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ugavakiwi
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Name: Laurie
Country: United States
State: Florida
Metro: Jacksonville
Birthday: 9/30/1985
Gender: Female
Interests: slurpees, music, shopping, running, sunshine, TOYPing, wakeboarding, skiing, being a nerd, organizing, pushing the snooze button, demolishing bathrooms, changing my mind, travelling, the color pink
Expertise: procrastinating
Occupation: student
Message: message meEmail: email me
Member Since:
5/27/2004
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| things that make me happy today:
1. pomegranates, even when they squirt juice all over my face.
2. the giant frog that just lept onto the window with a bang.
3. the gig i played tonight and last night. even though the choir kept coming in pretty much whenever they felt like it, a few measures early or a few measures late, and the conductor would give each measure however many beats he felt like giving it. one of the pieces was in 6/8 and he chose to conduct the entire thing in 4. at least he was consistent. anyway, the hallelujah chorus was at the end, and everyone stood up, and that made me very happy. i like playing my bass.
4. i also like playing my oboe.
5. our friends who came all the way from ohio and michigan! they were here from wednesday night until this morning and we got to show them around st. augustine and hang out. there was one point when alyssa and i were leaving to go SHOPPING, like real girl shopping which i never get to do, and then armin and peter were in the living room playing music, and ben was in his sleeping bag on a Vision Quest, and i really felt like all was right with the world. and they were all excited about palm trees and sunshine. and we had a fondue picnic. it was all very good.
6. peter's promotion!! finally, after almost a year of working full-time hours, he is being recognized as a full-time employee, plus he is actually getting paid as much as other people who do the things he does (except no one else actually does all the things he does...). and he can work overtime when they ask him to without getting yelled at. so this is all good. i am very proud of him for working so hard and being so patient over the past year.
7. driving in my car and listening to the radio. tonight i was driving home from my gig in palatka and i was switching between my two favorite radio stations. every time the music stopped on x102.9, they would play an ad ripping on planet radio, and i would get sick of listening to talking and switch to planet radio. then when the music stopped on planet radio, they would start talking about how they played less commercials than x102.9, and i would switch back to 102.9 to try to hear music. i think this was exactly the opposite of what the ads were trying to get me to do. in any case, i like music. :)
8. the winter wonderland. this is a very hot attraction in st. augustine during december. people pay $10 to ice skate in a tiny little rink outdoors with about 200 other people, and they pay $5 to go down an ice slide that is about 20 feet high. people like me from up north go just to laugh at how pathetic this attempt at winter is. they were even selling snow cones. i don't know if they caught the irony of that?
9. i don't have to go back to school for 2.5 weeks!
10. we might actually get to go to south carolina for christmas with peter's family, instead of being stuck here. hooray!
11. i just realized that pomegranate juice is splattered not only on my face, but on my desk and on the wall behind my desk. perhaps it is time to sign off and go clean that up.
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| i'm thinking if i had had any idea two years ago what grad school would have been like, i never would have come here. and i'm also thinking that i am SO glad i did. does that make any sense? it's good to remember every now and then that i really have no idea what is best for me.
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| third semester! already! i can’t believe it. i survived second semester, just barely. i think i spent the entire four months feeling like i was on a treadmill that was going too fast. i never quite got on top of things. and part of that was my fault, because i was being a slacker. summer is just so hot that all i wanted to do was loaf around. the only times it wasn’t hot was when it was thunderstorming, and i don’t know about you, but when it is thunderstorming during the day all i want to do is sleep. so that made for a very unproductive summer. but i made it through and my grades turned out fine and now i am a third of the way done with my master’s degree. hooray!
i flew away as soon as i finished my last exam. first we went to chicago to hang out with christine and jon and then we moved on to GR to see everyone else. it was so good to reconnect with a lot of different people. the best friends, i think, are the people who you can go months without seeing and know that they’ll still be your friends later on. it is good to know who those people are when you live in a strange land and you get lonely sometimes.
(of course, the problem with being in grand rapids for only about three days was that i ended up very full. there was one day when i went out with different people for all three meals plus ice cream. oy. people need to find ways to socialize other than eating together, i reckon. but it was all yummy.)
anyhow, i left grand rapids and spent a glorious week at big star lake. it was quite chilly in fact, but i didn’t mind as it was a nice break from the sauna i live in here. i went wakeboarding with my clothes on one evening because it was kind of unplanned, and it was so calm that i just kept going and going and going and afterward i was so sore i couldn’t even pull my pajama pants on. the rest of the week it was far too cold and rainy to do any wakeboarding, but that was okay because i was at my favorite place in the world. i got to sit in a chair and do puzzles and watch the orioles eat at the bird feeder. that’s really what life is about.
now! i am in jacksonville, everyone’s favorite overgrown city. more specifically i am sitting on the most comfortable couch known to mankind, which resides in the lobby of the news studio where my husband works. let me tell you about the news industry. it is STRANGE. peter worked 90 hours last week (yes, that means 50 hours of overtime) because big news happened in southern georgia and he is one of two people at the station who knows how to operate the satellite truck. (the other one is currently in peru.) so he was supposed to have tuesday evening free so he could come get me from the airport in orlando, but instead the station paid one of their producers to take six hours and come get me so peter wouldn’t have to leave. i suppose they love him, but they do have odd ways of showing it.
anyway, peter has come to this brilliant conclusion that the news industry is the only place where you have nerds and beautiful people working side by side. of course, i told him that he was both a nerd and a beautiful person. but it is kind of funny, because every time i have been to a live shot or even in the studio, there are a few women (and sometimes men) sitting with a mirror, touching up their hair and makeup before going on air, and then there are a bunch of other people running around with cables and cameras and microphones and things, and it is pretty clear where the division is. yes. it is a beautiful thing to see everyone come together, no?
also, there are portraits on the wall of this lobby of all of the anchors here, and i successfully picked out which is the sports guy and which is the weather guy. i have never seen the news, but you can just tell. the sports guy looks like a sports guy. the weather guy looks like a weather guy. is that horrible?
other than that. i decided that if my husband has left me for a satellite truck, i might as well take up a productive hobby to entertain myself. it just happened that while i was in michigan, peter went out and bought another guitar. (i am sure he is going to turn out like his stepfather, who left the house one day in a car and came home on foot with a new guitar.) so i decided to learn to play guitar! it is so much fun. it’s not as hard as i thought it would be. i am just learning chords and playing lots of songs and it’s quite satisfying. i just have to get over my bass player mindset, because i still think of everything in terms of the bass line and that isn’t really how it works. i also have to grow larger hands, which is something i never managed to do in all my years of playing bass. perhaps i would be better off with a ukulele? | | |
| it's july! even late july, i reckon. and that means i've lived in this place for well over a year. i am more than a quarter of the way through grad school, and more than a third of the way through my classes, and more than halfway through my time here. not that i'm counting... or at least, i wouldn't be if it weren't for this pathology exam i have in the morning. pathology is just exceptionally uninteresting to me. i keep studying less and less. i've pulled it off so far, but each time i become more and more concerned about what might happen to me.
BUT! it's just grades, right?
now i just have to start thinking about where i want to go and what i want to do for my internships. two internships, three months each, anywhere from florida to idaho to new hampshire, in acute care or hand therapy or nursing homes or mental health or schools. i start in june of 2010. it seems way too early to be thinking about this, but the important people tell me i have to.
florida, as it happens, is kind of hot this time of year. i keep trying to go to the beach, and every time i get all geared up to go and then it ends up raining. in fact, on saturday, peter and i had gone outside and set the beach towels on top of the car, and then we went back inside to get our suits and sunscreen and all those goodies, and then it was storming and our towels were floating across the parking lot. so we went to the ripley's museum instead. it was pretty silly, but we only had to pay $5 to get in since we're residents (they charge tourists $16) and it was a nice diversion. then we went to the pizza garden, which has TASTY TASTY pizza, and there happened to be live music, and the musicians happened to be the guys from the beach with whom we used to play jazz. so they invited us up to play some music. it was a lot of fun. despite the fact that i am in grad school here with 300-some other 20-somethings, i fit in much better when i am playing jazz with 60-year-olds. go figure. oh well. by the way, peter played his hands for the last song. he was a hit.
as far as that whole fitting in thing goes. it's a strange place, eh? i feel much more connected to my classmates than i did last semester, especially the other OT students. (we are kind of the violists of the school, if you know what i mean.) but i don't feel like there are any life-long bonds coming out of this. peter and i have talked about it and in a lot of ways it's just as well. i like my down time and i don't know if i'd get enough of that if i were out playing beer pong with my cohort (which has about zero appeal to me anyway). and it's good for the whole marriage thing. i really think it is. we've been able to focus on each other quite a bit. that's not a bad way to spend the first year or two of our marriage. after i'm done with school, we'll re-evaluate, and probably move somewhere other than northeast florida, but for the moment, i've made my peace with being here.
oh yeah, did i mention that it is hot here? and yet i'm supposed to start my marathon training in three weeks? running here is great during rainstorms, but the rest of the time the heat is just relentless. i read that for every five degrees above 60, you should take 20-30 seconds off your mile pace. so if it's 95 and i'm not that fast of a runner to begin with... well, i guess that leaves me walking. i usually just settle for shorter distances and figure that if i can do three or four miles in the blazing sunlight i'd be able to do at least six in normal conditions. my favorite is going to jacksonville beach and running along the edge of the water, where the sand is packed down. it's ridiculously crowded all the time, so i'm always dodging little kids and splashing over sand castles, and it's always at least 90 degrees, but being able to jump in the ocean afterwards makes it all worth it. really. i would go so far as to call it euphoric. you should try it sometime.
anyway, i know not many people use this whole xanga thing anymore, but it's here for the reading if you like, and it's a good procrastinatory device for me either way... :)
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| pleasing:
1. i just tutored someone in physiology for 1.5 hours, and i actually enjoyed it. i have to pretend i am not getting paid to do it (because minimum wage in florida is really quite pathetic) and then i realize that i learn a lot from doing this stuff over again. there is also a good amount of pleasure in knowing that i'm doing something i never thought i'd be able to do. physiology has never been my thing.
2. running on the beach! i've been doing some barefoot running (only on the beach so far) and it is hard work, especially in that oppressive florida sun, but it feels sooooo good to jump in the ocean afterward. one of the best things about running is that you can just put on your shoes and go. if you take shoes out of the picture, you can just go. i like that.
3. i like having my husband home in the evenings. in the past, he would be gone 6-7 evenings every week. these days he is limited to 4 days a week in jacksonville, and two of those are daytime photography which means he gets home by 8 and we can still have dinner. he also hasn't been at papa john's in a month. they are so flexible - they're fine with him just coming back at the end of june when all our travels are over. it is so nice to actually SEE that boy during the week.
4. only 9 days till i go to ohio, and 15 till i go to michigan! i can't wait to see some good old friends and family!
displeasing:
1. my lab partner for cadaver lab. he is a stereotypical male PT student in every way possible. he finds me in the hallway on lab days, without fail, just to say, "YOU READY TO GO AFTER THAT BRACHIAL PLEXUS, LAURIE?" or something comparable. you can just tell that he wears polos and khaki shorts every day,
even when he is on semester break, and that he gets up at 8 am on
saturdays to study. i am a good enough student, but i wear sweats and crocs when i am off campus, and i usually spend saturday mornings sleeping or going to the flea market or playing video games with peter. actually, i spend as much time as possible NOT studying. i think my lab partner lives to make me feel like a bad student. at least he gives me something to laugh about outside of class.
2. they are putting up siding in front of our condo, which i don't really understand, since they cut lawn care out of our budget, but whatever. the displeasing part is that the workers trampled one of our few remaining plants. it was all nice and pink and now it is just smushed into the ground. that saddens me.
3. dead fish. andrew is lonely now.
4. i need to make some mischief. i miss this sort of thing:
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