I'm a Fricken Genius.

I made a 60 on my Electrical exam!!!!!!!!

Okay, okay, it may not sound impressive to get a D- on an exam, but it really is good. Dr. Snelsire is old and tired and gives tests with only 5 questions, graded right or wrong. No partial credit.

Again, missing 2 out of five isn't that impressive, but with complicated circuit questions its easy to make a little error. Anyway, usually the average is about a 40. So I kicked ass.

Mwahahahahahahha!

Vote Barack.

Only Eskimos go to Class

Yup, it's officially cold in SC. So cold in fact that it snowed 3 whole inches. And iced over anything more than 3 inches from the ground. So no school today.

Because only an eskimo could trudge through that much winter precipitation.

Yay for me sleeping until 11:30!

Back to School

Hello 2007. I've now broken the month-long blog silence.

I really couldn't be bothered to blog over break, because cocktail hour was just so important.

New Year's Resolution: Read 20 books this year.
There's a girl who reads 50 books a year and talks about them on her blog (50books.blogspot.com) and she inspired me to read more. Unfortunately I'm a college student so a book a week seems a little out of my reach. I felt I could do one every 3 weeks during school and more than one a week during breaks. That puts me between 20 and 30 books this year.

So in honor of this new goal, I stole the book ticker from Miranda's blog and have been sucked into the world of librarything.com. Its fun.

As of now, I'm reading The Godfather. I'm nearly half-way through and its completely living up to the movies. Its (of course) somewhat better, but kudos to the movie makers for capturing the essence of the characters and staying true to the story. (Unlike some story-raping jerks I could mention involved in the making of the travesty that became "The Count of Monte Cristo".)

I've already read several books in the first few weeks of the year and I'm about to comment upon them in their own entries.

In other departments....
My crew is finally somewhat reunited- Dana and I are both on campus this semester, as well as Melissa as a grad student and JD as a graduate who is staying in town. JD has a pretty new girlfriend who we all like. Should make for a wicked fun semester. I'm taking 17 hours this semester, one is a easy "just show up" class and 3 of those hours are spanish so it should be considerably less demanding than last semester. Fingers crossed.

Ok. I've bored myself. Entries to come on "Hey, Nostradamus", "Cash", "Never Have your Dog Stuffed" and "High Fidelity".

-Abby the Literate

Study Break

My brain has turned to mush. Time for a break.

I've been hitting the Quality Engineering pretty hard all day with occasional stops for public speaking review. On a fun scale from 1 to 10 this is a -2.34.

Boo Statistics.

On the up side, they've (finally) started posting some of my grades.
Official- A in IE 491: Human Factors and System Safety
Unofficial- B in ME 310:Thermodynamics and Heat Transfer
- A in Engl 314: Technical Writing

Still awaiting the verdict after my ridiculously hard IE 360 final. Tomorrow is Quality Engr, and Public Speaking is Saturday. This week just won't end. It drags and drags and drags. Ugh.

At least there is a light at the end of the tunnel. If I live through Saturday its straight to Charleston and the fabulous company of the Real World Trion cast. :) Ah memories.

Strange occurrences in the last week? Running into old neighbors and professors in bars. Running into current professors in the grocery store. Having a roommate move in and out 18 times in 2 days. Passing Thermo. Finding out all of my old guyfriends are getting girlfriends (JD!). Having every member of my immediate family call me at the same time. 5 days in a row. Being lucky enough to catch the True Hollywood Story NKOTB.

Alright. Back to the books. Wish me luck.

Abby Gets Things Done.

[post preceded by shouts of excitement]

I finished classes today. Out of excitement, I even attended all the classes that met today. Pretty impressive, no?

While the two looming Saturday finals are pretty scary, I did not dedicate my whole day to studying. Things I did do today?

• celebrated Lauren Van Meter's 21st birthday! (at midnight this morning, until 2am, and even still I made it to Thermo at 9:30- I amaze even myself)
• overslept by almost an hour, but still showered, blew my hair dry, found a portable breakfast, and got dressed enough to be complimented on my shoes and accidently seduce a simple-minded man
  
• wore the new "I'm too cool for school" snoopy undies my mommy sent me
  
• chatted with my sister
  
• booked flights home for Christmas and back to school
• did my dishes
• bathed
• cleaned my closet
• watched the nbc Thursday night lineup

It is simply amazing the things you can get done, when you finally don't have anything to do. Now that the written work is behind me, all that's left is the stuff I rock at. Multiple choice tests and tests you can't prepare for.

So tomorrow I hit the books hard, Saturday I spend the whole day emptying my brain and then we are finally into the home stretch. 2 easy tests, a quick trip to Charleston, and its home sweet home. Wish me luck.

p.s. Watching ER makes me homesick.

The 12 Days of Finals. My favorite time of year.

Hey friends-

The countdown has officially started: 13 days until I'm done for the semester, 22 days till Christmas, and 26 days until Cancun!!

All I have to worry about now is, 5 papers, 4 final exams, 3 french hens, 2 birthdays and 1 online writing portfolio. Oh, and that detail of Christmas shopping. But I don't really worry about shopping. Its more of a giddy anticipation. I miss the mall.

Speaking of my writing portfolio, I've just finished with getting everything online and organized. It still needs a bit of editing, but if you've ever wondered what exactly it is I do at college (besides being a triathlete in drinking, dancing and danger) you might take a look. The Hurricane Project is what has been sucking up a lot of my time this semester.

Not all my time, obviously, after all, last night Kerry and I went to a party at a prof's house and the night before ('twas Sean's birthday-happy birthday Sean) a bunch of us went to see the new Bond movie. New Bond is freakin' hot. It was the best Bond movie in recent memory I'd say. Me being an expert in Bond films and all.

Speaking of brilliant films, I hope you are all planning to tune into TNT tonight to see the second "Librarian" movie with Noah Wyle. Because he is so delicious and the movie ought to be so ridiculous.

Okay, enough for now. If you don't hear from me in a few days, I may be trapped under a mountain of books. Send help.
-Abby

40 minute break

Having taken two tests, I have a short break before the third commences.

I failed Thermo with impressive style. Keep in mind I'm not one of those people who dramatically thinks they fail everything. Nor am I a humble person. On the contrary, I like to brag when I know I've done well. And here I have not. On the up side, it seemed like every person in the class failed as well. So if I failed less horribly than my classmates I should make it all up in the curve.

My Public Speaking test was funny. My teacher is very creative. She found ways to make the simplest concepts in the world seem like the 2nd or 3rd simplest. I'm predicting an A-.

Now I'm going back to studying my quality engineering stuff.

Later-
Abby

The Country of Italy Loses it Charm

You know how sexy foreign accents are? How many movies have we seen when the girl falls in love with a mysterious, exotic man whose english is atrocious. We all love it. The time of day sounds like sweet nothings with the right accent.

Well, I have found the way to break this trend. If you no longer desire to become lovesick at the sound of an accent, simply follow these instructions: Have an Italian lecture about thermodynamics.

Today was the first day that our actual thermo professor, Dr. Massa, of Italy, did our lecture. And for the first 15 seconds while he gave his intro about 'speak up if you have questions' and 'stop me if you get confused', I went ahead and swooned. Then he started putting that accent on words like 'heat transfer', 'energy balance equation' and 'constant pressure vs. polytropic processes'. Just like that he killed it. Suddenly Italian-English was just the same as Korean-English and Indian-English. Not sexy at all. Its just the sound of a person who is much smarter than you trying to explain things you will never understand.

Way to kill the fantasy, Dr. Massa.