A Place my Fics call Home

( My Fics )

Yup, all my fics. *grins*  

There is something seriously irritating about someone who goes into the lab, knowing you're still running experiments, messes with your set up without asking if you are still using it, and then LEAVES IT LIKE THAT. And when asked to please put the damn tank back when he's done, says something like, "Oh sorry, you should have told me when you want it back." And then DOES NOT PUT IT BACK. AND ALSO logs into the computer and WALKS OFF WITHOUT BOTHERING TO LOG OFF.

Which somehow means that he has the right to log me off the computer if he happens to see it logged on. And therefore it's my fault for not leaving a note on the computer saying in giant letters "DO NOT LOG OFF RUNNING FUCKING MATLAB".

It's been a couple of rather annoying days, I guess. I had wanted to go to the International Markets today, but because of this kind of entertaining antics on the part of my labmate and certain workpersons who think having possession of a master key meant they could waltz into any lab they wanted and dick around, because of these terribly considerate people, I now have to conduct my experiments on the weekend. Which means that I couldn't go to the markets and had to ask a friend to do my shopping for me instead.

So - a couple of annoying days, my weekends going kaputt, and then there's that whole period thing that happened in the middle of the week. Oh, and the weather is playing havoc, what with a short cold summer being eaten at both sides by long cool spring and autumn, and yet winter has yet to show up. In fact it's actually warmer now than it was at the tail end of the summer. It's getting very annoying, and the changeable weather being cold at night and sunny-warm in the day time is probably not good for my health or sinuses.

On the other hand, on Friday I got a whole steelhead trout, minus the head. For free. There was me, carting a big fish as long as my arm home wrapped in three layers of plastic.

Aaaaall for me.

AND I baked it tonight, in salt, pepper, generous amounts of garlic and hua diao jiu (Rice wine) till the fish all but melted under the fork. Totally made up for the scales in my hair.

I wish I had more Remy fic. I also want to RP Remy with people, or just write him, but i'm not sure what. I just want to read more of X-Men fic, TF2 fic, GW fic, or something, and write.

So of course my arm is startinng to hurt again.

Thank you arm!

Title: Meet the Flash
Fandom: Marvel/X-Men, DC/The Flash, mention of Naruto
Rating: PG.
Notes: So I wanted to write a bit of Remy, and Momo said, Remy meeting Flash! So I took Remy from her fic; well, more my version of Remy, and ... threw him off walmart.



There was, Remy thought, something deeply annoying about people who were fast.

Oh, there was fast, fast and slick; Remy himself was fast, light fingered and dropped out of sight with the goods with barely a whisper of his scent in the air when a target turned around.

But that was normal, that was a Thief's pride.

( This? Was just too much. )

Today...

Today is a bad day.

It didn't start out too bad - but I did have a somewhat ominous dream, wherein I was teachig a bunch of kids in Japan, in a school in the valley surrounded by mountains, which got crushed in an avalanche. I could somehow rewind this, and managed to tell my students if they heard rocks to get out. So we were mostly saved, but the Japanese help services weren't terribly helpful.

Then I woke up, and got an email from my prof - apparently some people had been dicking around in the lab, when I had put up a sign not to enter, and left the lights on. But that was okay, I thought, fish in dark room, etc. Should be fine.

Made to leave, and found a countainer in my fridge had tipped over and spilled soy sauce all over the bottom. At least it wasn't a rotting fruit oozing brown liquid, and it was only 5 minutes to clean up. Wasn't too bad a mood.

But then I got to school, and was told that not only had those idiots been in the lab, they had been electricians, and were actually fucking around with the electrical points of ALL of the lab. God knows why, because construction was going on in the lab across the hall, not MY lab. And they had not only fucked around with the lights, they'd opened the dark-room curtains of my experiment, fussed around till the tank was actually shifted out of place. And as an added touch of assholery, had disconnected the printer.

So all of today's recording is really a formality, and is completely useless.

Thank you, bastards. Next time i should set up yellow alarm tape all around my experiment just to make sure assholes who can't read don't go near it. Hell, maybe I should get some barb wire and mine the lab because dammit is it too much to ask that people don't go messing into labs without permission? It's as if the school gave them the keys to do construction and they take it as free permission to go into any lab they deem fit and unplug anything they found! What if I had a fish that was on electrical support, huh? Or a heated tank?

That would be Good bye fish, time for a funeral.

At least I managed to get my department to deal with my final travel arrangements to Seattle. I had a mini-sad-face when I realised that I couldn't book a ticket to Japan for my best friend's wedding because the costs were insane for a few days, and I couldn't go for a week because my uni has a stupid schedule of super long semesters, stingy breaks, and fuck all consideration for students and staff.

I can't wait for my masters to be over and I can get my fat ass out of the US.

***

On the other hand, I sent my mother and sister a tin of cookies on Saturday, and they recieved it yesterday. They were so excited that they devoured and demolished the first bag without even noticing that the second bag had nutless cookies.

At least some people are happy this week.

Sunday 1st November 2009
So let's see what I've done so far.

Not much, really. The Indian dance group couldn't use me in the dance, so I have free time (yay). I've finished my poster yesterday, and sent it to my prof. Hopefully she approves of it. It was horribly fiddly, because of the huge poster size, and then Excel just hates copying the graphs over accurately. I'm starting to think I might have to draw my graphs by hand. The presentations would be next week, so... fun times all around.

I've cooked soy sauce chicken (and it needs a whole lot less soy sauce. oops), as well as Chinese Herbal Chicken soup. Bought a bicycle helmet, so now if I get run over, my head would be intact. Or the back of my skull, anyway. It was warm two days ago, and now it's suddenly not. I'm slowly trying to use up the stuff in my fridge so I can do shopping again - but it'll be slow going because I'm just so tired these days.

What else, what else. I had the H1N1 flu vaccine yesterday. My friend S called me at quarter to one and asked if I wanted to go to the free clinic.

Me: Oh.... OH. It's today? SURE. When are you coming?
S: Now? I'll be there in 7 minutes.
Me: *in nightie.* Righto.
4 minutes later
Me: *dressed and ready and has purse and phone in a shoulder sling bag*

Indeed. It takes me only 4 minutes to get ready. Another three to brush my teeth and clip up my hair and I'm ready to go. It's why it always amazes me that the stereotype of women is that they take hours to get ready. It amazes me that anyone would take more than 15 minutes to get ready, unless they really take that long to get up. Or get moving. Or something. I've gone from bed to out of the door to school in less than 10 minutes, and that included me sneaking online a moment. Just... hmm.

Of course I'm a student, so I don't need to worry too much about presentable clothing. Granted, almost all my wardrobe is presentable because someone went and tossed out most of my old teeshirts and donated them to either Church or the ragpile. (Mum and Scorpio, I'm looking at you.) And that was even before I had to pick and choose what to take with me when I went to the US. I am going to whittle down my wardrobe even more when I am ready to go home.

Otherwise... I'm glad it's a rather warm, long start to winter? It hasn't snowed yet, which I count as good. It was a cold summer, a cool but long autumn, and hopefully a warmish winter.

I'm also thinking of taking a fun class this coming spring. Definitely taking ice-skating, but I'm not sure what else I can take. I did think about taking guitar, but it was full. :( There's workshops in continuing ed, for ukelele and mountain dulcimer, but these are one-day workshops, and they probably wouldn't be very helpful. But a cute little ukelele might be better than a guitar, especially considering how much trouble I had with my brothers' guitars. In addition to ice-skating, i'm also considering French, Russian or Spanish. Scorpio's taking French, (and ice-skating) because these are harder to take for free back home, and it'd be nice to be able to move backwards on ice. Maybe it'd even translate over to rollerblades? And it'd be nice if Scorpio and I could converse in other languages too, especially since both our third langauges are different.

I speak as if I'm brilliantly multi-lingual. I'm not. XD I'm only really fluent in English - I can speak passably in Mandarin Chinese, and very Basic German. My sister does much better in Chinese than me, and probably has a better grasp of Japanese, especially since I think she took maybe two years of it to my one year in German. ANd she'd end up taking French for a year compared to my one semseter if I took French. Also, Gemini's been learning French on his own, on-and-off. Maybe it'd be good to take French after all.

I don't particularly care for all those tones and spelling that doesn't make sense, however. Ah well.

So lately things have been a bit hectic. I nearly got run over by a car on Thursday. I was cycling across the road at the traffic light (i don't cycle on the road itself, it's asking to be run over by college students in giant fucking cars), and then this car suddenly cut in from the right. Technically the car is ... fine doing that? Because the traffic has stopped from the left-right direction, and it was turning right on a green light. But it was turning on a pedestrian crossing. It was so close that I actually had to swerve off onto the road or else I'd be T-boning the damn car. Or the car would smack my face off. The driver was on the phone and drove off with no indication that they'd noticed they'd ALMOST RAN ME OVER. Not even slowing down to take the damn turn. Just turned. If someone had been crossing from the other side they'd be roadkill.

The driver after that one looked equally shocked, and I sat there in the middle of the road on my bike staring at the car's ass, thinking, "Damn, I want cursewords."

Stupid. Stupid. College students and their idiotic need to talk on phones everywhere they go.

( In cooking related news, I have a new frying pan. )

I also learned how to make yogurt from my Indian friends. I had never thought it was possible to make it - in Singapore, for some reason, my dad said it's hard to do - I suspect it's the humidity and the difficulty in keeping the temperature even at 43degC for yogurt incubation unless you made one specially? Certainly you could make yogurt drinks though, by mixing some Yakult or yogurt in with milk and standing it near the stove for a bit. But the key is the boiling of the milk to kill any bacteria, I think.

( Yoghurt recipe )

( Schoolwise - my students are stupid. )

( Other school news involves the fact that I'm going to be presenting my research as a poster to the school on the 5th November. )

( My mother is at my sister's place right now - she's been there since the end of September. )

In final news. there's a fly in my room. And has been for over a week. And no matter how I hop around like a demented bunny, the fly would not leave.

It's getting to the point that I'm going to bring my bike in, and let the spider that's living under the gear shift build a web and eat the damn fly.

Shuang Jue died yesterday. He'd been doing very poorly, lethargic, swimming vertically (as opposed to horizontally), and choking a lot on his food.

He deteriorated very rapidly over the course of a week - unlike Suien whose death seemed a bit more sudden. Or maybe I just noticed the signs more readily after Suien.

I only had Shuang Jue for just over a month; I guess I'm not as terribly attached to him - especially considering that I knew he had a kink in his spine, and that he was quite probably not a very robust fish, unlike Suien.

Still, he deserves a tribute post, which I'll make sometime this week when I have time.

In school related news, I'm being rapidly exhausted by all my experiments and analysis. When they are finally done it'd wouldn't be too soon either.

There's also a school-wide research symposium coming up, on the 5th of November. Deadline to apply is this Friday. Then there's a department research retreat, that is on the 7th November, deadline to submit is next Friday.

So basically, my prof wants me to attend and present at both of these, in addition to the one in January, at Seattle.

This means that I'm going to end up having to give the same poster presentation three times.

I'm just exhausted thinking about it - but the practise will be good, I think. In a way, I suppose Shuang Jue's death came at a good time - it means I don't have to worry about taking care of him while putting my poster together, and won't have to find a sitter for him when I visit my sister over Thanksgiving AND when going home for the winter break.

That does make me seem rather callous, doesn't it?

My wrist is still doing okay - occasional tingles in my last two fingers when I leave my hand out of the immobilizer for extended periods of time, so I am trying to make myself remember to use it as often as possible, but still getting enough exercising into my wrist. First Saturday of "no computer day" trial didn't quite work - but I managed to stay off the computer for the whole morning at least!

I'll try again this Saturday - but school work and analysis is not making this easy.

I've finally booked my flight to my sister's for Thanksgiving - I feel so lazy. I should have done it earlier because now I have to pay about $450 for it, but... ngah, I guess it doesn't matter. I could have used AMTRAK or the greyhound but I don't fancy sitting on the bus for 9 hours.

Next flights I have to book are to my sister's again in December, and then back from her place in January. Then there's a flight I may or may not book in the end of December to Japan to see my Best Friend's wedding. I hate airlines - I hate them so much. But I hate the American airlines I've used so far because they just delight in giving me crap schedules and crappier costs. SIA is a bit more competitive in that respect, and doesn't do shitty schedules either.

Of course, SIA is just about Singapore's only large, global airline. If they didn't have world-class standards it'd be just sad. AirNZ is almost on par with SIA too, but AirNZ is really NZ's only airline. I just haven't met another airline that broke my luggage wheels, is what I'm saying.

I've just cleaned Shuang Jue's tank, changed a good 90% of his water.

He does not have the right to look at me forlornly after I've cleaned up all the dirt from the bottom - I just changed his tank yesterday! He's the dirtiest fish ever.

It is not my fault the little bastard decided that "Tear food pellet into messy bits and spread it all over the tank" is appropriate table manners.

Clearly he's been bred for looks, not brains. His mouth is almost HALF the size of his eyeball, for goodness sake.

A fun tidbit that is completely irrelevant to Shuang Jue: if you shock a blind cavefish often enough, it'd puke.

The fun things you learn in biology and aversive training!

For more than a week my right wrist and forearm had been giving me trouble. Aching in the wrist, a dull pain, sometimes going up my forearm and even my upper arms sometimes, especially if I rested my forearms on the edge of the table or my thighs.

Finally I gave in, and went to see the doctor - the internet had scared me with tales of carpal tunnel, and it was aching/hurting almost constantly by Thursday that I couldn't sleep on my right side anymore.

The doctor said that I had overused my wrists, and need to rest often (20 minutes per hour of computer use), wear a wrist immobilizer , and take some anti-inflammatory pills. Which is a relief, since that's what I read on the internet.

So my ibuprofen pills cost me 41 cents, my immobilizer is apparently free? Or was I supposed to show the box to the people to pay for it? I'm not sure.

But now my left arm's getting into the act. Stupid left hand.

ANyway. My right wrist is feeling better, a bit weak sometimes, but I'll try to keep to a good resting schedule. 3 times a day, eight hours inbetween ibuprofen pills are a little difficult to manage though, especially since I must take with food. Eating at 8am, 4pm, and 12 pm is rather impossible for my metabolism. Gah.

So I'm taking two pills a day, with about 8 hours in between, and now I've run out of milk.

Ah well.

This is going to put a serious cramp in my ability to write now. :(

Oh, and to make things fun, Shuang Jue has gone and acquired fin rot, because he shits a lot even if I only feed him a pellet everyday, and rolls in it. It's like I need to get him a proper cave because he'd rather lie on the floor of the tank amongst his poop rather than lie on the nice leaves of the fake plants I got him.

Damn these fish are spoilt.

Drabbles, because imepic said I oughta.

( 1. Dr Who, Naruto, Pern )


( 2. Dr Who, Naruto, Star Wars, Star Trek, Wee Free Men (Terry Pratchett) )

It really is hard to keep your drabbles 100 words long. o.O

I had a picnic with my department (not really my department, but I straddle the Biological sciences and the neurosciences because I study the behaviour of blind cavefish), so I had to post-pone my pizza adventures with my friend, which I'd scheduled for Friday evening. I felt really bad about it, because I knew how much I was looking forward to it, I knew my friend had to be anticipating it as well! So I promised that I'd bake cookies to share.

The picnic was nice - it was held in City Park - which is a rather small park by my standards, but rather nice and green nonetheless, and it had tables and chairs so I was happy. I was not quite so happy with the hornets that apparently wanted my apple cider, though. The organizing grad students made most of the food, which was very good, and I had wanted to make cookies to contribute something. Unfortunately when I came back that afternoon raring to bake, I found out I barely had a cup of flour, let alone four cups needed to make a decent batch of cookies. What was worse was that I'd been to Goodwill to buy a mixing bowl (and incidently, three pretty skirts), just so I could make the cookies, and Krogers was right next door, so I was kicking myself. So no cookies.

( Pictures! under the cut! And cookies and pizza! )

( Cookie Recipe! )

Yesterday I finally buckled down and wrote a long, weepy, hormone ridden letter of how useless I am, how worthless, how I felt like I couldn't get anything done, and how I wouldn't be worthy of doing a PhD at any university to my father.

Because... I don't know. I didn't want to ask my mother for help because she always gives useless and annoying advice as if she was the authority of everything, and she isn't, and gets upset if I told her no.

So I emailed my father.

And he replied that he'd been expecting this - it happened to him at every cross road of life in academia, where he wasn't sure if he could take on a Masters or a PhD. He'd expected me to have it, nearing the end of my masters.

Can you believe that? It's like my father knows everything.

He also told me that I should try for the zoo jobs I'd found online, and not worry about starting a PhD immediately - I could just mooch around after my masters, for example, and come home when my visa ran out. I could find a job at home and work for a change of pace. I could just wait.

It feels so good to hear that. To know that I wouldn't disappoint my father if I didn't do a PhD. To know that he wouldn't judge, that he'd support me in whatever I do, and he still loves me.

Somehow... this is what is really gets me. My father loves me - would support me. Before I sent that letter, I wondered if I should pray. But God has never answered my prayers, and God has never spoken to me. And while my father will not always be there (unlike what God purportedly claims), my father always answers his emails, and for as long as he can he will support me. God doesn't send an email saying that he loves me and that he'll support me. But my father did.

And this is why when I have problems, I turn to real people, instead of prayer.

I could talk about how my students really are set on driving me up the wall (they don't know basic maths - how long is one ocular unit if at 40x magnification 1 mm is 3.5 units? - they dont know how to follow basic draw one cell with straight lines no shading, and I have cells that look like an explosion of cotton wool) but then, I don't really need to care about them. If they really want to try harder, they would.

(  So I'll talk about Shuang Jue. Shuang Jue's my new betta! )

There's something completely heady about being a TA, I think. Especially in a first year class such as this.

Next week we're going to have a real fun lab, and my brats are going to be real scientists.

That is, I'm going to hand them sharp knives and an onion and tell them to knock themselves out.

Man, I remember my very first light microscope, and the plastic slides I had, and how I'd swab my own cheek cells and pinch onions from the kitchen to get some nice slides of cells...

Which I did when I was twelve. I was a sciency brat, I suppose, and really liked all things biology, especially colourful encyclopedia pictures. Don't know how I ended up doing ecology/marine/fish biology when I was so enamoured of dinosaurs and fetal development when I was a kid, but there you go.

Anyway, the brats get to feel like real scientists, and I get to not feel like a complete fraud in trying to teach them how to calculate ocular units for when staring at tiny bitty things through several hundred magnification.

There're also toothpicks for the enterprising and curious student to swab cheek cells, but I don't think we'd cover that, because I think it's dangerous enough as it is, handing them scalpels and telling them to have fun with onions. I don't need them stabbing a toothpick through their jaws.

Then after that I get to grade them on how nicely they can draw onion cells to scale. Joy.

So last night, I was puddling around the internet, and it suddenly struck me that I was sure that there were four archangels, but I couldn't figure out who the last one was - there was Raphael, Gabriel, and Michael, but dang if I could remember the fourth one.

So I looked it up on wikipedia, and mentioned archangels to Momo...

And she wanted Angelslashfic.

She said she'd give me crack if I did.

I admit, I was weak, I was tempted.

Then i spoke to nobiki about God and his angels and how some angels went down to earth to begat children and...

It went a trifle downhill from there.

And now you have this.

Title: The Morning Report
Warnings: Crack, This is really momo's fault, blasphemy, hints of implied kink and BDSM and sex. and Michael. And Abuse of capitals.

( God, also known as Yahweh, also known as Jehovah, sometimes known as Lord Father, other times as Creator of Heaven and Earth, used to be known as The One until that movie went and gave that title away to some pasty skinny guy, sat back in his throne of gold and clouds and frowned. )

Saturday, August 29th 2009. In a month and four days, I would have had Suien for a year.



I remember last year, I was so giddy for a pet, wanting and researching for months even before I actually came to the US, wanting to make sure I knew exactly what to do for my very own betta. Wanting to make sure I didn't kill him by overfeeding like we did when we were kids to those poor goldfish in the bowl. I would dream about his tiny, tiny tank, with a little filter, and glass pebbles at the bottom, and plants growing gently in the water, as my betta swam in the water, long flowing fins in green and blue irridescent shimmered in the water.

Then on November 3rd, 2008, I finally geared up my courage, and bought all the necessary things. A tank. a filter. A heater. A bunch of pebbles, some plants. And a fish.

He was nothing at all like I thought I'd get. He was red, a solid plain red. He was smaller than I thought he would be, and less dressy with his fins. His tail was a beautiful flame like veil, though, and he was beautiful in a subdued way.

I wasn't completely a good fish-owner - I should have let the water cycle for a month before getting him. I should have let it at least run through the filter for 24 hours before putting him int the tank. But i was so impatient, I bought him and the tank the same day, because there was no way I wanted to go to the pet store again and pay for a $7 two way trip because I didn't have a car.

But Suien survived that. He loved his tank, though it was pretty bare at first. And because he seemed so happy, I couldn't help but go and get him a little cave. I remember spending half an hour trying to figure out if I wanted to get him an actual cave, or a hollow log with some plants on it for him to swim around on. The plants with log won.

I found out that he hated flakes, though he tried to eat them when I realised I hadn't bought fish food. I biked for an hour to the petstore to get him betta pellets, and ee spat out the pellets when I first dropped them in. I finally found out that he'd only eat them if the pellets were soaked before hand for a few minutes.

Things happened as he settled in, and life got busy. Winter came, but he was good in the water, the heater keeping him warm. I went to visit my sister in winter, and gave him to a friend to take care of for those two weeks. He was so stressed when he came back, that half his tail fell off. He looked stricken, and I felt horrible. I started changing his water twice a week, instead of once every two weeks, because I wanted him to grow his tail back. He got a mild attack of fungus, and I went out and bought fungal treatment and aquarium salt. It went away, and I changed his water every week, and bought him a bottle of dried bloodworms for treats.

He never did grow his tail back entirely. I think he managed about maybe just less than two thirds of his original length. He seemed happy. Maybe he was stressed out by the weekly changes. Maybe I had overdosed him on aquarium salt. Maybe he was just old - the day before yesterday, he had been having some trouble swimming straight, and rested a lot on the bottom of his tank, only rousing when I dropped food onto the water surface, his colour not quite as strong when I first got him. Pet store bettas are usually a year or older because that was when bettas matured and grew their beautiful finnage.

So maybe he passed away in his sleep last night. Or maybe I killed him by too much stress, physical or chemical. But I think... I like to think.... that he was happy, at least while he was with me.

( Suien. )

Suien's dead.

I was thinking of changing his water today, but when I turned on the lamp, he was curled on the floor of his tank, stiff and dead and faded.

*sigh*

School started again this week, and I had thought it'd pass pretty normally. It almost did.

But first, on Sunday, I went and sliced the tip of my thumb while chopping fish. It didn't bleed a whole lot, but it bled and I knew it was going to sting like woah later. It was not fun.

And then because it was Sunday, the day before school started, I figured I might as well hem my jeans. my black jeans have really long legs, and I keep folding them up. The left leg had started to fray? Wear away at the fold, so I cut it off along the tear, and then sliced the other leg to match. Then I tried to hem the edge, thinking that it might be too much bother to actually fold it and hem it properly.

And because I haven't been sewing for a long time, and most certainly not by hand, I stabbed myself. With the needle. Three times. In the same finger.

If I'd done it in the same spot I'd probably throw the jeans out.

That was that, and it wasn't so bad, I suppose, but it certainly wasn't an auspicious start to the new week, though Sunday is technically a weekend.

Then on Monday, after I started my experiment at school, did some stuffs, I came home and clogged my toilet.

Well, the toilet does that on a regular basis, though since I'd changed toilet paper it only does it twice a month instead of once a week, so off I went to get a toilet plunger.

And then I realised I'd locked myself out. Without my keys. In my nightie.

Yeeeeeeah. Not at all an auspicious day. Or beginning for the new semester.

On the other hand, Tuesday, yesterday, was my first day of TAing a lab. 30 brand new first year brats, and in an effort to be hardworking and to do the best by my kids, I went to the 8.30am lab to watch Pavel, another TA handle his class. Needless to say, it was probably the most boring two hours of lab I'd ever had, and I was perfectly pleased to realise that I didn't really need to prepare much for this particular lab. Then I went off to do my experiment, and then off to class at 1.30pm, which finished at 2.15pm.

So when 2.30pm rolled round, I trotted to open my lab, and let in my brats. Um wow, I had never actually used a chalk board since primary school, and I really hadn't grown at all, because damn if I couldn't reach more than 2/3 of the board. I felt like an idiot. But I gave my name and email to the students, and started in on a very quick and dirty explanation on scientific notation. They did well, managing to get almost all the answers correct, which was pretty good... if they were secondary school students. Dear lord, I couldn't believe I had to teach first year college students this. On the other hand, it meant I didn't have to do anything for lesson plans.

Then I went into metric units and that was even better. The way the kids wrote down every word I said told me that they'd never actually used metric at all, didn't remember anything if they'd heard about it from High School, and they didn't even show a glimmer of recognition when I brought up the 1GB = 1000 MB = 1x10^6 KB thing, let alone when I started in on kilometers and kilograms.

The US needs to get its butt off its hands and actually overhaul the system and get with the rest of the world. If it wants to believe it's the best country in the world, leading edge technology and all, then the least it could do is actually get with the standard international units that everyone else in the scientific/academic world is using to make things easier. One of the accomplishments of the First Emperor of China was, despite his rather horrid personality (well, no Emperor is ever very nice anyway) standardizing the written language and measurements/weights/axle lengths of the world. And because he was a controlling tyrant with a hell lot of power, he made it happen.

Frankly, seeing blank looks from kids who are at least 18 years old when I talk about meters, centimeters, liters, and kilometers, makes me want to beat my head against the blackboard. I don't even dare bring up deciliters - it might break their little brains. I despair for the education of high schools in this area - and even barring the horrible lack of education in metric systems? The US needs to standardize its education. Apparently this lab is needed, because the prof can give them a very simple quiz, and 40% of them can fail it. We can test them on microscopes, and they will fail to be able to focus the stupid thing.

And I used to think UoA was bad.

As for my teaching abilities... Well, I can only hope that I did okay. When I pose some questions for them to solve, everytime they get it wrong my heart dies a little inside.

Me: So what is 0.00053 in scientific notation?
Student: eeeeh. 1 x 10^-3?
Me: *dies* Um. Not really.
Students: *laugh*
Me: *weak smile, dying more inside*

At least I entertain them.

Ahahahahahaha... I locked myself out of my room.

Apparently my room is the only room ever to have the self-locking door left in my whole ... apartments, and I went and locked myself out.

At 6.45pm. After office-hours. With just me and a toilet plunger. No phone.

Luckily the neighbour next to me was kind enough to lend me a phone and the number to call the office and I found one of the landlords upstairs who opened the door for me.

I am going to cling to my pillows for a bit and wail.


In other not so dramatic news: Tomorrow is my first TA session with a bunch of first years in a First Ever Biology Lab, so that will be fun for all. I have to go shower now and pick out some vaguely official set of clothing to be all TA-ish.

So I dream a lot sometimes. And I usually dream them movie-style, with details (of the crazy nature) in sequence, so it's a lot like watching a movie. Last night, I had a rather interesting, if weird, dream.

( Prologue: Girl who was in training as a demon killer got seduced by a demon, or someone like that. Click for more, but beware some triggery, rape mentions. )

Then I woke up.

Then there was another one that happened, three days ago. I found that I tend to have these dreams if I woke up in the morning and decide to go back to sleep. Maybe there's some sort of sub-conscious guilt going on. Or maybe it's just a heck lot of REM sleep.

So the dream that happened earlier:

( I dreamt that I visited, via some sort of magic teleport door, Germany but there, there were three buildings, built on near vertical ground it was the ONLY buildings like tat in the world. )