3 weeks

If I can make it to December 5th, it's all down hill from there.





The Other Guys Christmas Concert is Saturday the 3rd at 8pm. Let me know if you're interested.

Rust Removal

The bane of my mother's existence is our shower. I live on a farm, in the house my great-grandparents built long before fiberglass showers were invented. Our water comes from a well- so it is full of all kinds of good minerals and metals and things. You can't beat it for taste, but it leaves brown iron spots on all of our faucets. Our shower, which is in the basement and is pretty much just cinder blocks and left over hog-house wall stuff, has accumulated quite a bit of rust over the years. Mom has tried every rust removing product on the market to no avail. Last week she found something that actually worked. It even elicited a "Whoa, what did you use on this- it actually looks clean," from me when I got home.

Two whole bottles of The Works toilet bowl cleaner. TWO!

At 20% by volume HCl, that works out to about 8.159 Molar concentration.

Um...pretty sure we keep that stuff under a hood at all times, and have to wear gloves and goggles to use it.

Thank goodness it goes right out on a field tile, if it drained through metal pipes they would be gone.

Ok, so maybe I'm over reacting a little, she did dilute it some when she rinsed the shower out. :)

But still! Two bottles of 8 Molar HCl!

Crazy.....







Warren came for lunch. :)
The Kellenbergers are coming tonight!

Break

I think that breaks are my most favorite part of the school year. :) I would love school if every week was like the first two weeks of class, and every year had twice as much break time.

It is so wonderful to be able to be home and stay for a change and not have to go anyplace else. And I got to do stuff with Washington 2 nights in a row!! I miss our young group so much.... U of I is great too, but Washington is the best.

Friday night we all babysat at church- I spent most of my time in the kitchen- I am just not a kid person, and they were super wound up. Saturday night we had a great bible study and listened to some...um...good- ish singing.

Sunday afternoon I went to Marla and Jon's wedding reception, and heard that Julie got announced to some guy from Ohio. :) Crazy girls. Out of the six girls in my high school class who were converted when we graduated, only one is not married or engaged.

Today I went shopping with my mom. It was great! We ate at Famous Dave's for supper which is not even close to being as good as KC bbq, but it's probably the best we've got in Peoria.

We stopped at Gander Mountain.... sorry Gab, I forgot to ask about squirrel guns. Although, I did find out that it would be illegal to have pellet guns within Urbana City Limits. But that doesn't really matter since I don't own a pellet gun. We'll just have to make do with BB guns, and hope nobody sees us. :)

Tomorrow I am going to sleep in. My sister already has her outfit laid out so tomorrow morning I will not wake up to an argument about how she doesn't have the right shoes, or the right kind of socks, or something like that... :)

O, and my grandpa is doing wonderfully better, he came home from the hospital friday and was in church on sunday. :) They don't really know for sure what it was, cause nothing showed up on any of the tests they did.

One day more

Break starts tomorrow at noon!! Hallelujah!

I'm going to relax.

I am going to catch up on my emails. So if you've emailed me recently- I will reply eventually. :)

Just not today. Or tomorrow.

I will not think about P-chem for a whole week.

I haven't heard anything else about my Grandpa....I guess no news is good news.
Gotta love the Wyss's- when it's not important the whole world knows.....when it is important I hear nothing. :) Thanks everybody, for your prayers.

Well Anyway. Back to the P-chem.

Grandpa...

...had a small stroke yesterday afternoon. Last I heard he's still in the hospital.

The Horror

I'm out of Chocolate Teddy Grahams.

I love college

So today Meg, Gab, Kindel and I stood in line for an hour to get a free burrito and drink at Chipotle. :)


It was good.

A Daring Rescue

Once upon a time, far far away at the Frying Pan, Kat-arina had just gotten back from her trip to Mexico. She was busy unpacking, and Jenny was busy brushing her teeth in the bathroom. Suddenly a piercing scream broke the stillness of the night. "Kat-arina, come in here quick," a very rattled Jenny yelled.
Kat-arina came running in, saying, "What's wrong Jenny?"
Their peaceful domain had been infiltrated by pure evil. Pointing at the HUGE, quarter sized spider that was trying to blend into the white shower curtain, Jenny yelled "Kill it!!"
"With what," asked Kat-arina, "I don't want to get guts all over the shower curtain!"
"Well, I'm not touching it," said Jenny. "What are we going to do?? I know, lets go get one of the guys!"
So the brave Kat-arina went to yell out the window towards 711 for help, while Jenny stayed to watch the spider. Fortunately for these two damsels in distress, Super Bubs the Spider Slayer was passing through at that very moment. He quickly assessed the situation and made short work of the evil spider. Kat-arina and Jenny showered him with thanks for his daring rescue as they cleaned spider parts off the shower curtain. As he disappeared into the night, Kat-arina was pretty sure she heard him say, "Wherever I'm needed, I'll be there.......hehe...Crazy girls, afraid of a spider."

Choose Something Like a Star

O Star (the fairest one in sight),

We grant your loftiness the right
To some obscurity of cloud --
It will no do to say of night,
Since dark is what brings out your light.
Some mystery becomes the proud.
But to be wholly taciturn
In your reserve is not allowed.

Say something to us we can learn
By heart and when alone repeat.
Say something! And it says ``I burn.''


But say with what degree of heat.
Talk Fahrenheit, talk Centigrade.
Use language we can comprehend.
Tell us what elements you blend.
It gives us strangely little aid,
But does tell something in the end.


And steadfast as Keats' Eremite,
Not even stooping from its sphere,
It asks little of us here.
It asks of us a certain height,
So when at times the mob is swayed
To carry praise of blame too far,
We may choose something like a star
To stay our minds on and be staid.

-- Robert Frost

I had a wonderful weekend. I'm so sad it's over!
Thanks, Meg and Kaitlyn and Jodi for staying with us- it's so fun to have company.
If you could vaporize one member of your immediate family, who would you vaporize? (Don't ask, it's what I get for catching rides with my neighbors.)
I used my last stamp writing letters to my little cousins. Their letters are so cute, makes me wish I had nieces and nephews. Hm... maybe my dumb brother who didn't come this weekend should get on that. :)

I love Fridays

Fridays are wonderful. Classes are usually so much less intense. Every Friday in intro to east Asian cultures we have group presentations, and my group already went. So I get to watch other people be nervous and stress about their powerpoints. :) It's hard to start anything new in P-chem on Fridays, and my quant lab lecture is always about 30 min long. We do have quizzes every Friday for quant, but the average has been about a 2 out of 5, so I don't study for them at all.

I met with my advisor today to talk about next semester. She knew about as much as I did, which really wasn't helpful. We only have about 3 weeks of class left, this semester is going by crazy fast.

I got quite the note from Gab....AKA chris.... :)

I got some tragic news today...poor Laertes has gone to that big ocean in the sky..... ;)

I cleaned...my hands smell like lysol. I don't know if that is good or bad. I like the smell of clean, but I'm not sure if I want all those chemicals on my hands. If I get stuff on me in lab, I have to wash it off quick. Hmm.

Chalise came over and ate supper with Gretch and I. Out of the ten girls in our house, we were the only two home. :) We had curried lentils (leave it to Gretch), fried eggplant, and fried cucumbers. Which I don't know if you can actually do that, but they were good in butter with Parmesan cheese.

I baked cookies with Chris and Brett. Chris has never baked cookies in his life and he was trying to follow my recipe, which looks something like this:
5 cups flour
2 cups b. sugar
2 cups sugar
2 cups oats

4 s. butter
4 eggs
choc. chips

2 tsp soda
2 tsp powder
1 tsp vanilla
1 tsp salt

It was humorous. And Brett introduced us to the skillet cookie. I think I may have a new favorite desert. :)

Carrissa and Janelle, and Brian and Nic came over to hang out with Meg and I, and then we all went to the Shaker to play trivial pursuit. My team actually won! (Thanks to Brian)

You see a lot of interesting people on Green street at 2 am.

I think I'm going to sleep in tomorrow.

*Sigh*

Two tests today....

m42, the Orion Nebula