2 down, 1 to go

FINALS.

AGAIN.

I know, I was just doing these in December, but that's the glory of the quarter system. By chosing to matriculate in a school that is still on quarters, you've electively chosen to put yourself through one more frenzied week of finals. What's worse, you have no one to blame but yourself.

Luckily I have just one more to crank out before spring break. And helping me get through the dread of finals is knowing that my darling Linda will be flying in from London to spend a week with me in and around the Pacific Northwest.

Linda and I met nearly five years ago while spending our summer breaks studying in jolly ol' England. She was in my same "History of Elizabeth I" class. On the first day I had noticed that although she spoke English quite well, I could tell she wasn't American, nor British. Linda was aruging a point with the professor (one that wasn't taken too well, I should add), but Linda had a really valid point. Her confidence mixed with supported info and her "accent" intrigued me. I had no choice but to approach her immediately after class and get to the bottom of the mystery. That curiosity blossomed into a beautiful friendship, still going strong today. Here's a pic taken August 11, 2002, on Linda's birthday. We've just come down from a very soggy day exploring Neuschwanstein Castle.

What's funny is that more than likely any pics we take this upcoming week may look just as wet and soggy.

Linda these days is working on her master's at Oxford and just got accepted to Christ's College at Cambridge for a PhD. So, yes, I definitely plan on making a trip back to England sometime in the next three years to visit her in the city where it all started.

While here for spring break we'll be heading up to Vancouver, BC to say hello and spend time with our neighbors to the north (first for me!). We're also toying around with the idea of going down to San Francisco and taking even more fog and dampness into our spring break. While other classmates of mine will be working on their tans on Maui, or in Hawaii, Florida, and other sunny locales, I'll be working on my paleness factor and seeing if at all possible I can get whiter.

Besides that, life is fine and fun. No, not dating anyone (SHOCKER!), but that's okay, school keeps me warm at night ;)

Sorry for the infrequent posting lately. But thanks for reading, just the same!

States and Countries I've visited

I'll show you my maps if you show me yours!

I've totally stolen this from another blog, but I thought it looked fun, and hey, this is what the blogsphere is all about, right?

Visited states/countries shown in red.

These maps don't include "airport" visits, with the major exception of Taiwan, and that's only because I've honestly spent more than 48 hours of my life over the years in the Chiang Kai-shek airport in Taipei. And sadly it's probably the lamest of all Asian airports I've spent time in.



create your own personalized map of the USA



create your own visited country map

As you can see, the South American, African and Australian continents are still on my list (as far as my continent check off is concerned).

Okay, your turn.

Axo Axonic--a summary

I must apologize for leaving you all in the dark about the details of the Badminton tournament. Surely you've all been sitting on pins and needles.

First, we declared ourselves the AXO-AXONIC team, named in honor of our Neurology class where we learned all about axo-axonic synapses. Here's a pic, just in case you're scratching your head. I think it looks like two badminton rackets.


Well, we managed to to take 4th place, which isn't that bad considering some of the teams we went up against. In the semi-finals we played a team where collectively the two had close to 12 years of competetive experience playing doubles. As Jessica and I scrambled madly to keep the shuttlecock in the air, I could overhear our competitors going over grocery lists, dinner plans for the weekend, and time schedules for movies. They would honestly keep their eyes on the birdie half the time, and yet with the LEAST amount of effort, hit it in such a perfect way that would send Jessica and I running just to get in place for the return. There were minutes (plural!) where the guy on the other team wouldn't even move his feet, and yet they managed to CREAM us. The game was over before we knew it.

So we went into the consolation round, where we played a team that was much more evenly matched. We lost to them as well, but had a hell of lot more fun trying--in fact, after the match had officially been won, we continued playing with them for another 30 minutes, just because we were having such a good time. They were two grad students for the engineering department, and we had a fun time making jokes about engineers and speech-language pathologists.

My game improved 10 fold, and of course Jessica still rocks with the racket.

NEXT YEAR>>>>>> we'll give that team we lost to in the semifinals a run for their money (and maybe make them move around a bit before they pulverize us all over again ;)

Well February Sucked...

in my blogging, that is. Actually, it was a wonderful month. Guess I had a little writer's block.