Ugh.

I am totally freaking out about the economy and the 'bailout'. I am a worst case scenario preparer (you will never be disappointed!), so I am imagining the worst and praying for the best.

And I am totally stressed about the election. It's what I do.

To counter the effects, I am going to do laundry and mop my kitchen floor.

The counter the effects on the blog, I will post random pictures from my iPhone. Enjoy the mindless/pointless entertainment. I hope you are all well.



T in his work clothes. Aaaah.



My buddy E's mom is growing some of our wedding flowers for us....and here's a sample.



T and E sitting in front of the 'bonfire' we had a few weeks ago.



View from the condo balcony a few weeks ago.









At the park.

And....that's enough for now, I suppose. Bored yet?

Apples to Apples

When we bought the house, we noticed (to T's glee) that there is a mature apple tree in the back yard. It has beautiful flowers on it for about a month (which rain down on the lawn and make mowing a celebratory affair) and every fall.....

Apples.

Tons of them. It's borderline insane.

Last year, we ignored the apples and the deer went nuts. And the bees. And the lawn was pitted with soft, decaying fruit for most of the winter.

This is not something we want to repeat, so while T is at work today....I'm picking apples. Then I am making apple sauce. Then apple butter. Then apple pie. Then.....chutney? I don't know. I can't can anything, as I don't have the appropriate stuff for it, so T's family is about to inherit a giant box of apples and apple accessories.

Maybe I'll freeze some. Apple bread, that might work. Get some dried cherries or something....

Anyway, I'm blathering.

I'm off to the harvest.

Edited to add:

The applesauce ROCKS. Rocks....I'm patting myself on the back.

Random...what do you expect at this hour?

A white tom cat (I'm talking pure white, not a dark hair or patch of skin on the boy--not albino, however, he has yellow eyes) has been frequenting our house as of late.

He is insanely friendly, and obviously someones pet as he is well fed and has a nice coat.

He is, however, not fixed. (At least by my untrained eye--there appear to be testicles. There's a sentence not oft uttered.)

He only comes over at night, appearing as if out of no where and disappearing just the same. I don't know who he belongs to, or even in what direction they live from us.

The internet tells me several things:

1)White cats at night are bad omens, and black cats during the day are as well.

2)White male cats are reincarnated spirits, and are to be considered holy as well as blessings.

3)White male cats are said to be the most revered of all felines, and some call them 'angels'.

I'm not sure how we went from bad omens to angels, but whatever. (The bad omens came around during the dark ages, actually. But whatever.)

As pleased as I am to have blessings in my home, I am a tad unnerved by the 'angel', or reincarnated spirit option.

Because if this is true, I just spent ten minutes snuggling and coddling an angel, who I then terrified and sent streaking out into the night by closing my garage door.

And now I have to wash all my clothes and shower so I don't make T's face melt when he comes home from work, the poor allergic thing.

Does anyone else know what this could mean? (Aside from my neighbors putting their cat out at night?)

Oook. Prepare for Math hystaria

Ok. I am stealing questions off the sample exam.....

√ 2 × √ 15 = ?
A. 17
B. 30
C. √ 30
D. √ 17

That would be C, right? If not, why? (I just found the test key, and it is C....But I'm not sure why. At least my stab in the dark was right.)

The quadratic formula makes me want to drink heavily and spend the evening weeping under my dining room table.

What is the value of the expression 2x2 + 3xy – 4y2 when x = 2 and y = - 4?
A. -80
B. 80
C. -32
D. 32

What the hell....The "figure" is a circle with a smaller circle in the middle, the shaded area being a donut of sorts.

In the figure below, both circles have the same center, and the radius of the larger circle is R. If the radius of the smaller circle is 3 units less than R, which of the following represents the area of the shaded region?
A. πR2
B. π(R – 3)2
C. πR2 – π × 32
D. πR2 – π(R - 3)2

Because pi R squared is how you find the radius of a circle, right? So, it's D. No? Wait.

(3x – 2y)2 =
A. 9x2 – 4y2
B. 9x2 + 4y2
C. 9x2 + 4y2 – 6xy
D. 9x2 + 4y2 – 12xy

This is A, right? The 'squared' bits aren't coming through....that's supposed to be squared, not multiplied by two.

Which of the following expressions is equivalent
to 20 – 45 x > 16?
A. x ≤ 5
B. x ≥ 5
C. x ≥ 32½
D. x ≤ 32½

this one doesn't make a lick of sense to me.

If f(x) = 2x + 1 and g(x) = x – 12 , then f(g(x)) =
A. x
B. x – 14x + 2
C. 4x + 2x – 1
D. 5x + 12
E. (2x + 1)(x – 1)2

If θ is an acute angle and sin θ = 12, then cos θ =
A. -1
B. 0
C. 12
D. √32
E. 2

If log10x = 3, then x =
A. 310
B. 1,000
C. 30
D. 103
E. 310

If 3x2 – 2x + 7 = 0, then (x – 13)2=
A. 209
B. 79
C. -79
D. -89
E. -209

There are only 17 questions on the placement exam. To my knowledge, I cannot take it again. (I think I can take it again in 6 months, but never more than twice a year.) I don't believe that they can keep me out of college if I fail this--because they have to have a math class for morons, right? I mean, they make money from my being there, smart or not.....I'm just so terrified of failing. I failed college before (I did it to myself, mind. Drugs are bad, kids! So is crazy!) and I am so terrified of doing it again.

I am so embarrassed to have to show them my transcripts from my old university. I am so scared that they are going to look at my depressing and really really bad GPA and judge me. Think I am stupid.

I found my blog from when I was 20-21. I was reading over it, and it threw me into a huge depression....How flippant I was! How dumb! How I took everything for total granted, how all I cared about was sex and parties and drugs and music and some more sex (and more drugs, if you'd be so kind). I cringed, reading it. Literally.

What the fuck was I thinking? T says everyone has to 'find themselves' when they are that age....but unless I was hiding in the bottom of a bottle, in a bag of dope or in a strip club, I wasn't looking too damn hard.

But I guess if that stuff hadn't happened, I wouldn't be here now, and here ain't too bad.

But if it hadn't happened, I wouldn't be freaking out about how you multiply fucking fractions either.

Uhm, can you help me?

I have to take my entrance exam for college here shortly. I only have to take the math portion of this test, so that I can be placed accordingly.

I have not taken a math class, nor used any math harder than the basics (addition, subtraction, division and multiplication) in at least 10 years.

I am not good at math, I have always struggled with math. So I am plowing through the test prep, trying to study (another thing I haven't done in at least 4-5 years....)so that I don't just walk in there, write my name on the paper and leave.

The test prep? Terrifying. The sample test questions? Even more terrifying.

T's baby brother is a math genius. He has agreed to tutor me when he has the time. He doesn't have the time for a little while.

So here I sit, in my bathrobe, staring horrified at a web page, doing my best to refresh my cob-webbed math memory.

Wish me luck.

When Yarn Attacks!!

Prepare for boredom and a peek into my messy-ish house. And to see the evidence of my carpet....oh, the carpet. How I loathe it so.

After the completion of my first pair of socks (and their subsequent trip through the dryer and into the loving arms of F, who has incredibly small feet) and the baby knitting, I felt confident enough to try for a pair of socks for T.

I let him pick his own yarn, in his own colors and so on. (Otherwise I would have used the neon-rainbow-vomit sock yarn I already have. Barbie goes tanning pink, anyone?)

This yarn was left sitting in a hank in my yarn stash, languishing its days away while I finished fretting over the baby sweaters and asking everyone I saw if they would dress their child in such an item (Moni says she loves it! Hooray!).

Last night, I decided that the time was nigh. It was time to organize the yarn pile, to wind the hanks into balls and then separate everything by color, brand and fiber.

I asked T's brother J if he would hold the hank for me while I wound. (J has hands that we {well, I} refer to as 'Man-Bear-Paws {catch the South Park reference?} as they are huge beyond belief) All this chore entails is holding your hands about three feet apart while the yarn, which is suspended cat's-cradle style, around them, is slowly rolled into a ball.

This proved a job too difficult for the dear J.

He dropped a part of the hank, which immediately turned itself into a huge tangle. So T had to help. And my buddy A, who was over for dinner and some Wii bowling.

Please enjoy my blurry photo montage:



This is J, attempting to untangle the mess. Also, A's feet. Also, the random storage container in my dining room. T is currently holding the hank, I am winding the ball and taking the pics.



Here you are getting a larger scope of the problem. J is standing about three feet behind me, still taking part in the activities shown in the previous picture. (Aren't T's feet adorable?)



Here's T, modeling the proper way to hold a hank of yarn for winding. Also, my messy living room. And the infamous 'Navajo' couch. (You would think that if someone were going to make a couch that ugly, they would make it comfortable. That thing needs to go live with a nice family on a farm.) Oh, and anyone who can tell me who is on T's t-shirt wins a prize. For real.



And here is the full picture, from T's view. There's my pajama-ed legs, J frantically trying to un-tangle the knots, and my horrible horrible carpet.

And that is how I spent my Thursday night.

(Seriously, how embarrassing is it that it took 4 adults over the age of 25 half an hour to wind a ball of string?)

Suspension!

I have sciatica.

This sucks, to those of you who are lucky enough to not know that this is.

It's horrible, weird back pain that radiates down from your pelvis to your feet (and if you're really lucky, your arm and fingers) as you have done something to piss off your sciatic nerve.

Basically, what happens is I do something stupid, like, trip over my own feet or collapse when trying to get out of the car (My parents seriously thought about naming me Grace. Hilarity.) and wrench my back. I wake up the next morning, and walking/bending is not an option.

This time the flare is due to the fact that I didn't wear my super-sexy mouth guard while sleeping the last week or so, and ground the hell out of my teeth, giving myself a huge tension headache with morphed into a migraine which morphed into my laying on any flat surface with a pillow over my head with my back at a weird angle because it stretched my neck out......

One thing leads to another.

I would much rather have this than a migraine/tension headache, though.

You know how you make sciatica better? You exercise. I can't open the refrigerator without swearing from pain, and I'm supposed to go walk 1-3 miles.

Hates it. That's me. Anyway, I have taken to suspending myself over the chair I sit in--holding my body out of it with my arms and letting my ass hover over the seat. My back cracks and pops and moans, and I feel better for about 25 seconds.

Anyway, enough bitching.

Nothing is really going on.....I've been out of commission the past few days from back pain, migraine or the flu-ish thing that A gave me. (thanks again, buddy!) So there's nothing really new to report. I mailed all the baby knitting! That's something. Uhm....Yeah. Well, at least I never promised to entertain you kids.

(Where did my commenters go? I mean, seriously?)