In which Rachel was working like a rented circus monkey.

It's getting near the end of the semester, and there are many chapters in our Intro to Chemistry book that we have not touched on at all. Our teacher said she was going to give us a take-home test over the last unit, and then we would spend the rest of the remaining classes reviewing for the final next week.

She gave us the take-home test last week, but I didn't even look at it until after we finished testing on the previous unit, and then there was Thanksgiving, so I really didn't start working on the take-home test until Friday night at work. Which is when I found out that it was all over my head.

I told Rachel I was going to need her help, so Saturday afternoon I went to her house and she looked over the test and started coaching me through a couple of the problems on it. I did those, with her help, and then she suggested that I do some of the practice problems from the book, so I did that for about another hour, which is pretty much as long as I am able to focus on Chemistry before my brain melts and starts running out of my ears.

Sunday there was no time to get together with Rachel, but I did more practice problems at work. Rachel was at work, too, so she was trying to talk me off the ledge through it over the phone in between taking care of her patients.

My friend Diane, who is taking the Chem class, too, was at work on Sunday night and then we both went to class in the morning to sit through review and she was complaining about how tired she was, but I had no sympathy, because I have worked the night before and gone to class in the morning this whole semester! I blame my poor test scores on having taken every test while I was half-asleep!

I went back to Rachel's yesterday in the afternoon for more practice problems, and then last night at work, Diane and I had to really put our heads down and work on that test! We did all of the fill-in-the-blanks questions and but then today we still had the equations section to work on!

I went to Rachel's at 4 in the afternoon and started working on blah blah woof woof - you know you don't care what it was, but it was hard, let me tell you! Diane got there at about 6:30, and by then I was unable to focus anymore, so I took Maddy off to the other room and played with her while Diane and Rachel went over some of the things I was done with.

Ash took over amusing Maddy when I was ready to go back to doing horrendous equations, and he played with her and gave her a bath while we made the final push to finish my test! Yay! It was done and I was as wrung out as a used dishrag, so I went home at 8 to get a nap before work.

I'm at work now, and I just talked to Rachel, who said that Diane stayed until almost 9, and then she had to leave for work, but she got through it all. Rachel is exhausted, and Ash pointed out that she had been tutoring us for five hours!

What I'm thankful for today:

I'm thankful that Rachel was willing to spend the whole evening teaching us to do ridiculous crap that we will be unlikely to ever need to know in real life.

Now I just have to review all the stuff we covered early in the semester that I immediately forgot after we were tested on it.

I'm sore all over!

Ouch! I'm sore all over after Rachel and I did an exersize video this afternoon. It was fun to do, especially with Maddy crawling all over us, but now I am feeling it!

The semester is almost over - only two more weeks of this chemistry class, and I'll be glad to be done with it. My friend Diane is taking the class too, and this week she is working all night and then going to class in the morning, like I always do, so she is finally seeing how hard it is for me! We were both being bitter about it this morning, but as I said, it's almost over.

It's been gray and rainy all day, and a couple of people I've talked to are having some hard times in one way or another, so I'm trying to stay upbeat and positive to help them. Instead of whining about my sore muscles and my stinking class, I am going to think of something to be thankful for...

Today I'm thankful that my cat vomited on my new leather couch because the shiny surface was easier to clean than if it had been on the old cloth-covered couch. How's that for gratitude?

Thanksgiving

We went to Rachel's and had a wonderful dinner there. She made homemade rolls! With butter! She made Mexican Wedding cakes!! She made some delicious stuffing in the crockpot, with pork sausage and cranberries! She made some Brie in a crust with carmelized onions! She did some amazing cooking!

I made the mashed potatoes, and it was a really good batch. I made polenta and squash casserole, too, which is just mashed winter squash cooked into corn meal mush along with a big handful of parmesan cheese! I love that, and so did Maddy.

Then Ash went outside and deep-fried the turkey and it was fantastic! I've never had the turkey cooked that way before and it was so good! It only took an hour to cook once the oil got hot enough, but Ash had to sit outside and keep an eye on the fryer the whole time, and it was really cold! He was wearing gloves, a scarf, and a hat, his winter coat, and had a thermos of hot cocoa! (No one went outside to keep him company - it was freezing!)

Maddy nibbled along with us all day, and she never got her afternoon nap, but she was having a nice time playing and crawling around. She finally got so tired that Rachel put her in bed for a late nap, and she woke up again in about an hour. Rachel said Maddy was furious when she saw that all the company had gone home and the fun was over! She didn't go back to sleep until after midnight, just to punish her parents.

After dinner, we all felt so sleepy, you know how it is after turkey dinner. Ash took a nap in the bedroom and the rest of us sat on the couch and watched Kim play a video game, and talked about how sleepy we were. It was lovely and peaceful. I love to watch my kids play video games while I knit, especially Mario games, and the one Kim was playing is one of my favorites. (I don't know which one it is, either Mario 64 or Mario World. I think it was Mario 64.)

It's only 24 degrees outside today!

Thanksgiving, my favorite holiday.

This has been a long day, what with the cold, rainy weather, and the chemistry test this morning, and then I couldn't sleep this evening like I usually do before work. I used what would have been my sleeping time to catch up with Diana over the phone, so that was good. I played solitaire on my computer while I talked to her, and she played Vampire Wars on Facebook. (Just a reminder - if you see updates on Facebook that give you the status of my Vampire Wars achievements, that is not because I am playing VW, it's Diana. She plays my character as well as her own.)

So it was very cold and wet all day, and I had to go out to the college this morning to take a chem test. I felt really prepared last night when I was reviewing the Gas Laws and doing some practice problems. When I started the test I was fine - I had the Gas Laws memorized, and I had no problem with the multiple choice questions, but then I got to the problems, and hey! There was no indication of which Gas Law went with which problem! I was supposed to figure it out myself! Eeek! So I am expecting to have done very badly on the test, and I don't think I'll be getting a B in the class now.

When the weather is gray and rainy like this, it is good weather for sleeping during the day. Kim brought her laptop and got into bed with me this morning, and I slept until 3:30 in the afternoon.

After dinner Kim and I went to Rachel's to see Maddy. Rachel is all excited because she and Ash are making the Thanksgiving dinner this year, except for a couple of side dishes she asked me to make. She has been making lists and shopping for several days, and tonight we all went for a ride in the car to give Maddy her daily outing, and to pick up the propane tank from my garage. (Ash is planning to deep fat fry the turkey.)

Maddy started out wearing a jacket, a hat and little socks, but she pulls those off as fast as she can, so you have to keep distracting her from that activity. She was busy looking at things in the store where we stopped to get bread for making stuffing, so the hat stayed on while we were there. I never saw her do it, but somewhere between leaving the store and getting back into the car, she stripped off the hat and socks again! When I looked down at her, she was dozing comfortably, but was barefoot and bareheaded.

I'm back at work tonight, and expecting a quiet night. I'll sleep in the morning when I get home, and when I wake up we'll make the mashed potatoes to take to Rachel's. Yay! I love Thanksgiving dinner!

Here's an old post, it was too boring to publish. Until now.

Kim was home this weekend and she left this afternoon to go back to school. She drove the van back and left her car here, because Rich saw a crack in her tire. We'll get her tire taken care of and she'll bring the van back next week when she comes home for Thanksgiving break.

It was nice to have Kim home, but we didn't do anything special. I worked all weekend, and she spent some of her time writing her Nano story. Sando brought a new video game one night and they stayed up late playing that. So it was just the usual, but I was glad to have her for company.

In which we drove a long way and got a bad case of roadbutt.

Someone reminded me today that I haven't written anything here in a while, and said that she still checks every day to see if I've updated, so I'm going to write something just for Sue's Birthday! Happy Birthday, Sue!

Where I've been:

Rich and I took a driving trip to Salt Lake City to visit Scott and Carolyn and to spend time with Soren and Carl. It was a good trip - we had some good audiobooks to listen to, including Bulletproof Mascara, which we both enjoyed, and if Scott had time to read I would suggest it to him because the main character is a linguist who couldn't get a job in her field, but she falls into another job by accident and her skills as a linguist are unexpectedly helpful!

We visited two museums in SLC, one was the Museum of Natural History at the U of U, and the other was a children's hands-on museum. I am the worst sight-seer in the world, and also I pretty much hate nature, so once I have glanced at the exhibits I am done, so the natural history museum was not so great. It's very small, too, and on the day we went it was full of fifth-graders. Ugh.

The hands-on museum was slightly better, not because I am interested in child-oriented science or shopping in a grocery store full of plastic pork chops, but because there were a lot of cute kids and their parents, and I like to watch people and how they interact. I spent some time sitting on a bench with my knitting, talking to Scott, while Rich played in a very cool playhouse with Soren.

One night Scott had to go out to a meeting, and Carolyn dressed the kids in their Halloween costumes so we could walk over to visit a deaf friend of theirs who lives a couple of blocks away. (Side note: It's embarrassing to see how much my signing skills have declined.) Soren was the Cat in the Hat, and Carl was Yertle the Turtle. They were great costumes! Carolyn made them!

What I knitted in Utah:

I promised Carolyn's friend Monique a sweater for her baby when she first got pregnant, and I finally made one while we were visiting. On Tuesday morning we went to a lovely yarn shop called Black Sheep Wool near Temple Square, and I bought yarn for a Wallaby for Ethan. I spent the next three or four days knitting on that sweater, and finished it Friday night!

Scott took a couple of days off while we were there, and one afternoon he and I walked for blocks to visit another yarn shop called Blazing Needles! It was about a mile and a half away! That's right, I walked three miles round trip to go to a yarn shop!

It was a very nice shop with a lot of beautiful samples hanging up, but the most amazing thing was the Bison yarn! There were small skeins of it, probably an ounce or a little more, that were selling for 60-80 dollars! I felt a little shy about fondling it because it was so expensive! I didn't want to get it all rubbed up!

Carolyn wasn't with us at the hands-on museum because she was sick with a cold that spread through their family the whole week we were there. By the end of the week, Carolyn was almost completely well, Soren and Carl were still sick but Carl was on his way to wellness, and Scott was starting to come down with it. I'm sure you can guess who's got a cold now!

While I was gone I missed two sessions of my chemistry class, in which we started a new unit on moles and stoichiometry. I didn't take my book with me, and because there is limited access to the internet at Scott's house, I didn't see any of the notes or practice pages on the website, so when I got back to class on Monday, they were ready to take a quiz on things I was clueless about.

I looked blankly at my quiz paper, and then I scribbled a mole joke on the bottom of the page, hoping to get points for being funny. I stood up to turn in my paper and leave, and suddenly our teacher announced that everyone who showed up for the practice quiz would get full points and then she did some more review problems! Yay!

That afternoon Rachel tutored Diane and I for a couple of hours, so we were able to do the mole-converting, and I went back to practice more on Tuesday, too. We took the real test on Wednesday, and I am hoping to get very lucky and maybe get a C! If not, well, I will have to do better on the next unit to make up for this one. I never did get through the stoichiometry chapter.

While we were in SLC, we had a chance to meet up with some friends who moved to California last year, and see their new baby! So that was fun and unexpected. I did some cooking while Carolyn was sick, making chicken soup and chocolate chip cookies, which were so good I amazed myself!

I made some bacon quiche the last night we were there, and Carolyn had shopped for the groceries for it, but since she is not me, she had shopped for the kind of groceries that she buys - cheese in a block and bacon that has to be cooked in a pan, instead of a bag of shredded cheese and that instant bacon that you make in the microwave! I felt like a pioneer! I was just grateful that we didn't have to milk a cow, too!

We had a good drive home, including a stop at a place in Iowa where I like to get hamburgers, but I found it depressing this time, and I don't think I want to stop there again. The burgers are good, but the ambiance not so much. We listened to the second half of Bulletproof Mascara and started another book that was also good, but we only got through about half of it before we got home.

Rachel and Ash brought Maddy over to see us when we got home Sunday afternoon, and as they brought her up the steps, I opened the door and she started yelling in a happy way and kicking her feet and waving her arms with a big smile, and I said, "I know! I know!" because I was happy to see her, too.