Hmmm...

This morning as I was getting ready, I noticed a freckle on my side that I don't remember ever seeing before. I wonder if it recently graced me with its presence or if it has always been there and I am just that unobservant...

Check it Out!!

The studio here at State where the broadcast meteorology department does all of their weathercasting recently got a major overhaul and is now amazingly cool (not that it wasn't cool before, but now it's just that much cooler). We've (I say we like I'm actually involved. Not until next year.) started a new webcast called Campus Connect that gets updated twice a day during the week on this website. You should check it out. The technology that the new equipment uses is the same technology as was used in the new Star Wars movies. Pretty neato, huh?

Also, when I signed in, I couldn't for the life of me remember what my password was, so I had to do the whole "forgot your password?" deal to reset it. I guess this means I don't update enough.

Remember Me?

So I ran out of ways to waste time on the Internet earlier, so I decided I'd read my mom's blog because I hadn't in a while. When the page came up, I looked at the list of blogs she reads and noticed that I have apparently not posted in 2 months. That is kind of a long time, and I know you must all be dying to hear from me, so I figured I should probably come up with something to post about, so I am going to share with you all one reason why you should not leave your thermostat set to 50 over the weekend.

My best friend, my roommate, and I went to Ft. Walton Beach last weekend. I was the last to be done with all of my Friday obligations, so the other two loaded up the car so we'd be ready to leave as soon as I was ready. Apparently, they got hot while carrying stuff out because the air conditioner got turned way down. I didn't notice when I came in because I'd just had to trek all the way across campus and I didn't stay in the room long anyway.

Well after several incidents and much giggling on the way, we made it to the house we were staying at in Ft. Walton and did the whole beach thing. The weather was kind of questionable the whole time and we ended up having to leave early on our one beach day, but all in all the trip was still a blast.

And speaking of blasts...when we finally made it back to school, and got all of our suitcases and coolers lugged upstairs to our room, we opened the door and a blast of cold air smacked us in the face. This is when Morgan remembered she had set the air before we left. It had been running on 50 for 2 days straight. It was so cold, condensation had started to form on the inside of the light above my bed. It eventually started leaking out of one end and had made a wet spot on the floor. We set a cup underneath it and after about an hour of dripping, this is what we had collected. The moral of the story is, don't turn your air conditioner down as far as it will go and then leave for several days. You end up with icky light fixture water.

Peeved

I am bored to tears at work and have already read just about every article on The Onion, so in an attempt to keep myself from falling asleep I've decided to make a list of all my pet peeves just because I'm in a testy mood. Most of them will probably relate to work since that's what has me bored.
1. I hate when people bring in a deposit that's mostly cash and all the money isn't facing the same direction.
2. I hate when people act like it's my fault when they find out their account is overdrawn. Learn basic math and keep up with it yourself!
3. I hate when smelly old men prop their elbows on the sides of my teller window so that their armpits radiate stink directly at my nose.
4. I hate when aforementioned smelly old men try to make me laugh at their stupid jokes.
5. I hate when people come to my window while on the phone and look at me as if I'm the rudest person on the planet for interupting their call with silly questions regarding their transaction. It is absolutely unacceptable that I am not a mind reader.
6. I hate when people expect me to fill out their deposit slips and withdrawal slips for them just because they don't know their account numbers.
7. I hate when people hold up the line because they don't have all of their stuff together.
8. I hate when people breathe heavily.
9. I hate the stupid tracphone commercial with the violin music that plays on a loop all day on Walmart's tvs.
10. I hate the flickering light above register 11.
11. I hate how cold our break room always is. (I'm using the word room loosely. It's more like a closet.)
12. I hate when my cheerful greeting of "Good Morning! How are you?" is met by stony silence.
13. I hate when people assume I know all of Walmart's policies and proceedures simply because the branch of the bank that I work at happens to be located inside Walmart.
14. I hate when my coworkers decide to let it be Andra-work-by-herself-day and all disappear into the back to gossip.
15. I hate when I have to resort to making lists of things that I hate to keep myself occupied.

Blah.

I lack all motivation to do anything. You may call me Sloth today. That is all.

Banking Update

Banking is good for your ego. I have now been hit on twice and told I was a "purty little thing" by at least 5 old men. One such man today told me to shred his receipt for him so that my "old man" wouldn't know we'd met because "purty thing like me, he must be jealous." I have also been asked multiple times if I am old enough to have a job at the bank. Normally the guessed age is 15, but today I aged 3 years because the new guess was 18! Maybe by the end of the summer I will look my actual age...

Walmart: My Personal Hell

During the summers I work at Century Bank, last summer as a random file scanner/switchboard operator/address label sticker/vault of loan documents reorganizer/anything else they could come up with, and this summer as a teller. All teller training is done at the main office of the bank, which has normal banking hours: 9-4 on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday, 9-12 on Wednesday, and 9-5 on Friday (but you have to be there at 8 and generally don't get to leave until 30 minutes after the bank closes). Normally when someone teller trains, they are kept at the main office for a while, just to be sure they're comfortable with it before they are sent to whatever branch they are intended for; however, when I finished my initial training, there was someone already waiting to start theirs, and since there are a limited number of windows, and I hadn't made any huge mistakes so far, I was sent to another branch. This was fine because the branch they sent me to also has normal banking hours. I was there for a few days and liking it well enough when I got the dreaded call: they wanted me to fill in for someone who had called in sick at the Walmart branch. This particular branch is about the size of my bedroom, is located right in the middle of the front wall of Walmart, between the SmartStyle and customer service, and is open from 9-8 Monday through Saturday. The regulars there work in shifts: one group works Monday-Wednesday and the other group works Thursday-Saturday and at the end of every month they switch. Since I was not a regular, that first week, after having worked the normal 8-4 at another branch on Monday, I worked 8-8 on Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, AND Saturday. I had Sunday and Monday (Memorial Day=bank closed!!!) to recuperate and then worked Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.

The last half of the week is when most people get paid so that's when everyone wants to come cash their checks. Since they don't make it to town before the other branches close, they all head to Walmart. At any given moment on Thursday and Friday afternoon and all day Saturday, the line can be backed up all the way past customer service to the bathroom. It is utter chaos. We don't have time to think between transactions. It's all mindless handing out of money, and when it's all over and the bank is finally closed, we are all so stiff and sore and worn out that we are completely worthless.

The beginning of the week is not much better than the end, but for a completely different reason. It is very slow and we are all quite aware of the lengthiness of a 12 hour work day. We sit at our little windows and watch the world go by, literally since everyone in the county goes to Walmart multiple times a week. When I get tired of people watching I just kind of stare out into space. There are 3 light bulbs within my line of sight that flicker on and off constantly all day every day. You can't escape them. When you look down, the flickering reflects on the floor. Wednesday, I watched a bright yellow "Clearance" balloon escape from its string and float up to the ceiling. It was headed for a sky light, but got stuck on a rafter, so it hung out there for a while. Eventually it unstuck itself from the rafter and made it to the skylight. It floated there for the better part of the day, but by late afternoon had apparently tired of sky gazing, so it floated off towards produce.

I think I'm going to die in Walmart.

Give Me A Break...

What goes through physics book editors' heads when writing questions: Maybe if we give the questions witty titles and make them about totally useful things like using European coffee makers in the U.S. the students will forget that alternating current, impedance, capacitance, and all the other rubbish in this book has nothing whatsoever to do with their chosen major. They will be so blown away by our cleverness in titling and efforts to relate to them that they will be motivated to do all of their homework without complaint and maybe even change their majors so that one day they too can be as amazing as we are!

The End

The end of the semester, or at least this semester, is super stressful. I have zero time. Just thought I'd let you know I haven't fallen off the face of the earth for the past month.

Oh, and Tank, this is for you.

Greetings and Salutations

Yesterday morning in the shower I was thinking, probably about something shower related like shampoo or washcloths, and had one of those stream of consciousness things where you start at one thing and end up at something completely different and it makes sense to you at the time, but you can't really explain it to yourself later, and certainly couldn't explain it to anyone else. The thing that I ended up at from shampoo, or whatever it was that began it all, was the difference between the phrases "Good morning" and "Good afternoon." Have you ever noticed (or maybe it's just me) that saying "Good afternoon" seems way more formal than saying "Good morning?" It is perfectly acceptable to wish someone a good morning without seeming overly formal or cold, but wishing someone a good afternoon just seems awkward in everyday conversation. The only times I have ever actually spoken the words "Good afternoon" they were closely followed by "Vincent's. Can I help you?" or "Century Bank." Why is it that switching the word "morning" for "afternoon" suddenly makes a phrase something you only say when answering the phone at your place of employment? Or am I just crazy and people wish each other good afternoons without formality all the time?

Relief

I just found out that a physics quiz originally scheduled for after spring break (so I hadn't been working on the homework to prepare myself yet) that was moved to tomorrow (so I was frantically beginning to work homework problems this afternoon) just got moved back to after spring break, so I find myself in a very good mood this fine day. Much better than the mood this guy is about to be in anyway:

Ridiculousness

Last week, my Natural Hazards class was assigned a project about tornadoes. We were given a state and told to go to this website and download an Excel file of all the tornado data for our given state from 1950-2007. We were then told to plot all the F1 and F2 tornadoes on one map, all the F3, F4, and F5 tornadoes on another map, and on yet another map to plot the track of all tornadoes, regardless of magnitude on the Fujita scale, from 1970-2000. This meant plotting two dots for each tornado since we had to have a touch down and lift off location to get the track.

I lucked up because a friend of mine ended up with the same state as me, so we decided we'd work on it together. It didn't seem like it would be that hard until we sat down to start working on it last night and discovered that there were over 800 F1 tornadoes alone. We split the work to make it a little bit faster, but still spent about 4 1/2 hours sitting at his kitchen table last night putting dots on maps, and still didn't finish all of the maps.

This morning, when we got to class, our lovely teacher informed us that he had decided that 57 years gave too much data and that we should just filter it until we got about 100 tornadoes to work with. Why, oh why, could we not have waited one more day to start on it, or why couldn't he have told us one day sooner that he was making it easier? That's 4 1/2 hours of tornado plotting monotony that I will never get back.

Anti-Snow

So you all saw my snow pictures from last Sunday (and if you didn't, just scroll down a little farther and you will). Well this Sunday it is 78 degrees and I've been wearing shorts all weekend. Isn't Mississippi weather the greatest?

SNOW!!!

It snowed this weekend! In Mississippi! And I was there for it! (Everytime it snowed or there was even a chance of snow here last year, I was somewhere else.) It started snowing late Saturday night and by Sunday morning, we had about 3 inches. Naturally by the time I left for church most of it had melted, but I have a wonderful friend who woke me up really early so we could walk around in it. Naturally after about 5 minutes and 5 pictures my camera died, but I'll share what I have:

This is just outside my building. That's Butler Hall in the background.

This is taken from just about the same spot by my building, only from a different angle and with a different setting on my camera so it looks a lot better.

For you fellow Staters, this is just behind Suttle Hall and you can see most of Zacharias Village and Critz Hall in the background.

Chapel of Memories.

This is just before my camera died. There's lovely Suttle in the background and at this point it was still snowing (note the flakes on my hat). As you can see, everything I'm wearing here matches wonderfully, and you didn't even get the full affect. I still had my p.j.s on under this jacket. Oh, and after it stopped snowing and we were heading back to the warmth of our rooms, we walked back by the hill seen behind me and watched some people "snowboarding" down it. Quite entertaining as none of them made it far at all.

Canceled

Tuesdays and Thursdays are not fun days for me. I have an 8:oo class followed by another at 9:30, another at 11:00, and on Thursdays yet another at 1:00. It does not help that these are all classes that I really can't miss without being completely lost like Physics II and Differential Equations. My first class is Natural Hazards, and while I guess I could skip it and still pass, how would that look if I skipped out on my one class that was actually somewhat related to my major?

This morning when my alarm went off, I grudgingly (and more grudgingly than usual because it's Mardi Gras; we're not supposed to be in class) got out of bed, shuffled to the bathroom, and began my too-early-in-the-morning routine to get ready for my day. I was feeling lazy, so I skipped a few steps (don't worry, nothing important like teeth brushing or deodorant putting on) and headed out to class a little early. I got all the way to my class (which happens to be on the third floor so I had to hike up two flights of stairs after hiking down two flights of stairs because my room is also on the third floor) only to find a sign on the door that said all geography and geology classes for the day have been canceled. I hate when they do that! If it's my last class of the day so I was out and about already it's not such a big deal, but when I could have slept an extra hour and a half but didn't because I thought I had class it's downright aggravating. Now what am I going to do with myself for the next hour?

Picniking

I've known about this photo editing website called picnik for a while, but never really fooled with it much until a few weeks ago. I guess I've been more bored than usual. Or maybe more creative. Yeah, we'll go with that. Anyway, I haven't posted in a while so I figured I'd share some of my picniked pictures.

First up, my feet at Panama City Beach.

Secondly, my sisters, upside down.
I don't know that I like all the stuff I did to this one.
It was mainly just to see what all the website was capable of.

Next up, me standing under a waterfall on the Natchez Trace.

In this next picture, there was actually no green grass to be found,
so I tinted the picture green. Pretty nifty, huh?

And finally, my current Facebook profile picture.
I was bored in the car and had a half-eaten donut, so I did
what anyone else would have done in a similar situation:
turned it into a smile and put it on the internet.

I've Been tagged!!!

1) Go to the 4th folder in your computer where you store your pictures.
2) Pick the 4th picture in that folder.
3) Explain the picture.
4) Tag 4 people to do the same.

This is my friend D.J. at Mississippi College's Academic Competition. It's a trivia game that you play on 4 person teams. The caller reads out a question and you try to be the first one to ring in on your buzzer with the correct answer. This was 12th grade. We made it to the semi final of the competition, and were ahead going into half time, but the other team came out of nowhere and beat us. :( That was the furthest our school's team had ever gotten though, and I answered more questions in that match than any of the others, so I was still proud. Anyway, we had so many group pictures taken of us at each competition that it got to be a thing with him to see how many pictures he could ruin with awkward, weird faces. One of the sponsors made a slide show for our end of the year banquet, and it had a whole section of close ups of D.J.'s funny faces. His mom was so proud...

And I hate trying to come up with people to tag, so I'm going to be lazy and just not. If you're reading this, do it!

Up Early

For some reason that I cannot explain, I woke up at 7:00 this morning. Wednesday is a lazy day for me because class doesn't start until 12, so when I saw what time the clock read, I rolled over and attempted to go back to sleep. I was unsuccessful. I figured since I was up and there was apparently nothing I could do about it, I might as well do something worthwhile with this extra time, so I decided to catch up on my Bible reading because I've fallen a little behind the past few weeks. I am glad I did (did decide to catch up, that is, not fall behind in the first place.) because I ran across this verse in Romans, "God doesn't count us; he calls us by name. Arithmetic is not his focus." For some reason this struck me as funny. I actually laughed out loud (luckily my roommate has an early class so she had already left). I had an odd mental image of God bending over a desk doing my Differential Equations homework. I suppose this vision was brought on by a combination of relief that my first D.E. test, which was yesterday, is over (I spent most of the weekend doing just what I'd pictured God doing, only with most likely not nearly as much success) and sleep deprivation because my crazy body decided to get up way before it needed to, but whatever the cause, I enjoyed it thoroughly.

And to show you that I do have a spiritual side and am not all weird visions, isn't it nice to know that we're not just another number to God? Everyone likes to be called by name (unless of course you were unfortunate enough to be named something like Festus or Algernon and then I totally understand if you'd rather not be called by name) because it makes us feel special, like someone truly cares about us if they take the time to find out what our names are. To think that the God of the universe who has a million other things He could be doing took the time to learn them and call them rather than reverting to arithmetic is a really cool thought.

Cartography At Its Finest

We are studying earthquakes in my Natural Hazards class, so when this map showed up on the teacher's power point presentation the other day, at first I just looked at the red areas and ignored everything else, but then the girl next to me drew my attention our wonderful state of Mississippi. I wasn't aware we'd acquired new territory.

Frostbite

It is cold!!!!

That is all.

Incompetant Appliances

I found salt and lime flavored popcorn at Walmart the other day. I'm not a big fan of butter, but I like popcorn, so I figured I'd give it a try. The bag said put it in the microwave for a minute and 30 seconds, so I did. When that time was up, I opened the microwave door and stared sadly at my still flat popcorn bag. I decided to give it another go and pressed the popcorn button on the microwave. This put 3 minutes on the timer. At the end of this 3 minutes, I'd heard one pop, so I put the bag back in for another 3 minutes. At the end of this 3 minutes, making the total microwave time 7 and a half minutes this is how much popcorn I had:I am very sad. I'm going to have to borrow someone's microwave.


UPDATE: I tried again today and discovered it is not the bag. My microwave really is deficient.

The Crazy Things Rain Does to You

I did something yesterday that I told myself I'd never do: I went to Walmart in pajamas. Yesterday afternoon I went buy textbooks with a friend (my Differential Equations book was $200 and it's not even that thick!) in the rain. We drove to the bookstore, but my car is pretty far from the door of my building, and there were no good spots at Barnes and Noble, so needless to say, I got soaked. The bottom 5 inches of denim on my jeans were drippping. After we finished shopping, we went back to his room to watch a movie. I did not want to sit through an entire movie in wet pants, so I borrowed a pair of p.j. pants and put my sopping wet jeans in front of the air conditioner to dry off. Later that night, a group of us decided to make a trip to Walmart (for that icky cheese that comes in the bottle that you squirt out). I picked up my pants to go change back into them when I discovered that they were still really wet and now super cold from sitting in front of the a.c. Not wanting to be doubly miserable from the wet and cold, I made the trip in the p.j. pants. It is inexusable to my sense of style, but I must say that was the most comfortable squirty cheese run I've ever made.

Dreams

Have you ever noticed how incredibly weird dreams are? Sometimes they can be explained, like if I go to bed thinking about someone or something and it shows up in a dream, it's understandable. I was dwelling on it as I went to sleep so it makes sense it would stay with me in sleep. But what about those way out there crazy dreams? This afternoon I was lying on my bed reading Eragon when I dozed off. I dreamed that our church was putting on a Christmas musical with a live Nativity scene and my family was in charge of getting all of the animals to the church. I, wanting to branch out a bit, convinced my parents to get kangaroos and pandas instead of the traditional donkeys and sheep to gather around the manger. I don't know where we found the animals but we brought them to the church in our mini van and were just carrying them into the sanctuary (and getting some mighty odd looks, I might add), when my cell phone beeped and woke me up. Now where did that come from? There are no Christmas programs, pandas, or kangaroos in Eragon so obviously it wasn't because I was thinking about any of it, so how did it end up in my dreams? It's really a shame that I woke up when I did though. I would have liked to have seen how the program turned out.