First day of school

So today we started classes again. Drag. I'm taking 17 credit hours, and as I worked through my first 9 - 5 day on campus, I grew a little intimidated at my load. The homework hasn't even started yet. Yikes. Add to this the fact that I'll be working 15 hours per week in a research lab on campus, I figure I'm gonna be a busy little beaver.

*WARNING* THE FOLLOWING PARAGRAPH DISPLAYS EXTREME NERDINESS

I did some calculations, and this is what I discovered. Teachers (and "University Policy") state that for every hour you spend in class (credit hour), you should be spending two hours outside of class. 17 credit hours x 3 hours per week = 51 hours total per week. 51 hours of school + 15 hours of work = 66 hours of stuff that needs to be done.

24 hours per day - 8 for sleeping = 16 hours for stuff per day. 16 hours per day x 6 days for non-Sabbath activities = 96 hours for stuff each week. 96 hours for stuff - 66 hours of stuff that needs doing = 30 hours for everything else. Everything else = showering, eating, other morning and evening routines, shopping and other errands, leisure, wife, etc.

Guess who's stoked for the new semester?

P.S. My o-chem teacher is also nerdy and mentioned to us that she did the calculation for a dessert at Bennigan's called "Death by Chocolate" to find out how much energy would be released if you could release all of the calories in it at once. It's the same as a lightning strike. Awesome.

Happy New Year, etc.

What a great way to start out the new year! I went to work this morning. It was a blessing that I was able to wake up on time and be to work by 8, considering last night was New Year's Eve, and our landlady is a grandma with a lot of family over for the break. With lots of little kids. That stomped around and pounded on the piano around 12:30. Sweet. Fortunately, by the time we crawled into bed, they had all done the same. Phew. Though I complain a little bit, double-pay is pretty sweet. And Jess had lunch ready when I got home. What a great wife!

Sunday was super-relaxing. Because we attend a student ward, and most of the students are out of town, we just had sacrament meeting. So church started at 9, and finished at 10. Mandy and Paul came over for lunch (tons of fun!) and then we took a 3 hour nap. Followed by like 6 hours of reading. I finished 3 books and Jess finished two. Holy moly.

Yesterday we watched a couple of movies: Masters of the Universe (that's He-Man, for the uninformed) and then My Big Fat Greek Wedding (MBFGW). The He-Man movie was truly awful. Even loving the cartoon and toys when I was little was not enough to redeem that waste of an hour and a half. MBFGW was a lot of fun, though, and enjoyable. It had good humor, and it was interesting to watch the collision of two cultures. Naturally I was drawn to reflect on my own Mormon culture, and thinking about how similar parts of it would be in a parallel situation.

"The Dark is Rising" has been a fun series, and I'm now on the last book. Once I got past the first book, everything has been fairly fast-paced and exciting. I think the only reason that anyone might need to read the first book would be to get familiar with some of the characters that reappear in book 3. Meh. At least it's all been uphill from there...

Also, I had to shave my beard off last week. Sad stuff. I had a week's worth of scruff, and it made me kinda happy. At least we got to play with it when it was time to shave it off... I may post pictures soon. If I get around to it.

I'm discovering that I have a lot to talk about...

I'm working on reading the entire Old Testament. It's the only one of the standard works that I haven't read all the way through, and I want to change that. I'm trying my best to look for principles that are applicable to my own life, or things that help me better understand the gospel. Some parts are more difficult to find connections than others.

I finished Exodus today, which had a lot of neat stuff, especially at the beginning. Towards the end, we see that the Lord really cared about his temple-on-the-move (the tabernacle) and gave very specific details about how it should be built. And Moses recorded those details. In case you want to build your own at home? I'm not really sure why.

Chapters 1 -7 of Leviticus are the handbook for sacrifices--it gives you all the hows and whens of what kind of sacrifices to offer. Sweet. Biggest thing I pulled from those chapters: the Lord asked for sacrifices that were "without blemish." For a farming/nomadic society, it would be really easy to sacrifice the weak or broken animals that were going to die anyways. But the Lord deserves better than that. If we sacrifice more, he can also bless us more. Cool stuff. Also, Aaron's sons? Very foolish. See Leviticus 10. They died.

Enough for now, right? Ok, I'm done!

Can't remember the spiffy title I had thought of earlier...

It's been an action-packed couple of days. Sort of.

I finished The Dark is Rising today, and found the book SO MUCH better than the movie. I was glad that I saw the show before I read the book, because it allowed me to enjoy both of them. Had I gone in reverse order, I probably would have cried during the movie. :)

Book 1 was pretty boring. Just ask Jess. Book 2 was awesome (the one I just finished). Book 3 ties together some characters from both. We'll see how it turns out.

We had a nice 3-hour nap today. It was wonderful. Minus the part where 3 or 4 of Joanne's grandkids started pounding away at the piano that's right above our bedroom. It would have been frustrating even if we hadn't been trying to take a nap.

Last night was Ben's 1st birthday party. Fun and good times were had by all. Especially the kid who hacked up a lung. Seriously, he had a bad cough, and I hope that the other little ones didn't catch what he had.

Mandy and Paul came over for lunch today, which was both fun and tasty (they weren't tasty--lunch was). It's not often that we see them here in our neck of the woods.

Our stake president commented briefly in sacrament today about the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. How sad is it when people see the best solution to a problem is killing the person who's making the problem. Granted, it's one way to deal with things, but it's not a very good one. Same thing happened to Jesus Christ and Joseph and Hyrum Smith. Sad stuff. Seems they should follow Michael Scott's advice and "hug it out."

Also in regards to the assassination, I was surprised when I read about it. Those sort of things seem to me to be things of a time long ago (the 1960s and earlier--JFK, Franz Ferdinand, etc). It's weird to see it happening again.

Also in sacrament meeting, a guy from our ward mentioned how Joseph Smith had been wondering about which church to join for two years before he went to the grove and received the First Vision. It was neat to learn that he didn't just have a question pop into his head, pray about it and then--whammy! get an answer like he did. It took time and effort. That helps me feel better about when I don't get answers to my prayers very quickly.

Jess also mentioned on our way home from church that a couple weeks ago they had learned in Relief Society that the grove Joseph went to was one that his mother often went to in order to pray. It wasn't just some place that was arbitrarily chosen for his first vocal prayer. Cool stuff.

One of the other talks mentioned what Elder Ballard said recently about using new media to participate in conversations about the church. I think that's why my mom started her blog...

Happy 2nd-to-last day of the year, everybody.

Media update

Jess and I went to see The Seeker: The Dark is Rising last night at the dollar theater (wonderful place). The show was pretty good for the genre (cheesy adolescent feel-good family fantasy movie) and we enjoyed it for the most part. We did laugh at a couple of plot twists, but all-in-all, it was worth a dollar apiece. Biggest annoyance: the (maybe retarded to give them the benefit of the doubt) kids to our left and family behind us who all talked at full volume during the movie. Really, who does that?

I finished Persuasion by Jane Austen this morning, and have to admit that I enjoyed it. Austen has a sharp wit, and I love the irony and biting humor that she has in her books (at least the two that I've read). The version of the book that I was reading has the original last two chapters in it as an appendix (apparently Austen wrote two new ones right before publication), and there was almost no difference in them at all--she only changed the way in which Anne and her dashing Captain Wentworth finally discovered their true feelings for each other (that they hadn't changed after 8 years) and get back together. A lot of the text was conserved verbatim. I don't even know why they included the first couple pages.

Next to read: The Dark is Rising series. They were already in my reading queue, but having seen the movie made me want to read the books even more. I'm gonna go to the library today to pick them up--they've got like half a billion copies of each one, and they're all checked in. That's a lot nicer than the Golden Compass was. Good luck trying to get a copy of that book. Sheesh.

CHRISTMAS VACATION!!!

It's finally here! Finals are done as of noon today, and now it's time for a couple of weeks of no more school. Hooray!

I've got a list of things I'm wanting to accomplish over the break (so it's productive), and today Jess and I knocked out one of them--we fixed the fan in the bathroom so it's clean and not as noisy as it used to be. Sweet! And then Jess organized my ties for me and put them on a new tie hangar. Life is good.

Still to be done over the break: Fill out the FAFSA, send in a rebate for the tires we just got on the car, expand my book queue, defrost the freezer, and organize our important papers.

Last word from Dr. Cates--it sounds like we're on for the plant project. There have been a lot of ups and downs, and I'm sort of tired of being told one thing and then another. Here's hoping that we actually get to be hired and start working.

Thanks, Liz, for your book suggestion. Everyone else--please feel free to suggest books for me to read. With my handy-dandy queue, I can easily keep track. The future is now! Peace.

Spanish Lit books

I just finished two books for my intro to Spanish lit class, and they were pretty good. En la ardiente oscuridad by Antonio Buero Vallejo is a play that Buero Vallejo wrote during Franco's regime in Spain. It was sort of a secret rebellion/commentary on life in under Franco, but sneaky enough that Buero Vallejo didn't get booted out of Spain. It's about some kids at a school for the blind, who pretend that they aren't. Along comes Ignacio, who gets sick very quickly of the lie that the others are living, and his ideas start spreading to other students. How it's handled, and the surprising conclusion made this a great read. I'm gonna hold on to this one.

The other is Querido Diego, te abraza Quiela by Elena Poniatowska. She's originally from Poland, but grew up in Mexico. The very short book is a series of fictional letters from Angeline Beloff, a Russian in Paris, to Diego Rivera, famous Mexican painter. They had shacked up for 7 or so years, had a child who died, and Rivera went back to Mexico. It's a sad book, but it was an interesting read.

I'd recommend both if you can handle the Spanish. I'd love to see En la ardiente oscuridad done as a play, which my professor mentioned had happened several semesters back right here at BYU, both in English and Spanish. Drag.

Cool idea

So I just saw a cool idea on another blog that I want to implement, so I'm writing it down here so that I don't forget about it. The guy has a "reading queue" to help him keep track of all the different books that he wants to read. He's even got a random number generator to help him decide which one to read next. I've got a lot of books that I wanna read, so this is a pretty good idea for me, too. I've actually got something of a list on my computer, but it's in a Word document that I pretty much never open. Maybe if I put it online it will help me stick with it.