Who Would’ve Thought?

Yesterday after I dropped my sister and her friend off at dance class my brother and I went to this one shopping plaza that I really don’t like to go to that often because it’s 20 minutes away from my house.  But it’s only 5 or 10 minutes away from my sister’s dance studio, so I thought it would be a good time to go.  I had to get some knitting needles and yarn for the Gryffindor purse I’m knitting and I also wanted to use this coupon I had for PetSmart.  It was a birthday thing for Benny and got him a free toy.

First, we went to A.C. Moore so I could get my needles.  They didn’t have the right color yarn, so we had to go to Wal-Mart.  I really don’t like Wal-Mart.  One because it’s so big, two because the ‘express’ lanes are 20 items or less.  How does 20 items constitute ‘express’?  Where I work, express is 7 items or less.  Third, because they only have 5 or 6 lanes open when there are 32 lanes total.  What’s the point in having that many if they’re never open?  Third, the whole issue about their ethics.  But, whatever, I had to buy yarn and Wal-Mart is the only place around me that sells cheap yarn in Gryffindor colors.  My bro wasn’t too happy since he hates Wally World even more than I do.  We walk in and I bypass the greeter without getting a sticker for my A.C. Moore bag, hehe.  I find my yarn and head over to the registers, where I have to wait an insane amount of time in the ‘express’ lane to buy 2 items.  Then, we hightail it out of there.

Then my brother came up with the crazy idea of looking for fish in the stupid pet store that sells puppies.  I wasn’t too happy about this, but I dragged him to Wal-Mart, so I agree to go.  I hadn’t been in there since PetSmart went in which was a year and a half ago.  I immediately start feeling bad for all the puppies and the other animals they sell since they’re all housed in horrible conditions.  I wander around a bit and come upon the dog food section.  My jaw drops as I see Canidae, Eagle Pack, California Natural, Innova, and a few other high quality foods.  I never thought those were sold at this horrible place!  I would never consider buying them there, but still.

My brother then finds something even more amazing.  He had been looking for a kind of fish called Endler’s Livebearers, which are a variety of guppy.  They’re extremely rare and he looked at every other pet store in the area without success.  It seemed like the only place he would find them was the Internet, but for obvious reasons he really didn’t want to buy fish online.  But in one of the dirty fish tanks at this store, were Endler’s Livebearers, labeled ‘feeder guppies’.  They were tiny, only babies.  And they were only twenty cents.  So he decided to buy five of them and see how they would do.  His guppies keep on dying and there is only one left, a leopard print one named Lucius.  I immediately dubbed these tiny Endlers, Lucius’s Minions.

Bang For Your Buck

Last night my dad decided to order cell phones for my bro and one of my sisters.  My sister wants the Sony Walkman and it costs $30.  She was willing to pay for it because she wants an MP3 player and $30 is pretty cheap for an MP3 player.  My bro found some kind of fancy phone for free and was trying to convince my sister to look at free music player phones.  She agreed to look and found one that looked nice but my brother didn’t think it was as nice as his.  Hence the conversation that followed.

Bro-  You don’t want that one.  Get this other one, it’s cheaper.

Dad-  But they’re both free.

Bro-  Yeah, but with this one you get more bang for your non-existent buck.

Nevertheless, my sister went with the Walkman.  But my dad had to upgrade our plan first and can’t order the phones until the new plan kicks in in June.

New Way to Report Power Outages

We got a postcard in the mail the other day informing us of a new way to report power outages.  You know what it said?  Go to http://www.nyseg.com to report outages.  Right.  Next time the power’s out at my house, I’ll power up my computer and let them know…

On the same subject, my dad told me that if you go to the NY state website, there’s a button to click that says ‘Request a copy of your Birth or Death Certificate’.  I am not sure if they’ve fixed that yet.

He’ll Take the Chemistry

My brother wants to take both AP Chemistry and AP Biology next year.  I personally think he’s out of his mind, but he’s good at science so he can probably do it.  However, the classes might take place at the same time.  Since he does not own a Time-Turner, he’ll have to choose.  Up until now he had been very undecided.  On the way home from graduation he told us that he wants to take Chemistry.  Here’s how the conversation went.

Bro-  The AP Bio kids are dissecting a fetal pig tomorrow.

Me-  Ew, that’s disgusting.

Bro-  Yeah, so I think I’ll do the Chemistry.

Graduation

Well, it’s official, I am a college graduate.  I got my Associate’s Degree in Liberal Arts last night, aka the degree for those of us who had no idea what we wanted to major in.  The ceremony was nice.  It was very long, though, it went until 9:30pm and it started at 7:30pm.  It was a bit calmer than my high school graduation.  People were loud, but everyone was quiet while the speeches were taking place.  In high school, everyone talked and screamed through the speeches.  At this one, we didn’t have very many speeches.  Just the college president, state assemblywoman, and one of the students.  During graduation practice, someone announced that there weren’t going to be any long speeches and everyone started cheering.

The worst part was having to stand outside the building for 45 minutes until we started the procession.  It was chilly and rainy, but that’s to be expected.  It rained during my high school one, too.  Heck, there was a major flood just a few days after my high school graduation.  But once we were inside it was nice.  People were throwing beach balls around and they had a bunch of balloons that got dropped at the end.  There was a group of people playing the bag pipes as we left the building.

Graduation practice on the other hand was not nearly as fun.  First, I had to drive to the nearby city (my dad drove during the actual graduation) and I hadn’t really driven downtown before.  I managed to find the place, but then had to park in a parking garage.  Not something I want to do again anytime soon.  I drove in and had to pull a ticket out of a machine, but I couldn’t reach it.  I had to unbuckle and lean out the window to get the ticket.  Then when practice was over it took me over 10 minutes to get out of the garage, and then I had to pay $2 to get out.  I’ll take winding country roads any day over city driving, thank you very much.

I don’t have my actual diploma yet.  It’s going to come in the mail sometime in July after they’re sure I’ve met all the requirements for graduation.

Ode To Calculus

Calculus, oh calculus

How clearly I remember the torture you put me through

Over the last semester or two

But now it’s done

I can’t say that it was very much fun

I will not miss you, can’t you see

That I am very happy with my B

Oh, calculus, oh calculus

I am very surprised,

That my final grade was a B minus

Grades are in, and I got a B- in calc.  That’s officially my lowest grade in a college course, lower than chemistry.  But I am perfectly happy with it.  I got an A in history, fitness walking, and human development.  I got an A- in English.  The only grade that isn’t in yet is social problems.

It’s Finally Over!

Today was judgment day in calculus.  I took my final at 9:50 and it took me about an hour.  I actually knew what I was doing for most of it.  The last couple of problems were pretty hard and I guessed on them.  But after the test I was talking to one of my friends about it and I asked him what this one formula was that I couldn’t remember.  He told me and I realized that I actually guessed correctly.  So, I think I passed and I may have done decently.  My professor said she’d have grades up tomorrow.  The only thing left to do is wait.

Now I’m officially done with the semester and done with community college.  Graduation is on Thursday.  I tried to sell back a whole stack of books at the book store after my test.  They bought half of them and I got $44.50.  After that I decided to go to another book store to see if they’d buy the rest.  I had heard rumors that that book store buys any books.  Apparently the rumor is not true.  They bought one book out of the six I had left.  It was my walking class book and they gave me $2 for it.  Ugh, if I had known that I wouldn’t have bothered going, since I’m sure I spent more than $2 in gas to get there.  Now I am left with 5 books that no one will buy.  One is my chemistry book that I have tried to sell four times now.  No one wants it.  Maybe I’ll try Craigslist, although why anyone would want to buy my text books is beyond me.

But enough about text books.  Now I get to sit around all summer and hope to make more money than I spend.  Ah, summer.  I hate the insane heat, but love the vacation.  However, it doesn’t feel like summer yet.  There was a chance of snow last night and I am sitting here in a sweat shirt.  Gotta love the weather.  A few weeks ago it was almost 90 degrees, and last night it was 33.  I just hope I did decently in all my classes.  I’m sure calculus brought down my GPA, but hopefully the other classes helped off-set that.  None of my grades are up yet, so I’ll be checking quite often the next few days.  I’m guessing I won’t even know all my grades by the time graduation comes.  That’ll be pretty funny, graduating without even knowing my final grades.

By Some Miracle…

…I passed my calculus test!  I got a 52 out of 80, which is a 65%.  Not a spectacular score, but passing none the less.  My professor said we all did horrible and she wanted to cry while she was grading them.  So, I think I did all right.  I just have to hope that I do decently on the final.  If I get a 70 or higher on that, I might scrape a B in the class.  Just that final, and then I’m done with school!

Failure is Imminent

The question is not ‘did I fail my calculus test today?’, it is ‘how badly did I fail my calculus test today?’  Today was our fourth and last test, not including the comprehensive final next week.  I tried to study last night, but I just couldn’t concentrate.  There were so many other things I wanted to do, such as write fan fiction, so I only studied for about a half hour.  Of course, it did not help that my professor squeezed a whole chapter into about 2 and a half weeks of class.  I knew as soon as I saw this chapter that I would fail the test.

So I knew I would fail last night, and the day pretty much sucked in general.  I got to school and realized that I left my copy of the Constitution and the Articles of Confederation at home, sitting next to my laptop.  Since I live 20 mins away from school and there’s only 10 mins between classes, my choices were either hope that my history professor would not choose the Constitution essay, or run to the library in between classes to print them off.  I chose the latter.  I get to the library and luckily there was a computer available.  Unfortunately, it was an extremely slow computer.  I finally print off the documents and run to class.  I arrive at the classroom, out of breath, but prepared.  I needn’t have worried, however, because the professor decided to just let us choose which essay we wanted to write.  I wanted to write the one about the Revolutionary War, so the documents were unnecessary.  I left them sitting in the lobby of the building in case someone else forgot them.  They were about 20 pages long all together, so I kind of feel bad about killing a tree, but I know if I hadn’t have printed them, the professor would have picked that essay.

Then, after history, I’m walking to the dining hall and realize that I left my books in my history classroom.  I had to walk all the way back to that building and get them.  I then eat lunch and go to my walking class.  This was fairly uneventful, except that we had to walk up a monstrous hill that was steeper than the hills in my neighborhood, and that’s saying something.

I got to calculus hot, sweaty, out of breath, and thirsty, but I was on time.  I looked at the test and realized that I didn’t know how to do the first 4 problems.  Not good.  I go on to the other problems and found a couple that I thought I knew how to do.  Then I found one that I was really confident about.  It was a plug numbers into a formula and find the integral and I actually remembered the formula.  However, I plugged the integral into my calculator and the calculator’s answer was two more integrals!  It couldn’t do the problem.  I was ready to scream.  The professor wrote on the test that we were to do the integral on the calculator.  I was going to ask her about it, but I ran out of time.  I wrote down a bunch of random stuff on the remaining problems and hoped some of it was right.  Now all I can do is hope for partial credit.

Afterwards, my friend and I went to the store I work at and bought gummies.  Candy was necessary after this horrible monstrosity of a test.  I can only hope that I do better on the final.

Happy Birthday to My Favorite Mischief Maker!

Benny turned five today!  Three years ago, on Friday the 13th, we brought Benny home.  We arrived at the shelter after it closed, but someone was still there and we were able to pick him up.  The past three years have flew by in a whirlwind of trouble and fun.  In the past three years, he has destroyed expensive objects, chewed up numerous slippers, broken cabinets, opened doors, gotten into the fridge, eaten our food, and eaten things that shouldn’t be eaten.  But he has stolen our hearts.  Despite all the mischief and his insanity, we love him and we wouldn’t have it any other way.  Who knows what the next three years will bring?  Happy Birthday to my big fluffy dork of a dog!

Here he is the day after we brought him home.

And here he is now.