Our Dumb Blog

Spring Break is here! AAAaaaaaa!!!!! I’m excited. I’m happy. I’M STAYING UP TILL 3 A.M.!!!

It’s been crazy. I had six tests this week. Count them. Six. And most of them required studying.

To start of the week was chemistry. I struggled all weekend with homework trying to balance a double replacement chemical equation, but it just wouldn’t work no matter how I (and whoever I could get to help me) tried. Finally, I just added some oxygen on the right side, which seemed to work. Before class I asked one of the girls waiting outside what she had. She had down 1 and 4 on each side, and it worked! I couldn’t believe it was that simple. She couldn’t explain to me how she’d gotten it, however, since Dr. Gerdom helped her. I quickly changed my answer and went in to take the test. I finished it in 40 minutes, which I thought was really good considering it took me about the whole hour last time. I went back and worked on this one single replacement equation that I couldn’t seem to get (that’s because I was putting anions together. Duh.). I got the homework back on Wednesday; everything was okay. I got the test today; a 98! Out of 111 points, I made a bunch of mistakes, most of them stupid stuff, but he counted the 98 points I got right as the score. I’m happy. I may just be able to pull an A out of this class after all.

One of the things I’m doing to help matters was to go to make up lab today. I usually have English at 1 when the lab started, but Dr. Allums let me take the test during my free hour at 11 instead. Because my lab partner and I didn’t turn in our lab reports the first day (we were unaware that we were supposed to since he had already graded them in class) and our lab reports for the second lab got lost (not our fault), we have to do BOTH make up labs, of which today’s was the first. It was fairly complex. I was there till 4:30 and probably the last person to leave the classroom building with everyone leaving for spring break. It was kind of fun, though, to mix chemicals and stuff to see what my unknown solution had in it. While we were working, for some reason Dr. Gerdom held up a square shaped bottle and said, “So Joanna, is that Zima stuff any good?”

“Yeah,” I said. Everyone in the room gasped. You don’t talk about stuff like that on a Baptist campus. At least not in front of everyone. “Well,” I qualified, “I mean for an alcoholic beverage.”

Later while he was helping one of the students find a missing solution, Dr. Gerdom exclaimed, “Why, there it is. This person’s been hoarding it because it tastes so good.”

“Like Zima,” I added loud enough for the people around me to hear. One girl involuntarily broke out laughing.

Tuesday was our President’s Day holiday. I know, President’s Day comes a week before on most colanders, but at the University of Mobile it coincidentally falls on Fat Tuesday, the day before Lent when everyone gets drunk and goes to parades for Mardi Gras. Nothing is open on Fat Tuesday. Not even the hospital operating room is open, except for emergencies. All the schools are out Monday, Tuesday, and Ash Wednesday. A Baptist college like the University of Mobile would never celebrate Mardi Gras. Instead we name it after the school president, President Magnoli’s Day.

On Wednesday a few people were walking around with gray crosses on their foreheads. I had a religion test. I studied pretty hard for it. He gives us the questions (some of which we choose from), but then our professor expects us to write an essay recreating the notes we took in class. I memorized a bunch of stuff, even making an acronym for the different ideas on the unforgivable sin. I wrote fast and finished in the 50 minutes he gave us. Well, I thought I had finished. In reality, I misread one portion as saying “answer one of two” when it actually said “answer two.”
Just because all the other sections had been that way, I assumed this one would be too. I got the test back today. Everything else was okay, and I got the bonus, so my score was 95. Not bad at all.

Thursday I had two tests: philosophy and Russian history. Philosophy was on Harold Kushner’s book Who Needs God? He also wrote When Bad Things Happen to Good People. His book that we read should have been called Who Needs Religion? because that’s what he was stressing. As a rather liberal Jewish rabbi he has a lot of good things to say but comes at it from the wrong premise. He says that religion is good because it helps us. I say that, because we need help, we need God. The test wasn’t too hard. I hope. But as a philosophy teacher, Dr. Mashburn gives credit for almost everything, so I’m not worried.

Following directly after that was our Russian history midterm. We only have this, our final, and class participation to determine the grade, so I was a bit nervous. But once I picked up my pencil and started writing an essay on the October revolution and the civil war following it, the story flowed on for almost three pages of notebook paper. Hopefully, she’ll like what I wrote for the essay and all the questions. I didn’t have a clue for the bonus (three contributors to the Silver Age), so I just made up some names. She said spelling didn’t count, so maybe I came close.

Today was fairly straight forward. First was my sociology test. I’m afraid I put down the correct answers according to my teacher instead of putting down what was true in a couple of places, but that’s the way it is. I just don’t feel that invigorated engaging in debate at 9 in the morning.

Later today was the aforementioned English test. Easy.

Along with tests, this week has also been filled with visiting with guests. The Bennetts are old friends of ours from Columbus, Georgia where we lived before we moved to Colorado and then here. Cliff Bennett, the father, was our pastor for a while before we moved. He and my dad are close friends as are the moms. They have four kids: Andrew 18, Jenifer 15, Stephen 13, and Jeanetta 7. We all get along pretty good. Andrew and I usually hang out while Stephanie and Jenifer goof off and Benjamin and Stephen get into trouble. Jeanetta goes around annoying people. Andrew and I stayed up till 3 on Monday night (since I didn’t have to go to school the next day) watching Tombstone and Schindler’s List. Andrew had to go back early and take the G.E.D. on Thursday (since he homeschools). Coincidentally, Stephanie took her G.E.D. today (Friday). Andrew wants to do physical therapy and get the Air Force ROTC to pay for it down here at the University of Southern Alabama, which has the best physical therapy department in the area. That’d be neat having him around. Nathan talked Jenifer into coming out to Colorado with us this spring and helping out with camp. I’m still trying to convince people around here to attend Summit.

My grandmother is scheduled to leave the hospital and come live with us this coming Tuesday. A lot of changes are in store for us. Ben has moved out of his room and into the living room. We’re going to have to make the bathrooms handicapped accessible and put ramps to the doors. My mom won’t be able to travel anywhere until my grandmother leaves or something, so she won’t be coming out this summer for the Christian Bookseller’s Convention in Denver and stuff. My grandmother will probably want to move back some place in Richmond, Virginia at some point because that is where all her friends are.

Stephanie’s birthday is tomorrow. She’s 18, no longer a minor.

2-20-95

Someone around here has been accepting the mail and hiding it away without telling me! Not that I’ve had all that much time to write anything anyway.

I regularly stay up till 2 or so on Friday nights. Sometimes even on Saturdays. Other nights, however, I try hard to be in bed by midnight. Late at night is when I get the whole house to myself and, more importantly, the computer and can do anything I want to, as long as it’s silent. It’s my freetime. It’s also when I end up doing most of my homework, since I tend toward procrastination. Never put off till tomorrow what you can put off till the day after tomorrow.

Things have been going along at full speed without much time for procrastination around here. My grandmother had pneumonia, but she’s recovering from that. The last time Mom spoke with the doctor, he said it would be about 2 weeks until my grandmother would be discharged from the hospital. That means she could be moving in with us Thursday next week! We have a lot of preparing to do in the meantime. My brother will have to move out of his room into the living room. We’ll have to care for her constantly. Right now we really don’t have a clear idea of what’s going to happen.

Some bad news on the chemistry front. When the professor was handing back lab reports, me and my lab partner didn’t get them. We asked him why, and he said that he didn’t have them. We did put the in the correct box outside his office and everything just like we were supposed to after lab. I went back the next day to see if mine was still there because I wanted to change something, but since it wasn’t, I figured that he’d already collected them. But he said that they are not in his office. The weird thing is that both lab reports are missing. They weren’t together or anything, just in the box. Either he has lost them or someone hates us. It’s all very odd and disconcerting. He says that we’ll have to do a make up lab. That stinks.

I wrote my first formal lab report last night. It took a lot longer than I thought it would because everything had to be just so. I turned it in today. Let’s hope that it doesn’t end up missing too.

The theater department did a production of Wait Until Dark last weekend. I was very impressed. They did a great job. It was really suspenseful, I was on the edge of my seat almost the entire time. I went back another night to help serve with the dinner (it was a dinner theater) so that I could watch it again. This time it wasn’t nearly as scary since I knew what was going to happen, but I caught several of the details I missed the first time. It’s a story about three con men who try to weasel a doll filled with heroin out of a blind woman, whose husband brought it unknowingly from Canada. The girl who played the blind woman did it excellently.

I’ve got a couple stories of stuff that has happened to me lately that I want to write out but haven’t had the chance. I’ll see if I can get to it one of these days…

My grandmother spoke today!

Since her stroke, she hasn’t been able speak a word, only sign yes or no with her hand. Yesterday, Dad asked for prayer at Integrity Music’s weekly staff worship service on behalf of my grandmother. That same day, she relearned how to speak in therapy. She could count and sing Amazing Grace and other things by rote.
I went to visit her today. She has pneumonia, and hasn’t felt like eating anything, so I took her some chicken soup and tapioca pudding my mom made for her. As I prepared the soup for her to eat, my grandmother started signaling to me that she wanted something. It’s often hard to understand what she wants, almost like an endless game of twenty questions.

I pointed to something, “Do you want this?”

She made her hand into a fist, the sign for no.

“Well, what do you want?” I asked.

She opened her mouth, the syllables coming haltingly. “Oh… yesss…” she said. “I… can… talk…”

I laughed. It was the first time I’d heard her voice in more than a month.

“That’s right, you can talk!”

“I… can… talk…” she said, “you… can… talk…”

She has to try very hard to get the words out. It takes many false starts and a lot of concentration to get out what she is trying to say. Many times her syllables are so slurred that I can’t understand them. But she keep trying. She asked me,

“Ees… Booger… Oh… Kay?”

“Is Buller okay?” I repeated, talking about our neighbor’s dog (who, nevertheless, stays up at our house most of the time). “Yes, he’s fine.”

She asked me something about Stephanie, but I couldn’t understand her. “What… happened… to… day… at… school?” she asked me. I told her, but her ears are stopped up, and she was having trouble hearing me. “I… can’t… hear… youuuu…” she said, putting her hand behind her ear.

She ate all her chicken soup and tapioca, which is more than she’s eaten in a few days. She got me to open a package that arrived at the hospital for her. Inside was a box of thin chocolate mints from a friend. As I was leaving, she told the nurse, “I want… one of those…”

Christmas day my extended family and I were in my grandfather’s van, driving to New Orleans, where a plane would take me on a prized trip to Colorado. My grandmother sat in the middle seat, commenting about things to everyone in particular, while no one really wanted to listen. I made snide remarks to match each irrelevant one of hers, but only my dad sitting next to me in the drivers seat could catch them. “Stop it,” he warned but couldn’t stop himself from laughing. “Respect your elders,” he choked between convulsive gasps for air among hysterical chuckles but then broke into a fit of coughing brought on by my next joke.

A week later, I was sitting in a snow covered house in Colorado, letting the information sink in that my grandmother had suffered a severe stroke at our kitchen table.

Classes have been going pretty good. Well, actually more than good. It’s great. I love all the courses I’m taking this semester.

My sociology professor is a commie lib, but that’s just because he’s just a really compassionate guy (plus the fact that he’s resentful that he doesn’t get paid more than he does). I’ve been reluctant to get in any arguments with him because he seem so unsure of himself, but we have had a couple of good discussions. I’ve decided that I’m a functionalist capitalist, so if you want to label me anytime in the near future, you’ll know what terms to use.

Chemistry has been a doozy, even though I got 20 out of 20 on my last quiz (I am so happy). I’ve been listening to The Origin of Species (abridged) by Charles Darwin and A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking on tape. It was great because, while I was finding the result of a positron emission in Chemistry, I was learning what a positron IS from Hawking. Chemistry lab was pretty fun (although I broke a cardinal rule and wore contact lenses). We did all sorts of chemical reactions with a penny. It was cool. What chemistry lab should be, except, alas, with no explosions. However, now I can’t look my professor in the eye.

Religion is okay. We’re going through the synoptic gospels. As academic as my professor was last semester, this one is exceedingly conservative, a real fundamentalist. I like it. The other day he made the statement that angels have emotions. I asked him after class what scripture he could use to back that claim up. The next class period, he had a list of references for me.

English, as ever, is cool, even though Nathan isn’t in there. We did some William Faulkner and are now reading Billy Budd by Herman Melville. We’ll do The Death of Ivan Ilych later on. Dr. Allums is trying to persuade me to become an English major. Actually, double major. I told him, yeah right.

Philosophy is fun. It’s a discussion class, so that usually makes it interesting. We had our first test today on the Orestia. It was easy. I hope.

Russian History is great. Right now we’re at the 1917 Revolutions. Today I stayed after and another student and I talked with the instructor (a 44 year old woman from Russia) for over an hour and a half! It was great. She expressed the difficulty it is for her to adjust to a new way of thinking after years of believing that socialism was the best way. It’s fascinating to gain her perspective and understand why people accepted communism for so long.

Along with school I’ve had to pick up a bunch of the slack in household duties left off by mom, since she spends a majority of her time down at the hospital with my grandmother. I have a LOT of reading to do this semester, but I prefer that to papers, projects or other “work.” In the meantime, I haven’t had any. Time, that is.

Hey, did you know that time passes slower at higher altitudes than it does at sea level? No wonder Colorado has such a relaxed attitude.