The world (of chemistry) keeps turning

Chemistry has become the focus of my life, and the bane of my existence. Fortunately for me, my chemistry professor, Dr. G, has given us a way of upping our scores from the midterm. What we can do is go back through all the questions we missed, work out detailed calculations and explanations as to why the correct answer is the correct answer (this is all open book, now), and then get half credit for them.

Good news for me, except it’s due this Thursday. That’s the same day that my chemistry lab, and all its work, is due.

Here’s how the lab assignments work. The day we do the experiments, we turn in a pre-lab assignment. Pre-labs consists of a series of questions geared to letting the instructor know that we understand what’s going on with the lab we’re going to be doing, as well as a data sheet to collect and organize the data from the experiment on. After the experiment is over, we have the following week to work up a detailed report of the experiment, including all calculations needed to create the report and support our findings. We also do a post-lab assignment, much like the pre-lab in that it is a bunch of questions designed to test that we know what’s going on. On top of that, we’ve got to prepare the pre-lab for the following week.

Doing all this has been taking me way too much time. I’ve only got the lab report done from last week, and I’ve not even touched the chemistry “re-test.”

And it’s all due in two days.

Any guesses as to what my life revolves around this week?

Get back to class, you!

Spring break has sprung, and now it’s gone. Back to the ol’ grind am I.

I got a lot done last week, though. Not on school, but on my music studio. It’s up and running, and so far everything works. I haven’t tried everything, though. I never did get any studying done over the break, though. Now I have to hustle my butt off to get ready for an anatomy test this Friday.

I can’t decide which is more pathetic, though: to not take advantage of a break to study, or to actually study during spring break.

Spring Break

Spring break is here! This week is really going to be nice for me. It’s not quite a vacation (I still have to go to work), but it’ll be a nice change to not have to go to classes for a bit. It’s weird, though. I had planned on using this week to catch up on some of my reading and such for my classes, but for some reason I just can’t bring myself to do that just yet. Instead I’m goofing off and building a music studio in my basement. Maybe I’ll get excited about catching up on my homework before the week is over.

But probably not.

Two Words

Next week I will partake in two of the most wonderful words to be had in a college student’s academic career.

Spring break.

Ahhhhh. I feel so much better now.

Morning Vacuum

This morning was horrible. Really. It sucked big time. This is no piddely little suckage, this is full blown outer space is a vacuum suckage. Actually, it started last night.

I got home late from work, and so I didn’t end up getting to bed until about 1:30 AM this morning. Then my middle daughter comes in to my bedroom at about 6:00 AM and wakes me up to tell me that she needs to “get something for Mom.”  This happens again about 10 minutes later because she didn’t get the right thing the first time. About 20 minutes more and my wife comes in and putts around, instead of just getting what she needed and getting out.

It gets worse. About 7:00 my wife is getting ready to leave to take the oldest two kids to school and, low and behold, my youngest decides to throw a fit. She’s screaming and crying and from what I can tell, no one is doing anything about it. By this time I’ve had enough and resigned myself to the fact that I’ve gotten to bed about two hours late and been woken up about two hours early. So much for my beauty sleep. I get up to take care of my youngest to be greeting to chaos as everyone is trying to get there stuff together so they can leave, and ignoring her. As soon as everyone leaves I turn on the TV to Sesame Street and, miracle of miracles, my youngest shuts up, having been hypnotized by Elmo.

A few minutes later my wife comes back, and I putter around the house trying to get my morning exercises done, take a shower, and get prepared for my day. Only I run into a snag about the laundry not being folded and put away, so I have to hunt through a few barrels of clean laundry to find a shirt.

Eventually I get out of the house and on my way to school. On the road out of town I see an old silver and white (and rust colored in spots) truck that about broadsided me last weekend in the grocery store parking lot. My oldest daughter was with me, or I would have had a harder time not removing the smile the driver had on his face (it looked like he though it was funny to endanger me and my oldest daughter) with my fist. I took the license plate number down to report it to a couple of friends of mine. One is the chief of police in town and the other is a county sheriff. I’m not sure what they can do about this weirdo, but it was the only highlight in my morning.

At school I’ve got a chemistry midterm and I screw it up. I just can’t get the numbers to work right. I don’t know why. I did fine with the practice problems the night before. I run out of time before I can even finish the darn thing. Now I’m questioning whether or not I’ve got what it takes to even take on the sciences. I’ve never thought of myself as stupid, but when something like this happens, you start to wonder.

So now I’m at work and I get an email from a guy I bought a used laptop computer from saying he’s just shipped the laptop, but he thinks the batteries might be dead. I’m not talking just needing to be recharged here. I’m talking may need replacing. He’s promised to replace them if that’s the case, but it’s just one more annoyance added to an otherwise vile day.

There’s nineteen more hours until tomorrow morning. If I didn’t have to work, I’d want sedation.