umbrellas are apparently useless.

after getting soaked getting lunch in amherst (it was good pizza), i am now in the grad computer lab and notice a "noiseless" chalkboard eraser.

my question: since when do erasers need to be "noiseless"???

to the student who gave me this awful cold/flu...

...if i find out who you are, i may fail you :-P

i'm not serious, but i want to be.

1/2 a box of tissues down and 1/2 to go. this will make the plane ride interesting tomorrow.

odds and ends...

1. i saw a rainbow today. it's kind of dumb, but i needed to see a rainbow today -- or something beautiful. i had a rough night. it was a good start to the day (especially given how freakin' early i got up after not sleeping)

2. i didn't fail my stats hw. i did well. better than i thought. of course, with my usual "dumb" mistakes for a big -0.5 off. :-P

3. my stats prof made the following statement regarding whether the central limits theorem of statistics is ever violated: "this is safer to believe than anything in the Bible...uh, or any religious texts...i'm not trying to single out Christianity...." i thought it was funny. a lot of things are funny right. like the fact that i have no life. it's hilarious.

el fin.

Perhaps someone else has felt this way...

Prayer for Courage

Let me not pray to be sheltered from dangers,
but to be fearless in facing them.
Let me not beg for the stilling of my pain
but for the heat to conquer it.
Let me not look for allies in life's battle-field,
but to my own strength.
Let me not crave in anxious fear to be saved,
but hope for the patience to win my freedom.
Grant that I may not be a coward,
feeling your mercy in my success alone; but let me
find the grasp of your hand in my failure.

-Rabindranath Tagore

my friends (aka "the party crowd")

so of the cohort, there are about four people i hang out with regularly. three of them are pictured above (from left, me, laura, shawn, marianne; irene couldn't make it because she was burried somewhere under a pile of CAM). we are the cool people who take a break and enjoy life for more than 12 minutes. because otherwise, we'd go crazy (and aren't we crazy enough selling our souls to be in grad school?)

I swiped these from Shawn's website. :-) (I really haven't lost as much weight as it looks like -- promise Mom!)Mount Sugarloaf

Hiking Mount Holyoke!

whole new spin on why they all drink...

after this week, i can understand why the grad lounge starts serving alcohol at 11am.

that is all.

new england living :-)

(the pics doesn't match the texts, but i thought you might want to see my cute little town of northampton) so i've been talking so much about school that i've forgotten to write about how much i love living here. the area is beautiful. living in western mass, as i do, rural (a helluva lot of farms - which means fresh fresh produce!). um, just in case you didn't know, amherst/northampton is in a valley. i have several sizable mountains viewable when i'm scooting around. the coolest thing in the early AM (about the only good thing about driving so early to my [bleeping] 8am TA...) is seeing the clouds/fog floating just starting to lift. so beautiful. the trees are just starting to change colors. only a few leaves on each tree, showing signs of autumn. it's cool to see little splashes of yellows or oranges in an otherwise green tree. i can't wait for the colors to really come out. i have my camera ready to take pics. it's exciting.

so the rural thing. it's taken a little bit to get used to. it's not like delaware was this major metropolis, but it was keeping with the times and there were strip malls and shopping centers in abundance. i now have to drive about 20 minutes to find something like that (oddly, in a slightly poorer town :-\ weirdness). i guess it's nice. it's not like i have any $$ to spend on that sort of thing, but it's definitely weird to consolidate trips because the store isn't really right around the corner.

oh, just to throw in a complete non-sequitur (because i'm so good at that!), in my stats class, we ran a regression on earnings and age to examine the relationship between getting older and one's earnings (oooh! i sound smart...). anyway, the regression equation showed that at zero years, you should make $16k and you would experience an increase of $506 per year. granted, it's only a linear regression and in context, that makes little sense to earn $16k as an infant. i just thought it was funny that my one year-old nephew could potentially (according to my regression) make more money than me. gotta love stats...

over 900 eyes all lookin' at me!

i apologize for the delay in blogging. i haven't had a coherent thought in my head lately (grad school is supposed to make you smarter, but i'm beginning to feel like a half-baked carrot. not that i've ever actually been half-baked, and we won't talk about being a carrot...;-)).

So the second week of grad school: i've managed to avert a complete breakdown. it was a super close call. i wanted to call bob (the grad director) and explain to him that i just don't have what it takes. apparently that feeling was remedied with 6 hours of sleep. good to know.

other than that, reading is kicking my butt. i've never read this much in my life. it's incredible. and obscure sometimes too. there were a few moment when i was reading an article i thought, "what?!" (with a slightly confused look - you'll have to imagine it...). yeah, it was great. i had to re-read the same paragraph 15x (ok, a little hyperbole my friends, but not much) to understand what the heck the author was saying. seriously, if you can't write clearly, don't write. just give presentations at conferences and use lots of pictures. some people are meant to write, some people are meant to read. it's your lot in life and there's nothing wrong with that...

so janice (the prof i TA for) allowed me to speak to our class (of 450+ students!) on my research on hurricanes andrew and mitch and relate that to katrina. it didn't go perfectly, but it went well enough. janice was very kind about it too. in fact, she offered that if i want to do something else during the semester, she would allow me to do so! exciting huh? yeah, especially as a first-year. it was a lot of work to pull together (even for only 20 minutes...) but being up there really reminded me why i'm here. i love to teach. and that's what will help me get through those miserable, i want to quit moments. ;-)

until next week, friends....:-)

"oh s**t!"

(the title will make sense in a moment, so please bear with me...) i went to a new church today in deerfield. i liked it a lot. it's definitely #1 on the list of likely "home" churches. next week, i'm still planning to check out a church in wilibram. not that i'm trying to be extremely picky, but i do want to keep my options open and see what else is out there. pretty soon, though, i'll end up in boston or hartford looking for a church and i don't want to do that...

okay, so the title. i decided that i want to make cookies this afternoon and had to stop at the stop&shop for ingredients. i park my car and approach the store only to see a relatively large crowd out front staring to my right. i turn my attention to where they were looking and - prepare yourself - there was a car on top of a car. oh yes. that's right. a ford crown vic had manage to ramp up this little sedan so it's wheels - it's wheels - were on the other car's windshield. how the heck do you manage to do that??? honestly. so, of course, this is the talk of the store. everyone from the dairy guy to the cashier was talking about it. anyway, i get my groceries and head out of the store. as i'm walking to my car, this guy is walking in saying, "don't forget we need to get...oh shit!" cause seriously, how often do you see that???

and it begins

so i've had two classes and my TA class. our proseminar (prosem) was cancelled yesterday because the department i/t guy wasn't able to make it. my first class was in labor market inequality. it's right up my alley ;-). it'll be a lot of work (not that it's a surprise...), but ifif i can work a required comp paper out of the class, it'll be worth it. of course, i'm getting ahead of myself. i've just made it through my first week...

i had my 8am TA today. holy cow it's early. so frickin early. but i like the class and the prof is amazing. i'm excited about working with her. i'll actually get to speak a bit about my thesis/research on vulnerability next week. oh, the worst thing today: one of the students spilled my coffee during CAS so i had to function all day without caffiene, but i managed (no worries) to make it through stats at 3pm. i think i'll do okay in it. the class should be similar to my undergrad class. we'll learn stats up to multivariate regression and that's what we got to in soc301. granted that was two years ago.

new england demographic trends

i meant to post this a while ago. i received this in my UMail account when i first moved to MA :-):

"A record number of babies recently arrived at our Maternity Center on the Memorial Campus. From July 31 to August 8, a total of 96 babies were delivered, including 48 newborns arriving during a 72-hour period from August 5 - 8. When asked what contributed to this unusually high number, Kathy Teeple, director of Women and Infant Services, said that upon consulting the pregnancy wheel, it was determined that many of these babies were conceived in the spirit of celebration at the end of the World Series last October! One family even named its son Fenway, in honor of the Red Sox's triumphant victory."


...i'm so glad i like Eagles football. ;-)

4-18 years? holy cow

so i found out today that the range is between 4 and 18 years for the grad program. no typo - that's eighteen, as in the age that you're allowed to vote. 18 freaking, flipping, forever long years. i'm aiming for 6 years. i think it's doable if i stay focused. my idea is to stay on top of things and get my coursework done. i'd like to be "abd" within 4 years. we'll see how that goes.

classes start tomorrow. it's the end of life as i know it ;-).

"...and they ran into a frog..."

today was hiking part ii. again, it was laura, summer, shawn and me going up mount holyoke. shawn fixed his hiking boots so they didn't bother his heel this time, but the laces were apparently digging into his toes so summer gave him a - are you ready - sanitary napkin to help "pad" it. oh, and it worked ;-). so we decided on our trail and, after the girls doused ourselves in bug spray (lest to get eaten alive by insects), we started on our hike to the top of the mountain. this trail kept screwing with us because we'd walk up the trail and just when we (in our out of breath state) thought that we were up as far as we could go, the trail would dip down and then go back up more steeply than before. jerk. we'll have fabulous butts if we keep this up and i think that we'll try to. anyway, we got to the top of the mountain (a 1000 feet hike, btw) and what a view. i was still stunned. beautiful. i can't wait to go up again in the fall. the leaves are going to be awesome (and i mean the real definition of awesome, not "awesome like a hotdog, sir?" -- okay, sorry, bad reference to eddy izzard...)

we decided to go back another way via the horse caves. not at all what we were expecting - we climbed down and were all like, "um are we there? i guess we're there" but they were really cool anyway (turns out they were stone overhangings where "they" would take horses). we sat in the cave and had lunch. i found out that there is (or was?) a handkerchief code for gay men. yeah, i'll skip that discussion except to say that, hey at least they all can communicate exactly (i mean exactly) what they're looking for. maybe it has to be through color pieces of cloth - but who's to judge, really? i never know what straight men are thinking...

but i digress. we weren't able to figure out a punchline to our joke. we got a middle part though. "so the group comes across a frog who says, "i am an enchanted frog. if the right person kisses me, i will be restored to my original self." so the straight woman (thinking of the story of the frog prince) leans down and gives the little amphebian a kiss. to her dismay, nothing happens. the gay man thinks, why not and kisses the frog. nothing happens. so the lesbians pick up the frog and kiss him and he turns into...." and we couldn't figure it out! how lame, huh? we had tons of inside jokes but no one would get them because, gasp, they're inside. oh well. summer will return in october and maybe then we'll figure out our punchline. stay tuned. ;-)

strike two?

i went to another new church in agawam today. it was...okay. i think i'll try a new one next week. sigh. i'm not a fan of this process at all.

the biggest feat of the day: i conquered a massachusettean roundabout. go me :-)

mount sugarloaf

we went for a hike today up mount sugarloaf (isn't that so cute?). it was just four of us: shawn, laura, summer and me. we had a fun time. i forgot how much i like to hike. and it was the perfect day for a hike - clear, sunny but not hot. aside from my personal troubles getting to the trail, (i kept driving past the road onto which i was supposed to turn right -- and, in my defense, i'm normally a great navigator :-P) it was a great time. it wasn't a big mountain (shawn and i thought it would be best to avoid a complicated trail for our first time hiking in MA), but we took the long way up the trail so it took an hour. there were a few sections (toward the top) when we all decided that if we kept this up, we'd have the finest asses in the cohort...


the best part was getting to the summit. holy cow. you could see the whole valley. the mountain was in deerfield (north of us) and we were still able to see amherst and hadley (if you look really closely at the first pic, you can see du bois library in the background). and, of course, you have the connecticut river which meanders through the valley. amazing.

we had lunch on top and after shawn and summer made fun of a motorcycle gang (quietly of course, lest they get their butts handed to them), we decided to head back down. here's the fun part - we finally figured out the map and decided to go down a different way than we came up. the trail back down zig-zagged steeply down the front slide of the mountain and had a cable fence around it (we figured out that this was to prevent cars from driving off not to keep hikers off). anyway, so we begin our descent and shawn remarks, "this seems like the beginning to a joke: 'two lesbians, a gay man and a straight woman go down a mountain...'" but we never decided on a punchline. we thought the beginning part was too funny.


in the end, we had such a great time that we're going to mount holyoke to hike monday. :-)

orientation part ii - TAing

today was the TA orientation. it was...an orientation. not much to say there. i was slightly annoyed that the sessions didn't start/end on time. but that's me just being my type-a, organized, "particular" (as my cohort says, as opposed to "anal") self. there were some useful tidbits in the sessions too, so it's not a total loss. just annoying.

the fun thing about today was meeting the rest of my cohort (save one). of course, i've already met shawn, laura, marianne, dan, and courtney (the last of whom was lucky enough to skip out on today...). today, i met irene, kathryn, dustin and ayse. fun times. we all had lunch together with bob (the grad director) and sandy (grad secretary and savior of our lives at school...). it was nice. and free. gotta love free lunch.

i'm really excited about the semester now that i'm making friends and beginning to form an identity here. a lot of us are in the same classes together (well, obviously, there's the prereq courses). we'll get to know each other really well :-). AND i found out today that i'm not the only student living in my town. dustin and his wife live here too. of course, bob mentioned that most of the first years live in amherst. everyone else eventually moves to northampton ;-). woo-hoo.

'twill be a lazy labor day weekend (haha, ironic). shawn and i (plus laura/summer?) are going hiking tomorrow and sunday i try out a *new* church. monday i will sleep my lazy butt away for tuesday is the departmental orientation and wednesday is the first day of classes. anymore of these orientation things and i may begin to quote bureaucratic mumbo jumbo in my sleep...