Fishing anyone?

Michael exaggerates. I'm not up all night doing Calculus. We actually stay up late watching the latest movie we've either borrowed or bought from the local shop of pirated DVDs. Yes, my Calculus can be a very real nightmare. It's necessary, though. I need it to get to where I'm trying to go. So even though I might speak in tongues while working on my homework, telling myself the benefits of the Pythagorean Theorem, or 'a' is tangent to the x-axis, or the wonders of the coordinate plane, or the equation of a slope and which numbers are the y-intercept, x-intercept...blah blah blah...makes someone go a little crazy after awhile.

My calculator finally arrived. Just in time too. I was getting to the sections in my math class involving the calculator. So now a brand new used TI-83 Plus graphing calculator is now among our possessions. Yeehaaw.

Thumb is doing good. It's just the fine detail healing in progress right now. Michael and I are getting ready to watch "Lucky Number Slevin." I have a psychology course starting in about two weeks. My goal is to get five online classes finished while I'm in this Mesopotamian paradise.

One down...three and a half more to go...

There's this chart up on the wall that I made that tracks all of my assignments, and I "X" out ones I've completed. It makes me really happy when there's a whole bunch of "X's" up there. Very motivating.

Not much is really happening. Right now I'm a "desk manager" or "administrative assistant" or "PAC clerk" or however you want to put it. That's my light duty until I'm fully mission capable. It's alright. I don't mind paperwork, but it does get kind of boring. The schedule is very ideal, though. Michael and I are getting a lot of time together right now, which is really good for us. It's almost like having a normal, civilian work schedule...almost.

Anyway, I told Michael I'd blog today, so I am. There's really not too much going on. We're getting overrun by ants, which Michael thinks is cool. I sent several scores of them to their deaths earlier today with some toilet paper...I wonder if ants have medics?

The insects here are so scrappy, they come back from the dead sometimes. I smashed an ant one time while cleaning the floors in here, and watched it for several minutes while it straightened out its limbs and got back to normal doing its ant business. Kind of stunned me. Shouldn't suprise me, though, since the flies never die. You smash them and they're back to attacking you with newly resolved vigor.

The fish in the lake here are called Mangar...look them up. The carp here eat baby ducks, and there's videos out there to prove it. There's these spots by the lake where they accumulate and swim all over each other, and it kind of looks like a swarm of snakes...very freaky looking. I like watching their mouths separate from their faces like prehensal trunks when they're eating the bread that people throw out to them...that is, when they're not eating baby ducks. They're certainly not the beautiful fish that people get tattoos of when you see them in their natural state.

Anyway, Michael and I are going to watch our movie now. It's chow time soon. I'll probably do my vaseline treatment tonight on my hands...and Calculus. So...TTFN. Ta Ta For Now.

R.