Paraskevidekatriaphobia

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In honor of everyone’s least favorite day (the title means fear of Friday the 13th), here’s a list of phobias that might just crack you up. If you have one of these, I’m very sorry, but some of them are absolutely hilarious. From MSN.
Chromophobia–fear of colors. (How do they watch tv?)
Papaphobia–fear of the pope. (Guess they’re not Catholic.)
Scorodophobia–fear of garlic.
Pteronophobia–fear of being tickled with feathers. (LOL, in the middle of the lab)
Ranidaphobia–fear of frogs.
Philematophobia–fear of kissing.
Aulophobia–fear of flutes.
Ostraconophobia–fear of shellfish.
Graphophobia–fear of handwriting. (um, did they type before they wrote?)
Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia–fear of long words (seriously).
Blennophobia–fear of slime.
Gerontophobia–fear of old people.
Peladophobia–fear of bald people.
Geropeladophobia–fear of old, bald people.
Phobophobia–fear of developing a fear.
Then there was the woman on the Tyra Banks show who was afraid of Styrofoam, and in order to overcome it, the producers buried a diamond necklace inside a large armoire filled with packing peanuts. She wouldn’t go near it for the first five minutes of the show. And of course, when she finally did open the door to start looking, all of them gushed out over her. She did eventually find the necklace, but I don’t know if she was cured…
May your day be spectacularly lucky despite any phobias. Go Cards!

creaky

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It doesn’t seem quite fair that I should be sore after doing something altruistic, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t so. Last Saturday I helped lay laminate flooring in a bedroom of one of the Habitat for Humanity houses, and I bet you can guess how happy my knees were with that…but I know how to do it, at least a full-floating floor type, and I can use a jigsaw and a miter saw and I watched as someone else used a table saw…oh, and I can still hammer with the best of them. But my knees, and my back, and my inner thighs are saying, why didn’t you have kneepads?
At least I feel accomplished. If creaky.
And I am absurdly excited that NaNo starts in a month. Why can’t I get excited about other things the way I do about writing?
And I’m still waiting on the med school app. I’ve delivered forms to all my recommenders, so here’s hoping they have something nice to say. Keep those fingers crossed.
Anyone with ideas on how to write a journal review paper?

tech support

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So yesterday we finally got hi-speed internet for the apartment. Joy. But it certainly wasn’t without its hassles.
First, we ordered it last week and never got a tracking number for the modem. Since our service was confirmed to be activated yesterday, I started looking at my account over the weekend to see if I could find out what was wrong. I finally realized monday night that for some reason the shipping address, which I’m pretty sure I specified as being the same as the billing address, only had our apartment number and not the street address. I called AT&T tuesday to see what could be done, and see if they had a tracking number for me. Lo and behold it was wrong there too, and of course they had already shipped it (which is good, I suppose, but don’t you think someone would have noticed that it had no street number?)

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Good Love is On the Way

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John Mayer is wonderful. I’m so glad he came back to St. Louis. Although I still feel whoever designed UMB Pavilion should be shot; the parking is awful and you have to drive these winding roads for 15 minutes before you can even see the ampitheater…
Anyway. A good show, with Matt Kearney (of Nothing Left to Lose fame) opening. John played first, then Sheryl Crow. Got a nice tour tshirt and paid an outrageous price for a SoCo Hurricane (it was good though 😉 ). Went early so my aunt and I could eat at Dave & Buster’s before the show. It’s the first time I’ve been; I was supposed to go for Senior week back in school, but had to pass it up when the 4×100 team made provisionally qualified. The food was good and our waiter Jason quite attentive, but I don’t feel a pressing need to go again. Just wanted to know what it was like.
One day I will be able to play guitar like John, I swear. It amazes me that finger movement like that is possible. One day. Quit thinkin’ and start doin’…
A setlist for you… * indicates new stuff from Continuum, coming out tomorrow (which I’ve pre-ordered, because I’m a JM geek)
Why Georgia
Bigger Than My Body
Belief*
Vultures*
My Stupid Mouth
I Don’t Trust Myself (With Loving You)*
Daughters
Clarity
Good Love is On the Way (I really loved this version, I wonder if I’ll be able to find it…)
No Such Thing
Gravity*
Waiting on the World to Change*
Sheryl Crow sang a bunch of songs, which were good, and even some I really liked. I might just have to find myself a copy of Wildflower. The backdrop for John’s show consisted of several grids with square panels in some of the grid intersections. They lit up with pretty colors in the mood of the song. Sheryl had a scrim with light tubes behind it, and one song, Redemption Day, had quotes about peace and war and racism projected behind her.
The night was glorious, once the sun went down, and we didn’t get wet. For once my fan club seats were quite good. We were slightly to the left-like, but we were on the floor and just kept having to move through the ranks to get to our seats. I’ve never been that close at a concert, so yay.

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Roommate No. 5

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I think I finally have another roommate I like. Thank goodness. Hopefully I won’t have jinxed it by committing it to paper, er, blog. She’s very nice, a grad student at WU, and has two cats. She’s not too much younger than me, and we seem to have quite a bit in common (we even have the same laptop–go Apple!). Since I have someone to share the bill, we got hi-speed internet too, joy of all joys. Here’s hoping we can actually *do* the self-install.
So, welcome to September. I can’t believe school’s back in session again. Seasons just keep marching on. I’ve had two Biochemistry classes so far, and luckily it’s been stuff I’ve seen before, though I’ll certainly have to break out my old Orgo book and take a look at things. Is it silly to be mad that we have to write a journal-review paper (at least I think that’s what it will be) that’s due on Dec 1? Recall that I’ve done NaNoWriMo for the last two years, and I already have an idea for it…I don’t know if I’ll be able to do classwork, a class paper, AND write 50k words worth of fluff all in November. Guess we’ll see…
Tomorrow is my first Habitat for Humanity build. I’ve got to figure out what clothes I have I don’t mind getting dirty. I wonder how many times I’ll get to do it; Saturdays seem to be precious commodities these days, what with HfH and my mom’s shows and finishing up the anthology (which I finally turned in, after much procrastination on everyone’s part).
On a side note, I saw my cousin Trevor today. He just graduated from school and was interviewing for a job at the med school. I had decided to walk to work today instead of taking the shuttle, and I’m glad I did, or else I wouldn’t have seen him. Good luck, cuz!
Hopefully I can get my med school app in this weekend. And cross your fingers on that one.

waiting for the world to change

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It’s almost time for a birthday 🙂
There’s been rather a lot going on here, but it’s kept me busy. Beware my loquaciousness.
Last night was my last regular softball game, because I’m signed up for Biochemistry on thursday nights. Hopefully I’ll be able to play some make-up games, as long as they’re on another night than thurs…why is everything on thurs. nights? Anyway, after we won (and I didn’t make a single hit–I struck out, how fair is that, in my last game?) we headed over to this pub called Harry’s. Normally it has good, if simple, food and relatively fast servers. But last night we were there for at least 15 minutes before the waitress even looked at us, then another 15 or so before she brought beer, for those of us who drank it (not I). Some more time goes by, and variously the members of our party either went to find the server/manager, or went to the bathroom 😉 It took about an hour for the server to tell us there was only one cook in the kitchen and they were swamped, but we should get food soon. Another quarter hour later the manager comes out with a free pitcher of beer and says our order ticket had been lost, hence the no food. Perhaps 20 minutes after that it finally came. By that time one guy had left, since he had to be up early. We got to the place about 8:20 pm and got our food a little after 10 pm. And yes, after all that, everything was free.

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one day

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One day, I will have a music room, filled with instruments. A piano, of course, but perhaps a digital one in addition to the classic baby grand, so I can transcribe the notes directly onto computer. A hammered dulcimer, certainly. Wind chimes, near a window. A drum set, perhaps, but not just the snares and bass; hand drums (what are they called in Gaelic?) shakers…a brass instrument here or there…
and I will know how to play them all.
But I especially want the hammered dulcimer.
(Still working on the med school essay. Just signed up for biochemistry this fall. Decided to not worry about it kicking my ass, even though it probably will, because Bernard, a coworker, told me not to. And as the song says:
Don’t worry about the future; or worry, but know that worrying is as
effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubblegum.)