vel's journaly thing

WTF is going on?? Tonight at class I found out one of the professors in my department had a heart attack today; he was one of my teachers last semester. He's in the hospital but it sounds like he'll be okay.

Oma is still in critical condition. In addition to the injuries I mentioned earlier she also has bleeding in the brain and a cut liver. She was touch and go for a while, but now at least she's stable. She'd better be fine...if I ever meet the person who did this to her I'll fucking kill em.

And it still sucks. I was going to go to class today, but I'm just too dizzy. I'll have to get the notes from someone and hope I didn't miss anything too important. I did go to work on Sunday, which I think was a mistake because my cold worsened by Monday. But I can't really call in sick because there wouldn't be anyone to cover for me. I went to classes yesterday because I had a quiz in my anime class and those awful phrase structure rules were due. But some good news is I got my transcription back and I got an A! Only two people in the class got A's, so yay for me :)

I should really sleep and try to feel better by this afternoon, since I have to go meet the people I'm house sitting for today at 5:30. Hope I can find their house alright, it wasn't on Yahoo Maps. Heck, I hope I'll be up to driving! They live way off in the hills somewhere in an area I've never been to. I really need to do some work today, though, not sleep. I have to prepare both of my presentations by Thursday; I'll probably skip bowling tomorrow night as well and use that time for more recovery and homework :(

I'm soooo tiiiired...these phrase structure rules have really been kicking my ass. I just spent another five hours or so working on them. The good news is the hardest part is finished. Now we just have to condense all the rules we came up with. "Just" I say, ha. That's another stressful piece of work. Oh and I haven't even done the reading for this class yet; gotta find time to do that before Monday. I really don't feel like I have the energy for work tomorrow, especially since I'm still getting over my cold. Gotta do it though. At least it'll be a nice change of pace from schoolwork.

Oh today on my way to my project partner's house I came across some whack job on the road. I don't know if the driver was asleep or passed out or what, but this truck was going about 10 mph down the street just rolling on his merry way. Red light? Pssh, he just moseyed on through. Luckily he was going so slowly that the other cars could easily spot him and wait for him to get the hell out of the intersection. I called 911 when I got to my friend's house to report him, but since I was in an area I didn't know, I couldn't remember the street he was on. I hope they found him before he ran into someone, though.

I feel like I should write something, but I don't really have anything to say. Oh wait, yes I do: I hate writing phrase structure rules!!! This is a thousand times worse than doing the transcription I mentioned before. Now I have to take that transcription and write a rule for how every single utterance was formulated. There are over 175 of them! So far my partner and I have spent something like 7 hours working on it, and we're barely halfway through. It's due on Monday and it looks like we'll be working on it all weekend. I also have a paper I need to start working on, as well as a couple of presentations, all of which are due in about two weeks. Yay.

In other news, someone at my dad's work is apparently looking for a house/pet sitter for a long 5 day weekend. I'll probably call her tomorrow if she doesn't call me first; I could always use extra money, and I'd love to take care of her horses, cats, dogs, and chickens. Well, maybe not the chickens but I'd do it anyway. Birds kind of scare me with their sharp beaks and claws. I still wouldn't mind another house sitting job, though. I miss the kitties from my last one.

I can't think of anything else. I need some new clothes. I absolutely hate clothes shopping, but I need more "teachery" type outfits to wear when I teach the writing lab on Wednesdays. I don't really need to dress professionally, but I want to, just so people can tell me apart from the students if nothing else.

I made a post full of cute horsey pictures, which can be seen here (when Photobucket starts working again anyway!): Baaaaaby Animals

There is a strange trend in my house. My brother is a big-time computer gamer, so every two years or so (or even less than that it seems) he gets a whole new computer decked out with the latest high tech junk for online gaming. When that happens somehow I keep getting his old computer and it turns into my new one. We have lots of computers around; my dad just buys parts and builds them himself, so my brother and I both have a laptop and a desktop each, and my parents have two desktops. There are also older ones lying around that aren't in use anymore.

My desktop has been broken for about a year, so I've been living exclusively on my laptop. My bigger hard drive went bad AGAIN (it had already been reformatted once; don't ever buy from Western Digital! My brother also had the same problem with another hard drive from them). Since this was around the same time I got my laptop, I just used it instead and my desktop has been sitting under my desk untouched. Well my brother just got another new computer, so his old one has yet again come to me. The only difference is that my hard drives have been put into it, but all the super-gaming hardware has stayed the same. I have a new, bigger (250 GB) hard drive along with my one of my old ones that works and has for years (good thing because it has all my precious anime and mp3s and programs on it!). That's nice and all, but now comes all the annoying work of installing everything I need onto the new hard drive.

That has to wait because I have to spend all day today doing schoolwork. One of my projects is transcribing a recording we made of a non-native speaker (NNS) of English doing a narration. That is, the NNS and an NS (native speaker) both watched a Charlie Chaplin movie (now you know the source of my newfound love of Charlie Chaplin *g*), then the NS left for the last 20 minutes while the NNS watched the rest of the movie. Then when it was over the NS came back, and the NNS had to tell her what happened in the last 20 minutes in as much detail as possible. We recorded her narration and now I have to transcribe the whole thing (10 1/2 minutes of talking), due on Monday. Doesn't sound too hard, right? HA. The transcription has to include all the pauses, stress, intonation patterns, etc. that accompany speech, so in fact it takes about an hour to transcribe one minute of speech, if you're lucky! And as I've only done two minutes so far, I have about another 8 hours of transcription work ahead of me. Yay. I also have a paper due in two weeks I really need to get started on, but I'll have to worry about that later. Grad school...woo!

Yesterday I finally went to Great America with my brother rocketman9mm and rainstorm159  from work. It was fun, we went on pretty much everything that didn't involve water (because it was freaking cold out!). Even though it was a Saturday, it wasn't very busy and we didn't have to wait in long lines for anything. Top Gun is still my favorite ride there, plus it's the only roller coaster there that didn't bang my head against the sides of the seat.

After Great America I went to dinner at Marie Callender's with friends. The only problem was the one who drove us all there was supposed to be at home to have dinner with her family for her mother's birthday at the same time! So instead her family came and joined us at the restaurant, which worked out very well. And I got my yummy portobello mushroom sandwich :) But then I was stupid and said I would share a dessert with one of my friends when I was already way too full, so I felt totally sick the rest of the night :p

Today work was extremely slow since it was drizzling this morning. This gave us plenty of time to have our barbecue which was really cool with all the good food. I think we had maybe four small rides all day. Jim came up and brought those new name tags for the tack room, so I labeled them all and Scott put them up with Jim's staple gun. It looks SO much better in there now, all nice and organized. I love love love labeling and organizing things! I hate mess and disorder. I also cleaned up the rest of the tack room and put all the extra bridles and saddles back into decent order. That was my accomplishment for the day. After work I took Cowboy out on the trails; I hadn't ridden him before, but he's a very comfortable cow pony. I went out to try and see if I could locate Great America down in the valley, but it was hard to tell what was what. Next time I'll bring a pair of binoculars with me.

What I didn't do this weekend was any homework at all. Now I just realized I have a lot of reading I need to do before my night class tomorrow, but since I'll be in that Japanese Animation class for 3 hours before that, I'm not sure when I'll have time. I'll probably end up reading during that class. I'm worried about finding parking; it's the first day of classes for this other school, and everyone says parking is a nightmare there. Plus I'm really not familiar with the campus, so I'll have twice as hard a time searching for parking as well as my classroom. Gotta get there super early! Which means I should go to bed now. Yeah right, South Park is on! I'll go after it ends.

Okay, the puppy's name is officially Sequoia because we're sick of trying to come up with anything better. She's getting much better about sleeping quietly through the night, but she still yipes and whines horribly when she's awake during the day and no one is around to play with her. She also has even more toys now since any one toy only seems to keep her interested for a day or two.

I dropped my Tuesday night class, so now I'm down to only two night classes on Mondays and Thursdays. Yay! That class was SO lame; it was called Communication & Culture and most of the people in there were kids majoring in Communications. I had zero interest in it and it involved a lot of annoying reading, not to mention having to stay at school at night for yet another 3 hours in a row. Anyway, I've dropped it and instead I signed up for a class at the community college I'll be working at. The class? Japanese Animation *g* Three hours of watching anime every Monday; I think I can handle that... ^_~

Yesterday was bowling and I did quite well for me. For the last few weeks I've been sucking; my ball won't go where I want it to and I haven't been able to figure out why. It's like the way I bowled changed completely over the space of a week or two. Then last night my thumbnail broke off on my first practice ball, and suddenly I could bowl normally again! For three weeks I've been bowling like crap all because of one stupid nail. Well now I know I have to keep them cut short.

Tonight the fire alarm went off during my night class. I wonder if it was a prank or something, because the alarm went off in the same building on Monday night as well. That thing is freaking LOUD. At least it was kind of nice to get out of that boring class for a few minutes; I keep almost falling asleep in there. Then when I was walking to the parking structure, I saw something rustling under a bush. I figured it was a cat (there's an orange tabby I've seen a few times around campus) and stopped to look at it. Well what should scurry out from under the bush but a huge possom! In the middle of downtown San Jose! It ran over to a building and sniffed around, looking for a way in, then it crawled through this little opening near the bottom of the wall. Weird.

I don't remember where I got this, but I've had it for years and I've always found it amusing.

( Reasons why the English language is hard to learn )

I really don't want to go to school. there's a big nasty storm outside and I'll have to stay there until 8:30 tonight. I also have lots of reading left to do and a presentation to prepare (for today). I didn't get any work done yesterday because I went to see Mamma Mia! in SF with my mom. she had won tickets to it from a radio contest (so what else is new?), and she had thought my dad wanted to go, but he didn't so I got to go instead. it's a pretty good show; I don't know anything about ABBA but I liked the music, though I thought the overall plot was kind of dull (a girl wants to get married and have her father walk her down the aisle; she doesn't know who it is out of 3 possibilities so she invites them all). Starlight Express still stands out much more in my mind, but maybe that's because of all the rollerskating and crazy costumes. I went with Jennie to see that a couple weeks ago and it was a lot more entertaining; probably partly because it's so weird, but it's still interesting. if you haven't heard of it (I hadn't), it's about a kid dreaming he's racing different types of trains against each other, and the train engines and cars are represented by people singing and dancing on roller skates. most of the music is synthesized/high energy, and the races are 3-D film sequences. lots of catchy music in both shows; I should get the soundtracks. later, must start reading now *sigh*

as it seems everyone I know has one of these journal things, I thought I'd try it out. I don't know if I'll actually write much of anything, but I think if I have one of these it'll be easier to find and read posts by other people. right now I'm just trying to see how everything works. looks like a nice little thing; maybe I'll use it to rant about the horrors of grad school which I will be returning to on thursday *dread* on the other hand I probably won't have time! but this looks better than doing research and writing papers.