

my shoulders...

Today was the first Wed. that I woke up earlier than 9am. Usually I don't have class, but I went to the range and shot some arrows. Since there were only five people I got to shoot quite a bit with very little time between waves. After about an hour my shoulders were killing me. They were really sore and I couldn't even aim my bow properly because my arm was shaking. When I went back in the afternoon during the usual training session, my shoulder was still sore and I had to leave practice early. Hopefully by 7pm tomorrow I will be ok. I want to try out some advice that I got from a girl I met at the range this morning when my arm/shoulder isn't killing me and I can aim properly. The girl I met is one of the best archers on the team and is currently doing her PhD. She has been shooting for 4 years and is currently on the Scottish and Swedish archery teams. I was told she is probably good enough to qualify for archery in the 2012 Olympics in London. I was super impressed. She gave a bit of advice to help me with my head movement problem that makes my shots gravitate left. I am hoping to try it out during tomorrows novice training session.

The first years in my hall are right outside my door being quite noisy and banging on the walls and my door. It is pretty annoying, especially because the pantry (kitchen) has been locked because the first years have left such a ridiculous mess there almost every night. Why can't they socialize somewhere else? They are always outside my room and it is making my attempt to work unsuccessful.

focus, focus, focus

I am having difficulty focusing on work this term. I haven't done much reading for my classes and it is the sixth week of classes. The only work I have done was the physiology paper and a lab report that is due this Thursday. I have a paper due for my philosophy class due next Monday. I agree with the essay topic, that science is a social process, but I haven't really read that many of the papers required for the class, and some of the ones that I have read, I don't know how I will use them to support my essay. The good news is that the word count is only 1000, bad news is that I have no clue what to write. I am trying to spend my time in between classes in the library so I can get some work done this week and hopefully catch up the reading I haven't done. It is probably best if I do work tonight instead of going to the pub. That's the plan, now I have to stick to it.

I think archery is one of the biggest distractions I have here. Whenever I leave a practice session, I just think about the next time I will be going to the range to shoot. In addition to the Saturday morning practices, I am also allowed to go down to the range whenever there is a senior shooting, which now increases the amount of time I can shoot arrows. So that means since someone will be at the range at 8am tomorrow, I will be too. I am really enjoying archery more than any of the other sports I have done in the past. Maybe it's because I don't have to run laps...

I managed to call the Hogmanay people today and managed to get the tickets for the street party. Crossing my fingers for good weather.

stupid tickets...

I've been trying to get reasonable tickets to Taiwan these last few weeks and I have put off Hogmanay tickets for two reasons: (1) I am lazy/have a ton of work to do, (2) I didn't know what address to have the tickets sent to since I don't actually check my snail mail here. I am totally regretting it now. I think that the tickets for the street party may have filled up while I was trying to get them tonight. The dumb thing is that when I submitted my request for tickets, the website claimed that I made 2 submissions to the site, which was not allowed. So at this point I have no clue whether I have tickets to the street party or not. I really hope that I can get some tickets, there were only 5GBP. I should have gotten my buttin gear sooner. I suppose it is mostly my fault if I don't get tickets. I was eyeing them for a while, but I didn't think that things would get sold out so soon. At least there are some events that you don't need tickets for. I really hope I can get these tickets though. It probably is once in a lifetime for me. I suppose I will have to call the office tomorrow.

atonement

After writing about it a couple of weeks ago, I finally got around to seeing Atonement in the theater yesterday as a reward to myself for my Physiology essay that was due last Friday. When this film comes out in December in the U.S. I would really recommend seeing it. It was a sad and depressing film, but I knew that walking into the film. There is an amazing 5min panning shot of a scene in Dunkirk when the British were retreating. It is really as amazing as the critics have been saying. I am normally not a person that cries during films, but I definitely teared up for this one. I probably would have cried more if I hadn't read the book before hand and knew what was going to happen, but it was still moving in a different way. When I finished the book, I felt really sad and depressed, but after the film it was worse. Having the visuals presented to you is different from what you see in your head while reading a book. To me a great film adaptation from a book like this portrays what you see in your mind while reading the book, but brings a physical realness to it. Some people like the worlds that they can create in their imagination, but to me seeing something physical can be more moving. I don't know if that makes any sense, but the love between Cecila Tallis and Robbie Turner broke my heart and I think Keira Knightly and James McAvoy are deserving of the compliments they have been given for this film. Yes, I am a romantic at heart, despite some of your thoughts that I may be asexual...

For people that don't recognize James McAvoy, he's a wonderful Scottish actor that is probably most well-known right now in the U.S. as the actor that played Doctor Nicholas Garrigan in The Last King of Scotland and Mr. Tumnus in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. He also did Starter for Ten, which was great fun. I hope that he does more great work in the future.

essays...

It's about mid-term now. I am still working on that physiology essay. I'm pretty much done writing the essay, but I need to add the figures and put in my references. I should probably learn how to use EndNote. Like I mentioned earlier, this essay is supposed to by 2000 words +/- 10%, but the kicker is the 20 references that I am supposed to have for this paper. That means one reference per 100 words. Right now I have 11 references and I need to find 9 more.

Last Saturday I had a lot of fun at archery practice, except for running to the gym. I was supposed to wake up at 8:30 in the morning to go to the range in the gym. Usually it is a 15 minute walk for me, but I woke up at 9 because my alarm didn't go off at the proper time. I was dumb and set the alarm for 8:30 pm. I hate when that happens. After dressing and brushing my teeth, I ran out the door. I tried to get a cab to the gym so I wouldn't be 20 minutes late, but I couldn't get a cab on the street and ended up running in a sweater and my coat to the gym. I immediately regretted it when I walked in and practice was still getting setup. Everyone was staring at me when I came down totally out of breath, gross and sweaty. Monday's session was pretty pitiful for me. I kept shooting left and embedding my arrows in the wooden frame of the boss, on which the targets are pinned on. One time I even manged to get my arrows really close together, almost in the same point of the wood, and split a bit of the edge of the frame. Oops... Today's session was much better and I was shooting reasonably. I feel that I am just really inconsistent. Hopefully that will clear up when I get used to this bow. If the archery club at Caltech is not set up when I get back, I may want to just go down to the range in Pasadena that I saw on the Internet and see what I can do.

I should be getting back to those references. If I finish it tonight, I may go to the party at Potterow (one of the student unions) tomorrow night where entrance fees go toward the club of your choice (in my case archery).

Congrats to my friend Cindy who just found out that she is going to be a Caltech Watson Fellowship Nominee. I am pretty excited for her. I hope she gets it after all the hard work she has gone through at Tech and beyond. Wish her luck!

nobel peace prize 2007

I just found out that Al Gore has won the Nobel Peace Prize with the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Who knew that that losing the Presidency to George Bush and making An Inconvenient Truth would make him so famous? Now he's got a Nobel Prize, Oscar, and Emmy. Now only if he could win a Grammy and a Tony too...

sperm, arrows, work, and 21st birthdays

I love it when Dr. Evelyn Telfer lectures in Reproductive Biology. I felt really bad when I fell asleep during lecture last week, from a bad night of sleep and coughiness. She always has really funny anecdotes in her lectures. For example, today's lecture was on the preparation of gametes for fertilization. The story Dr. Telfer told during class today was about a time when people weren't very worried about touching bodily fluids and didn't really know that much about AIDS and similarly transmitted diseases.

Many years ago in the medical school version of this class, there was a lab where the students studied human sperm. The boys in the class would pee into a cup. Apparently extra sperm just goes into the urine. The pee was spun down and the class could look at human sperm. One year, a male student showed up late to lab and was just handed a plastic cup. He knew the lab was about looking a human sperm and went off with the cup. After being gone for a long, long time, he came back and asked "How much of this cup do I actually have to fill?!" I'm sure you can guess what sort of sample he thought he had to provide. Because he came late to lab, he didn't realize he was supposed to pee in the cup, thus this story was funny and doubled as a warning against showing up to class late.

Now we just get to look at bull and boar sperm when we study sperm in practicals. Interesting and weird fact that goes along with this: the volume of seminal fluid in humans in about 3ml, whereas in boars it is about 500ml...

I do have good news in the archery department. On Wednesday's novice training session, I was pulled aside with another girl. We were asked if we would like to get our own bows (on loan of course) that are more customized for us (proper poundage and sights adjusted for us). Up to this point all the training sessions have been a couple bows and a ton of people cued up to get a chance to shoot a couple of times each night. We were both really excited about this news since not everyone gets asked. I was really happy because I only have a short period of time here and I want to get the most out of this experience. I also have so much fun with the people in the archery club. I was a bit sad for a while because the captain once told me that I definitely was not going to get a bow because I was a visiting student and only here for a term. Now in hindsight and what people have told me about him, he may have been just being cheeky and teasing me, but you never know. So now that I will be getting my own bow, I will also have training at 9am on Saturday mornings. That's kind of a bummer to get up so early, but I think that my happiness with more training and actually being half decent enough to have this opportunity supersedes that feeling. I really hope that when I get back to Caltech the archery club will be set up properly. I really want to continue shooting in the States.

On the up swing, I have been getting some work done. I have about 600 of the 2000 words that I need for my physiology essay. This is good news and I hope that I will have my draft done by the end of the weekend so that I can begin my other essays and lab reports that are no where near as irritating as this assignment. The most annoying thing about this essay isn't that I have trouble understanding the topic, it is that I need 20-25 references. That is a reference for every 100 words. I just think that's silly. I really need to be working more to have reading done for my proteins class. My Reproductive Biology partner failed that class last year and was tell me how hard it was. Since I haven't done any work, she seriously suggested that I put some reading in soon, sounds like a weekend...

On a happy note, it is my best friend Katie's 21st birthday today. If you are still reading this Happy Birthday! I am so excited for you, if only I was home to celebrate it with you. It's the big 21 and its on a Friday, so you've got the whole weekend to celebrate. Party it up girl! I'll take a raincheck and party with you when I get back in January. Or we could just do a massive LotR extended edition marathon. I still hope to get through that one day.

productivity at zero and dropping

I feel like a sloth. I have a paper that is due next Friday (not the upcoming one) and I don't really understand the material I need to write the essay on. "discuss how alpha-melanocyte-stimulating hormone plays a role in controlling feeding behaviour and sexual function" or something to that effect. My hope is that I will have a draft of this paper done by this upcoming Friday so I don't freak next week and can just use that period for editing.

This weekend I didn't really get as much done as I had hoped. I went to watch Iain in a downhill city race from Edinburgh Castle to the Grassmarket. It was a pretty intense race that went down stairs and over ramps. I was fairly impressed. Then I went out for some drinks to help a friend celebrate her 20th birthday, before meeting up with Iain and crowd again. I checked out at 1-ish because I didn't want to go clubbing and I was meeting someone at 10 the next morning to go to the library. Big mistake, I learned the hard way that the library doesn't open until noon on Sundays. Whoops, I guess I couldn't use the facilities. Honestly, why does the library have such restricted hours? You have to swipe an ID to get in, so why bother with such terrible hours. We ended up just going to a coffee shop to discuss the information for this upcoming essay, sipping GIANT cups of hot chocolate. Seriously, the cashier said there was a pint of milk in there. Otherwise, my weekend was really unproductive. I tried to get some research done for this paper, but I really don't want to do anything. I am sitting here in Appleton Tower thinking about food. I don't know why I am hungry. I had breakfast today, a sandwich, muffin and apple for lunch and I am still thinking about food. Class for an hour before I head back to Pollock for grease on a plate and archery at 7.

taking out the lights

While walking around today by Pollock I stopped at an intersection to wait for a crossing light. I saw a truck, one of the big long ones that can been seen driving cross country. It made a right turn and suddenly I heard a really loud crash. The truck hit a gray box that was sitting on the side of the street. When it pulled away, I saw some red wires sticking out, but didn't worry too much about it. I didn't realize until a few minutes later when I was still waiting for the crossing light, that the gray box was actually the wiring for the traffic and crossing lights. While staring at the damage done, I was somehow blind to the results. The lights were totally out. Thankfully people were able to use their own brains and were very polite when passing through the intersection so that traffic would keep flowing. While I was there, the only damage I saw was to the wiring and its container. The guy next to me on the street called someone to report the problem though, so hopefully it was fixed quickly.

homecooked meals

Here at Pollock, dinner sometimes seems like a block of grease and a cup of oil. I haven't had a proper home cooked, reasonably healthy meal since I moved into the dorms. This box of mostly eaten pasta is an aforementioned meal and was very tasty. There was so much packed in here, I couldn't even finish it in one go. I really appreciated it tonight when I walked into the dining hall and didn't see anything I wanted to eat. This pasta may not look like much, but it had cheese, peppers, tomato sauce and onions, which I love. So where did I get this nice box of food? Near the end of archery practice today, Claire, a member of the club and one of the captain's flatmates brought some dinner for him, which is well deserved because he is training different people from 2-9pm. It turns out the captain forgot about this meal and left for the Napier training session before she came to practice. Since he wasn't around Claire said that I could have the meal. Thank you so much Claire, this was yummy!

andy warhol time!

Aimee and I finally got around to going to the Andy Warhol Exhibit at the art gallery in Edinburgh. It is only around until Oct 7, so anyone reading this in the area, you should go soon! We both had a blast while we were there. There were some really interesting works that we saw that were not what I think of as the "typical" Warhol, Campbell's soup cans and Marilyn Monroe. There was some of that type of work but we also got to see some of his earlier ink work, screen tests and other works on death, the Cold War, and even children's toys. One of the things that I really liked was that a few of the rooms in the exhibition were papered with Warhol wallpaper, cows, fish and the Washington Monument.

There was also a great room with a bunch of silver balloons, like blown up rectangular bags that let us have a ton of fun. We spent quite a bit of time in this room playing around like we were children again. I tried to take some good pictures, but most of them didn't come out great especially with all the movement and shiny, reflective material. I'm also trying to train myself with the manual setting on my camera. I probably should have put it on auto for a few shots so that I could get some better shots. Anyway, here are some shots of us having a blast.

Awesome silver balloon thingies. We ran around and tried to keep them all up in the air.

One of the few half decent shots I managed to get of Aimee.

Our reflection in one of the balloons. Of course my face is obscured by the camera. I think that Aimee came out quite good. Roderick is holding the balloon up for this shot. Why do I always photograph so poorly? Argh! I should give up this manual thing

One of the few decent shots of me. Basically they all came out blurry. One would thing that this is the point at which I would have realized I should have my camera on auto if I actually want photos for posterity, but then again, hindsight is always 20/20. Yes, that is a balloon hitting my face.

Look at all those cans of Campbell's Soup! When my father visited Edinburgh, a bus we were riding passed by the front of the gallery, which has set up this promotional display. He said, "They must really love Campbell's Soup here". I could barely stop laughing to explain what the cans were really set up for.

for the sake of rotation

Like every other Tuesday this term I have gone out for drinks and then proceeded to Bannerman's a local pub for karaoke. Usually I don't have the guts to go up and sing, but Aimee convinced me to go up for the sake of Rotation that we are missing this year. Instead of Karaoke Revolution we did the real thing in public. I chose the usual, Love Shack, and Aimee sang Hey Jealousy. Of course I was terrible and nervous, I think all the notes were off. You don't get the nice arrow on the screen that tells you how well you are hitting the note in real life, so I was totally shooting in the dark. Anyway, it was good fun, but I was really embarrassed. I don't know if Aimee took any photos, but I think that she did take a video that I have yet to see.


On a less interesting note, I am ill again. I started to feel it Monday afternoon and had a terrible night shivering and sweating the whole time. I felt so cold that if I was a furry animal with a tail I would be curled up with my tail wrapped around me. Yes, I felt that cold. I had a terrible night and slept through about half my classes. I felt like I was being really rude to the lecturer, I am sure that she could see me sleeping in the middle of the room. I was interested in her lecture topic, but the bad night of sleep and walk to KB made me so tired. I even slept another two hours in the library afterwards before my next class. Thankfully Iain let me borrow a hot water bottle last night and I slept very well. It also helped that I didn't have a 9-er this morning.

i don't know how to dress myself

I honestly can't read the weather here when I get up in the morning. Every day I have class (Mon, Tues, Thurs, Fri) I have to get up at 7.30am to dress, catch breakfast, and make the long trek to King's Buildings to make class on time. When I get up in the morning I am cold and it looks cold out my window. Naturally, I dress suitably for the day I see when I wake up. This morning I was contemplating putting on a sweater because I was seriously cold and the day looked gloomy, but for some reason, I decided to forgo this and put on a long sleeved dress shirt. Throwing on a scarf and my light coat, I headed out to class. About half way there I started to feel a bit warm and by the time I actually got to class (in a heated building) I was sweating in a way that is a bit nasty for the time of the day. The scarf was definitely unnecessary and I practically ripped off my coat when I got to the lecture theatre. I was really glad that I decided not to put a sweater on today, but unhappy that I didn't put on something lighter. I didn't even wear the coat or scarf on my walk back to my room.

I have no idea what to put on in the mornings here since I have to get up so early before the day actually starts. Any suggestions? I am thinking about dressing lighter in the morning and adding later in the day if I need it, but I don't think that I actually have enough clothes here to actually do something like that. The day is so beautiful right now and I won't be taking my scarf or coat with me when I go to my class at 5. I wish I could sit on my windowsill with a book that I enjoy. I tried it yesterday, but the sill is too narrow and my butt is too wide to sit comfortably for a long period of time.

At my Proteins class this morning, the tutorial session basically went over a project where I have to read a specific paper, answer questions, model some proteins and write a review. It isn't due until December, but all the tutorials kept telling me to start NOW! Of course I thought to myself 'no way'. It is due so much later than the other things that I have due. In the next five weeks I have three essays due and two practical write ups. I think those assignments have higher priority.

I think that I am starting to regret taking this philosophy class. I have a ton of reading to do this week, five papers pf about 20-30 pages in length. Hopefully they will be more interesting than last weeks readings, which I never got around to finishing. I should make a dent in them before class at 5 since I've got archery tonight. Hopefully less people will be there so I can shoot more arrows instead of waiting on a cue for most of the night.