we did it for the photo op

We almost didn't go to graduation. Reasons?

• We technically graduated 4 months ago, before Christmas break, when there were no graduation ceremonies.
  
• Cap and gown rental fees seem like a racket after you've already paid your four years' tuition.
• My husband often scoffs at pomp and authority (and so also, possibly, at "Pomp and Circumstance"). He initially didn't look forward to the fancy hats, color-coded tassles, and terrible parking.
  

But one of my favorite pictures of myself as a little girl was taken on my dad's graduation day. I wanted a picture like that for our baby girl. Possibly for tradition's sake. Or possibly to have proof to show her when she's a teenager (and thinks she knows everything) that she has smart parents. Caps and gowns make us look like we know something.
















Which is probably why I didn't take some of the other, non-smarty-pants pictures that I should have that afternoon:

• The mess I made when I didn't put the lid on the bottle correctly so all the milk we brought spilled in the diaper bag
  
• The spot where I would have gotten lost (on a campus I've known for years) if other people hadn't insisted I was going the wrong way
• Or the moment we had to break into the car because I'd locked the keys inside

I opted for the photo that makes us look smart, that we'll put in a baby book—which might be an unfair representation of everything we did that day, but reason enough to go to graduation.

wish him luck on his toughest final

My finals this semester seem a little more reasonable than my husband's. I'll hand in a written portfolio at the end of the week while he'll have to regurgitate massive chunks of information—one of which is this little instruction I encountered on his study guide while quizzing him for his chemistry final:

"Know what hormones are and in general terms how they act."

Really? I can't help but feel that the study guide's a little vague. And absurd. Surely it can't mean ALL hormones? Especially when that's just a single bullet point on a three-page study guide. Right?

Personally, I think C. should receive 100% for that section of the test before he even shows up for the final tomorrow. I mean, he lives with a pregnant woman. He certainly knows what hormones are and EXACTLY how they act.

Tomato Christmas

We have drinken (drunk. K goes crazy when I use that word) a lot of eggnog lately. I even put it on my cereal.
School ends next week. I haven't posted lately because of the craziness. But I want to wish you all a merry Christmas. Here is a card that I made from tomatoes from our farmer.

Today I had a Christmas Miracle. I accidentally deleted all of my iTunes music, because I'm kind of an idiot. I was making a picture in photoshop, and it said that I needed more room on my hard drive. So I started deleting things like crazy. The next time I turned on iTunes, all of my songs had !'s next to them.

I wrote Apple and begged for forgiveness. A girl named Sarah wrote back an hour later and said that I could download everything again. Hooray!

Which brings me to a thought: I think once you buy a song or a movie, you should own it forever. If a new form of holding the song or movie develops (blu-ray, laserdisk, etc.), then you shouldn't have to buy it again, you should just get it for free. Okay, maybe the company wouldn't be required to send you a brand new dvd, but you should forever have rights to the data, so you could burn a new copy on whatever newly developed format. A lot of companies keep track of your purchases for a long time, so if your kid decides to put your dvds in the oven, you should be able to just download it again. That would be a real Christmas miracle.
Well, that's enough for utopian dreams. Merry Christmas.
p.s., I made a Christmas playlist, you can find it on the sidebar.

you may now call me Master Nerd

Last night, I sat at a big conference table with three of my amazing professors and talked about the classes I've taken and the stories I've written.

Of course, they didn't ask any of the questions I thought they might. And I didn't get to say most of the things I had hoped I would be able to. And when they asked how my reading influenced my writing, the mental list I'd made of books I wanted to talk about went entirely blank. But we had an interesting conversation, and they didn't hesitate to tell me that I passed my thesis defense. Perhaps they were swayed by the muhammara that I made them.

you know what sounds good right now?

These days, my tummy feels a bit willing to re-open its culinary horizons. So, I baked some salmon, made some rice and took them to campus with me today.

I thought I'd have plenty of time in my office to eat lunch, but I didn't. So I pulled the food out of the microwave and ate it while I walked in the crowd of students that moves en masse across campus between classes.

I would tell you about the two guys walking right behind me, and how they must have been really hungry, because I heard one say to the other, "You know what sounds good right now? Chicken curry with couscous." And I would tell you that the other one said, "No," and offered some other protein/pasta variation as the ideal meal. And I would tell you that I almost felt guilty that my lunch smelled REALLY GOOD.

But I realized before I wrote it what a pointless story that would be. So I'll just say this: I was thinking today of how much cooler my lunch would be if I had a Remains of the Day lunchbox. Does anyone know where I might find one?

Wallet, Eggs, and Stauffer's

I made eggs that looked like eyeballs and spiderwebs. They would be great for Halloween, though I intended them for Easter.
We saw these Goldfish ripoffs at the store.
Not only did they steal the product, but they stole the brand, which looks like Stouffer's one of the largest and most trustworthy food processors in the world.
And my new wallet is the coolest. I still have my first one, which I bought when I was 16, and have glued back together more than once.
My new one looks just like a piece of paper, but it's made out of super-strong tyvek.

And I forgot to take a final this week. I went in on Wednesday, and the testing people said it ended Tuesday. Oops. There goes 30% of my grade. I emailed the teacher to ask for mercy, but he's kind of old, and I don't think he uses the internet.

spring burnout

The combination of warmer weather and non-stop school since August 2007 is burning us out a little bit. A spring break sounds nice about now. But, alas, capital-S-Spring, capital-B-Break does not exist at our institution of higher learning. We have heard unreliable theories about why this is:

• We finish school a week earlier than other schools, so we get to the good jobs first.
• A shorter winter semester lets the university squeeze two terms into summer instead of one.
• The school can earn more money during the summer by having an extra week to host hundreds of teenagers for efy.
• The school board worries that an official Spring Break would encourage their good, christian students to use that week for binge drinking, recreational drug use, and casual sex.

We think that number 4 is not true. We would also be happy to whine about it if it were—because we don't need a week of excessive drinking (or maybe we do). We just need a second to breathe, to finish reading the 6 (7? 8?) more books we have yet to finish before April, and to clean up our cluttery little apartment so we can see the couch again.

We wouldn't even need a whole week.

More Good News: Econ Class Win

Nothing can top the Good News we celebrate this Christmas. But this is pretty good news.

Remember when I forgot to take a test in my econ class?

Well, I got a B+.

  ECON   210   001         Intro Ag Econ                   3.00  B+

That's good news.

Another email to a professor

Dr. Steele teaches Food Microbiology. This week we learned about microbes that cause food poisoning. I got food poisoning this same week, and sent him this email on Saturday:

Dr. Steele,

I think I should get a little extra credit for an out-of-class activity I'm doing right now. I'm experiencing a case of food poisoning.

I'm guessing it's foodborne intoxication, most likely Staphylococcus aureus, because it was quick onset, with mostly upper digestive tract symptoms, i.e. vomiting.

Thanks,
Christopher West

He replied:

Sorry to hear of your extracurricular experiences. Isn’t it great to be educated in your illnesses!

How to Fail: Halloween Edition

Update: My econ professor said I cannot retake the test.

I went into a job interview today dressed like R2D2.

I went to work at 6am, and spent three hours feeling nauseous with nervousness for my 9:30am interview. I got to the interview early, and saw that everyone else who was in line for the interview had dressed up like business executives.
Ron from Oregon Icecream was very nice. He politely told me I wouldn't get the job.

He said I'd be a good fit for research and development. My two ideas I was too nervous to say:

1. Chocolate chip cookie icecream. It wouldn't have chunks of cookie dough, rather the icecream would taste like cookies, and have chocolate chips in it.

2. Melted ice cream drink. I like to leave the ice cream out to melt and then drink it. They should sell it premelted. They could sell it to people who want to get fat.

I'm still feeling a little nauseous, but also a little sad. I think I'm going to get some icecream.

Personal Bailout

I procrastinated taking my econ. test until the last day, only to find that I was a day late.

Instead of taking the test on Saturday, I went shopping with my wife, and worked 8 hours.

But I wouldn't have traded this experience, because it gave me the excuse to write this email to my econ professor:

Professor Pope, If this were any other class in the entire world, a student's failure to pay attention and to do what he was supposed to do would have been punished accordingly. But this is Economics, taught in the U.S.

According to U.S. economics, if someone really important screws up, we bail them out.

A student may not be considered important enough to bail out. But at BYU, we understand that every student is a child of God with infinite worth.

Also, this isn't just economics, this is agricultural economics. In the U.S., we not only give a large chunk of subsidies to farmers who grow things, we give huge subsidies to farmers who don't grow things. If all farmers grew to capacity, prices would plummet.

Even so, if I would have taken your test and aced it, test scores would have risen and you may have appeared to be an 'easy' teacher.

You can thank me by allowing me to take the test late. Or, if you prefer, by sending a $700,000,000,000 check to:

[Address]

I sent this to him just a minute ago. I'll let you know when I hear back.

be nice to your teachers

If you take an English class, write good papers.
Your teacher has to read ALL the papers in the class. ALL. NIGHT. LONG.

eavesdropping no. 2

Abbie had a good suggestion: include a weekly eavesdropping moment on this blog. Because I so firmly believe in eavesdropping, I wholly agreed with her. And I thought it would be easy.

But it hasn't been.

For over a week, I've been waiting to hear something delicious or funny. Nothin'. What does it mean when everyone I hear on campus says that the reflection in the MARB's windows makes her thighs look fat, or discusses the consistency of the brownies she baked her crush for his birthday, or talks SO LOUD into his cell phone about his Friday night plans to drive all the way to Orem? I worry that the people around me are growing more inane daily.

I almost wanted to post some of the interesting conversations my witty friends or my smart husband let me in on. But those feel like they don't actually qualify.

Maybe next week.

don't know scat

Graduation
I thought that I wouldn't graduate for another two or three years. But I'll actually be done in just three semesters. Dec. 2009!

Change of Major
I was out of my own loop because I had just changed my major, and so I hadn't mapped which classes I had left. I switched to avoid taking calculus. My major changed from Food Science: Technical, to Food Science: Management. Instead of calc., I'll take a couple business classes.

Poo
Today in food microbiology, I learned that when microbes break down meat, they produce skatole, cadaverine, and putresine, three compounds that make rotting dead things smell gross. The root skat, or scat, from skatole, is a word I just barely learned when one of Kathy's learn-ed master of English friends described a book as scatological. I asked her what that means. She said scat means poop. Scatological means the book is full of fart and poop jokes. Apparently you can get a degree in that. I need to tell my 14 year old brother about this.

Fun Activity
So I thought that spook houses should get some cadaverine (which smells like cadavers) and sprinkle it around. Wouldn't the smell enhance the fear, especially when it mingled with their patrons' vomit? Sounds spooky to me.

Or if you throw a halloween party, you could have those mystery boxes that people have to stick their hands in. The spaghetti "is the witches hair," the boiled eggs "are the witches eyes." Just add a couple drops of putresine and the kids may think you actually have a dead witch cut up in little pieces in your kitchen. For a better effect, have your wife absent from the party for the first thirty minutes.

What you'll need
I haven't found a company that sells these compounds. To make your own: leave raw meat on the counter for a couple weeks.

happy fall!

A week or so ago, I asked my class to brainstorm things they look forward to this coming fall. They came up with BYU football and the end of finals week. And for a minute, that was about it.

Pushing them to think about other possibilities (I mean, that's the point of brainstorming), I mentioned something I'm looking forward to: "What about scarves?" Scarves? They all kind of laughed like I was their crazy, nerdy English teacher. Which I am, thank you very much.

As soon as the weather gets colder in a few weeks, I will pull out my winter scarves. Yes, I've actually consciously and happily looked forward to it. And then yes, I will be the crazy, scarf-wearing English teacher my class believes me to be.

the bicycle's only built for two

I'm a chronic eavesdropper. Not because I really care what's going on in strangers' lives, but because I think it makes for good writing material. Plus, it's super easy to do on a college campus; students move in giant herds between classes, and they're all self-absorbed enough that they fail to realize that everyone FOR A MILE AROUND can hear them.

Some of those conversations are so revealing they actually embarrass me. But today's just made me sad. Here's how it went behind me while I walked down the hall after my writing class:

Girl: So, what are you doing this weekend?

Boy: I'm going biking.

Girl: How cool! With a bunch of people? (said with the blatant intonation that shouts, "Invite me! Invite me!")

Boy: My girlfriend rented a tandem bike and we're going together.

Girl: Oh. (said with much ouch.)

Silence. Very awkward silence.

Girl: (with that sort of boundless enthusiasm that overcompensates for sudden disappointment) Wow! You didn't mention a girl last time I saw you!

Boy: Yes. I did.

We rounded the corner and I turned to look at them as they walked past. I'm pretty certain that her heart was sloshing around in her feet. And from the look on his face, I felt just as certain that he didn't even know. I wanted to stop her and say, "Don't worry. He's just clueless. And taken. As well as doofy looking. You don't really want to go out with him." I didn't say that, though. Maybe I should have.

The look on her face was about enough to make me want to stop eavesdropping.

save the tree octopus

In my English class last week, I warned my students to be on guard for bogus or unreliable research sources. Just for fun, I showed them sites that warn against the dangers of Di-hydrogen Monoxide (water), tout the new drug Havidol ("when more is not enough"), and—most importantly—call on readers to save the Northwest Tree Octopus.

What are the odds? On that day, in that class, with fewer than 20 students present, one girl was wearing her "Save the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus" T-shirt. I want one.

Pretty much a doctor

My brother Nick quoted the classic Chris Farley: "lots of people go to school for seven years." "Yeah, they're called doctors."

I'm in my fourth year, but have probably two more coming. I'm going to school full-time over the summer to try to get done.
















But I have this accomplished feeling. I'll have as much education as a doctor by the time I graduate.

I'm studying food.