Memorial Day Weekend

Yeah, my sister is hotter than me. Oh well....

Although not representative of the whole weekend, this is a good picture. The more enduring memory for me was the wind blowing through the fir trees against the backdrop of a grey, cloudy sky. Oh yeah, and a snapshot of the canoe, as I looked at it longingly from the campfire, wishing that it wasn't so windy so I could get away from everyone and out into some peace and quiet for a bit.

It's amazing how quickly I've gotten accustomed to being around free-thinking, liberal people. The conversations about homeless people faking their homeless status, rants against gays (and others), authoritative assertions on the illegitimacy of the Davinci Code, and endless Brokeback Mountain jokes were enough to drive me batty. It started off at 7:30 on Saturday morning when grandma told me, in her most condenscending "now you know the tooth fairy isn't real" voice, that global warming is perfectly natural and there's nothing we can do about it anyway. The last memorable asinine conversation ended with Gretchen (the sis picced above), who is a history major, visibly biting her tongue to keep from insulting the know-it-all bible thumpers on their poor grasp of history and the Davinci Code. "I can't believe I'm related to these people," was the line running through my head constantly.

It wasn't all arguments and gloom, though. As usual, there was an over abundance of food, of which I ate entirely too much. There was fry bread, brauts, salmon, gooey brownies, burgers, chicken, sandwiches, snacks galore and, of course, s'mores. My cousin and I went on several canoe rides and a rowboat trip, and saw many birds, flowers and a raccoon. It was also nice on Saturday night to hang out with all my cousins as well as my sister. We drank beer, talked about school, laughed loudly and threw things into the fire.

In all, it was a nice break from the school crunch that has had me stressed and depressed these past few weeks.

Still don't know what's up with my layout

It's fine on my desktop but is screwed up on my laptop. Grr! I knew I should have gotten a Mac! Stupid Explorer, stupid Windows! What's the blog look like on your computer? Is the profile and sidebar where it should be, or down at the bottom of the page?

I've been gone all weekend, up to the grandparents' lakehouse near Olympia, WA. I'll have more to say about it later (along with those pictures I promised!), but I've got a bunch of homework to finish by tomorrow morning and it's already 10:40pm.

Jean Baptiste-Lully

This envied egomaniac of Louis XIV's court epitomized French Baroque music and died of a conducting accident. So says Rhapsody's summary.

A conducting accident? Wikipedia solved this in a few seconds:

On January 8, 1687, Lully was conducting a Te Deum in honor of Louis XIV's recent recovery from illness. He was beating time by banging a long staff (a precursor to the baton) against the floor, as was the common practice at the time, when he struck his toe, creating an abscess. The wound turned gangrenous, but Lully refused to have his toe amputated and the gangrene spread resulting in his death on the 22nd of March. He left his last opera, Achille & Polyxène, unfinished.

We all have to go somehow, I suppose....

And yes, I finished my paper. It sucks mightily, but it's done.

The Clock is Ticking!

I am currently 1.2 pages into a 6-7 page paper that is due in approximately 18 hours. Will she make it? Stay tuned!

1.5 pages done and 16.5 hours left! Aggghhhh!!! Why did I have to be so grumpy earlier this week? I wanted this done long ago! Grrrrr!

4 pages, 6.5 hours. *dramatic music*

Rethinking the moody bitch

Before our regularly scheduled rant, I have to report that today is not going well. I was caught in a downpour between the MAX stop and school and I walked into my geology test drenched and dripping water everywhere. Then I completely bombed the test. Really, it will be a fucking miracle if I end up with a passing grade. I have another geology test, this time in the lab section, this afternoon. I'd have studied for the next one more, but I left my fucking lab notebook in the fucking lab this weekend. Woofuckinhoo. Oh and what the fuck is going on with my page layout? It doesn't look like this on my desktop! How long has this been going on? Grr!

Ok, the official rant:

As I mentioned in a previous post, I'm a moody bitch. I've generally attributed this to being a woman and just a little more oversensitive to the fluctuations than most. However, this weekend while I was hanging out with the family, I realized that my dad (well known for being grumpy. in fact, his moods are almost legendary) has the exact same mood swing patterns. I'll take an exerpt from the previously mentioned post to demonstrate how I descend into grumpiness:

Today started off well enough. I was cheerful, even. I made tea, instead of coffee and somehow found this amusing. Perhaps that should have been a sign. When the mood goes up, it must go down. I put on my desert camo pants, feeling special that I'm wearing pants that I wore in Afghanistan and that no one on campus today could say the same. I decided to wear my Chucks, which were bought prior to Nike's takeover of Converse and thus the last pair I will ever own. They only get busted out on particularly happy days.

So I'm sitting in class. Once again, this is archaeology, a subject I enjoy with the added benefit of a hot guy in the room. I get my window seat and settle in to admiring the blue, clear sky.

All of the sudden... I convince myself that I've failed the test we took last week. My pants make me look fat. These shoes look dumb and they hurt my feet. How dare it be sunny! How dare it! I wish it wasn't so cold out. God, it's fucking ROASTING in here! If that girl asks one more know-it-all question I will strangle her. Or at least throw my leaky pen at the back of her head. Why did I even come today? I hate this class.

I even had attitude in my notes. After the prof explained why the Fertile Crescent was the perfect place for agriculture to sprout (har!) up, I wrote: "So the Fertile Crescent is fertile. Who knew!"

Dad was cheery in the morning, teasing the dog, making jokes, etc. All of the sudden at the soccer field the atmosphere darkened. You could actually feel all of the energy being sucked out of the area. He turned and started asking angry, snotty questions about unimportant things (not directed at me, luckily for all involved). I was amazed; we're exactly alike.

Simply finding a cause of my moodiness, however, doesn't really make it any better. This just means that I'm grumpy naturally, and IN ADDITION, I'm hormonal and bitchy. Fuck.

Snarls and such.

Garr, more propa - uh, I mean news

"Carbon dioxide... we call it life," TV ads say

By Deborah Zabarenko
Wed May 17, 6:58 PM ET



WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A little girl blows away dandelion fluff as an announcer says, "Carbon dioxide: they call it pollution; we call it life," in an advertisement targeting global warming "alarmists," especially Al Gore.

The television ads, screened for the press on Wednesday and set to air in 14 U.S. cities starting on Thursday, are part of a campaign by the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute to counter a media spotlight on threats posed by worldwide climate change.

Ya know, for being an anthropology major, I sure don't like people a whole lot.

In boring Sara news, I'm going away for the weekend to see the dog and the family. I also need to write a seven page paper and study for two tests. This probably means little blogging and not the pictures I promised. Later, I swear!

WHAT!?

Someone made a MOVIE about my crappy little hometown?????? And not just *someone*, it's a guy I went to school with! And it's at the Sundance Festival! Wow! Wowowowowowow!!! It's called: Clearcut: The Story of Philomath, OR. Here's the synopsis and the website:

In the rural Oregon logging town of Philomath, every high school graduate has their college tuition paid thanks to the generosity of local lumber baron Rex Clemens. But when a new schools Superintendent arrives from Chicago, the administrators of the scholarship become concerned over the increasingly "liberal" direction of the schools. The conflict between the old-time loggers and the "urban immigrants" escalates dramatically, and the scholarship administrators deliver an ultimatum: either the superintendent leaves, or the scholarship is withdrawn, leaving the town's children without money for college

My prediction is that there are some real bastards in this movie. Actually, I KNOW there are some real bastards in this movie. The only real campaigning I've ever done was against a ballot measure sponsored by the Lowthers, the current maintainers of the scholarship and the cause of all the turmoil. We won by 70%. Haha!

Anyway, if this movie comes out your way, make sure you go and see it. It's getting rave reviews by the film-y people! ...at least watch the trailer on the website, ok?

Taster

There are some pictures on Flickr I've uploaded, but I've discovered that there is a monthly limit on uploads from them and I just exceeded it, so you'll have to put up with smaller pics on this site.

Here are some Afghanistan shots: These were taken at and around Firebase Shkin between February and April 2004.

Mountains! View from the east side of the firebase. The Pakistani border is the top of those mountains and is not as far away as it looks. Pretty, no?




Proof the U.S. Army can make anything ugly. Look at those beautiful snowy mountains... if you can see past the heap of garbage and mud in the foreground.




This is me in a hole on some mountain. That hole took three of us, with a pickaxe and a shovel, three hours to dig due to the elevation, which is at over 9,000 ft here. The firebase shown above is at around 8,000ft.

OK, this page is going to take forever to load if I keep adding pics, so for now, here are the rest of them at my flickr account: http://www.flickr.com/photos/noaccuser/sets/72057594136620047/

Too hot to sleep

It was 97 here today. In Oregon. In May. The planet is truly sick.

As I walked into my sweatbox of an apartment, already drenched in sweat, I decided that today was officially the first day of gin and tonic season. Being poor, I haven't had much in the way of hard liquor, so one and a half drinks had me going pretty good. In my defense, the second drink was nearly half gin, as I refused to turn on any lights in the kitchen, lest I heat the house anymore. The lead me on a quest to find pictures. Don't ask me how or why. I then took a half a dozen rolls of film, possibly more, down to the store to have put onto CD. That's right, pictures going all the way back to Korea, possibly Monterey/Texas, will be available in a digitized format as of WEDNESDAY NIGHT!! MARK YOUR CALENDARS!!! ...Or not, as there will be much posting here when it happens. I think.

It's 11pm and 79. I'd like to get some sleep tonight, dammit!

Ah, the news

Sorry for the lack of blogging lately. I've been grumpy.

Language of Prairie Dogs Includes Words for Humans

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) _ Prairie dogs, those little pups popping in and out of holes on vacant lots and rural rangeland, are talking up a storm. They have different "words'' for tall human in yellow shirt, short human in green shirt, coyote, deer, red-tailed hawk and many other creatures.

They can even coin new terms for things they've never seen before, independently coming up with the same calls or words, according to Con Slobodchikoff, a Northern Arizona University biology professor and prairie dog linguist.

Prairie dog linguist????? Suddenly, I'm no longer so grumpy. I've aspired to be some pretty silly things in life. Hell, I've been some pretty silly things in life (still trying to find a word for someone who gets arrested and searched - brutally - several times a day; it's not 'prisoner', because they only get arrested once and 'victim' isn't precise enough), but prairie dog linguist was never one of them. In fact, I'm ashamed to admit that the idea never even occurred to me.

Update: I've spent the morning thinking about the implications of talking prairie dogs and I'm finding them to be more and more disturbing. They're smart enough to coin new terms? Now that they have language the next thing ya know they'll be doing long term planning - plotting. Just think of organized prairie dog armies sneaking around in their tunnel systems right under our feet! Perhaps it's good that we have a prairie dog linguist around. Maybe the army will start a prairie dog language program at DLI and then deploy the platoon to Iraq into a prairie dog free region. Not that that would be anything like training a Korean linguist for two years and then sending her to Afghanistan, oh no no no. Sheesh, and we think illegal immigrants are a threat!

mid-twenties

It's official. I'm in my mid-twenties. There's no stretching it to 'late-early-twenties' or anything cute like that. Boo. I'd always imagined twenty-four-year-olds as being employed, adult-like people. Young, but still adults with responsibility and stuff. So what did I do to celebrate, you may ask? I took a midterm, cleaned the bathroom, applied for an apartment and ate about three bites of ice cream. Oh yeah, and went to an evening class. Suh-weeeeeet! You're jealous, aren't you?

At least the weather has been lovely! Off to another day...

No kidding????

Bin Laden most likely hiding on Pakistan side of border with Afghanistan: U.S. official. While not quite as forehead-slappingly obvious as the "Human Genes Still Evolving" story from a few weeks ago, this still makes me want to throttle someone. Do you think I can make money by publishing a news article declaring the sky to be blue, using prolific quotes from many experts (one of whom will argue that his colleagues are rushing to conclusions and may perhaps need to examine the evidence more closely) and maybe even a big picture? I could be famous!

pleasant surprises

Today I was to find out two grades from recent work: one, a geology test that I was hoping to eek a C out of and an anthropology paper for which I had high hopes of an A. It turned out that the geology test had more questions that I was originally counting from and so my C- was actually a solid B! Woohoo! Thinking that two good things couldn't possibly happen in the same day, I was anxious for the return of the anthro paper. The prof (just an instructor! he insists) then proceeded to scare the shit out of everyone in the room by writing the distribution of grades on the board: a piddly 13 As, a scant 15 Bs, a large group of 30 Cs, and 25 depressing Did Not Do Assignment (oh, they *did* the assignment, but apparently it wasn't anything like what he was looking for. I'm fairly certain that this is what my archaeology final grade was.). I was nervous. An eternity later I got my paper to find. . . an A! Wooohoooooooo!!!!!! I should quit while I'm ahead.

useless little post

Feeling somewhat better, yet not the least bit interested in attending my geology lab this afternoon. Those rocks smell, believe it or not!

There is a huge immigration rights rally outside. I like huge rallies! We were even excused from class if we so desired to participate. I assumed, and was right, that there would be plenty enough other people showing up that my presence wouldn't really be required.

Oo, my favorite DavidT stopped by! Tell me again how I've attracted a British wingnut? Seriously, I don't understand. Hey, David, ya know you don't have to be a U.S. citizen to serve in our military, right? ENLIST ALREADY!!

Hot Guy sighting today! Hooray! I wish he would cut his hair, though. Ah well, he is still hot. In fact, short of gouging his eyes out, I think he'd be hard pressed to NOT be attractive.