Overdue

I am a bit overdue for a post, even breaking that once a week rule I am trying to stick with here.  And I think that once you start letting something like time slip by and slip away, before you know it, time has passed you by.

Though I was just listening to a guy on the radio talking about physics and relativity and how in Einstein's view, it wasn't that the apple fell on Newton's head, but how Newton's head went up to bonk into the apple.  Yeah, I haven't taken any physics since high school and I didn't understand it then either, so I am just repeating what I think I heard.

Last weekend, DMA came into town for the Star Trek Convention that was at a hotel near San Francisco Airport.  We had gone to one last year that was actually in San Francisco.  The hotel this year was closer to my house, but going there was less exciting and it wasn't in a great area of eating establishments.  But it was fine, having lunch at or near the hotel during the day, then going out to dinner.  By some strange circumstances, we ended up at The Plant shopping center all three nights that DMA was in town, only finally getting our Boiling Crab fix on the Sunday night.  Yeah there are many other places to eat in my area, but this kind of worked out well.

Last Monday right after I dropped DMA off at the airport, I had my Italian final.  I don't think I did great, but I probably did fine.  I looked through the syllabus and realized that the final was only 10% of my grade, and I had an A up until that point, so it can't be that bad.  Also my instructor is a tough tester but seems to be an easy grader.  I am looking forward to starting back up in Italian 3 in a week.  I had a weird conversation with my boss about this, about how language classes are named.  See, I don't think my boss ever went to college, and doesn't understand college numbering conventions.  So she said that each session, that is, Italian 1, 2, and 3 is a "year" of learning the language in ten weeks.  I am still not really clear what she was driving at with that.  Maybe meaning that it was like a year at high school level?  But I'm not coming out of high school, and I had many years of college level language classes.  I think she's just ignorant in a lot of ways, and this is one of them.

Anyway so I sort of have a spring break here, and my mom is coming out on Friday.  I cleaned my house a bit for DMA's visit, but will need to clean more/again.  Teddy has been aggressively shedding, trying to assert his male supremacy over me and Kiki.  I don't think it's working, as we are both still running the house.  Ha.  In addition to vacuuming up fur, I went and got a haircut and an eyebrow wax so I feel it was a day of dealing with hair.

Lots of Class

This whole ongoing taking a class thing is quite an experience.  Lately I am gearing up for the final part of the class which is taking a final exam a week from today.  I was a bit worried about how well I did on the second midterm (midterm is such a misnomer for these, isn't it), and then I got it back today and I had gotten an A.  So a lot of my pressure about the final, and wanting to make sure that I did really well on the final to make up for the midterm, and then seeing I did well on the midterm, well, I don't feel quite as pressured.  I probably should put a bit of pressure on my self so I don't totally slack off.

Also, I had to do a group project with a couple of people in my class.  We had to watch a movie, Il Postino.  If you haven't seen it, I'll just say that the picture of the poster on the IMDB page is hella misleading.  It is not a comedy.  It does not end heartily and happily.  Anyway, so we had to meet to see the movie, then we had to meet on Saturday to discuss what we'd say about the movie.  Then that just dragged on infinitely with the one girl who was continuously texting during us putting the presentation together.  Oh in addition to her texting, she would go on and on about how stressful her life is and how difficult it is.  Yes, she is a college student.  I am sure there is some stress there, but it's not like she's homeless or unemployed or pregnant at fifteen.  I think years of group therapy have made me more likely to listen to someone's sob story and be respectful, but in this particular instance, I realized that we had to not indulge these behaviors to get our result.

The point of all this group project preparation is that we are going to stand in front of the class for  20 minutes and talk about our movie.  This doesn't sound that complicated to me, in fact, I feel like I could do it by myself without a lot of preparation.  But having the preparation is probably good.

Partial Recall

I got to visit the adopted cat yesterday.  It's weird in a way, because I feel like I have been concerned about her for so long, thinking of her and wanting her to get adopted, and now that she is, I'm still kind of worried about things.  With no rational, real reason to be.  But seeing her in her new home, where she is getting lots of love and cuddles, I feel like things are mostly okay.  Good even.  Still some small part of me that thought of adopting her myself, that thinks of her as "my" cat.  That part needs to fade away, over time.

Speaking of cats, the food that I feed my cats is being voluntarily recalled.  I came home yesterday right after work, to check the dates on the food that we had left.  And then it was under the recall, so I went right out and got another case of Wellness.  I am brand loyal, even with this brand having some issue.   I talked to the company over the phone, and they described symptoms I could look for, and thankfully none of that was occurring here.  My cats get dry food in addition to wet, so all is well.  You can read this article if you are interested in reading more about the symptoms.

I am really enjoying having TV again.  I feel a little bit dirty in admitting that it wasn't that I wasn't watching TV, but I was watching it and not paying for it.  Not stealing cable, mind you, but not 100% legitimate either.  And I should say that I'd probably still be doing it if I didn't have problems with my computer.  But in typing this out, I kind of think that paying for cable again is the right thing to do.  Downloading shows was something I did with C, something I learned from him.  So much of relationships involve these habits, and the more time goes on, the more I feel like distancing myself from that time in my life.

This week, I was thinking about something my ex R used to say to me about how I'd "style" my hair.  And what he said was so ridiculous and full of his own ignorance of how things were done.  I do wish I had stood up to him more, but I didn't, and I can accept that (and hopefully not make that kind of mistake in the future in other relationships).  But I just think there is something funny about a balding dude who buzzes his head with hair clippers giving someone like me with a full head of curly hair advice.  Like honestly, he had no fucking idea what he was talking about.  I've had this talk with DMA a few times about how I'm just sick to death of people giving me unsolicited advice on things.  R was full of continuous advice on what I should/could be doing.  And would you take advice from a guy in his early 40s who had no job and no savings and no prospects and was living off his much younger girlfriend?  Hardly.