Home!

Am finally back home for Thanksgiving. The last few weeks have been really hectic, and it's good to have some time to take a few deep breaths, get some sleep, and do a lot of homework in the comfort of my parents' house. Thoughts:

*The drive back last night was wonderful. We drove the "long" way and took mostly all back roads. Once we were past Pittsburgh traffic was completely fine, and so the journey was mostly just driving at night through back roads, listening to good music and enjoying life. One thing I've really learned over the semester is the value in actually living in the moment, without even worrying about the past or trying to plan for the future...taking the long way back meant that there was this one big long awesomely zen moment to just soak up and enjoy some peace and quiet in between classes and the hectic holiday season, and it was just what I needed.

I then proceeded to come home and pass out for 10 hours, and am still trying to get over that groggy "Holy crap, I slept way way way too much" feeling, he he.
Per usual, I have work to do, so I'm going to get to that here shortly....

*I've been thinking a lot about the 212 assignment that was due shortly before break. I did an AWFUL job on it...I was in the typical college-y "wait until 3 nights before it's due to even look at or start it", and for the way I work, that just wasn't enough time. I've been able to do well on the other assignments because I've given myself the time to look at the problem descriptions, think, and then plan, and then write the code. I didn't need more than a day or so of coding, probably, to actually code up the solution to this one, but I just didn't have enough time to think about how to approach the problem...by early Monday evening ( it was due at midnight) I felt like I was just kind of killing time until the deadline, because sitting in front of a computer wasn't going to help me code, not sleeping wasn't going to get it any closer to finished (even though I really didn't sleep much while trying to get it done.) It's really embarassing, because I did a shitty job on the parts I got done (I didn't even get things down for all of it) and I woke up yesterday morning realizing that there were some some debugging things I'd left in the code that weren't still supposed to be there but I never changed into the correct things before submitting because I was so completely exhausted when I did submit it.

The whole thing could have been avoided, had I just reminded myself to even LOOK at the assignment earlier. That's what's frustrating. It wouldn't have taken too much more time away from anything else I was doing just to look at it, but for some reason I just took it for granted that I could get it done and...argh. It's in the past now, and I can't do anything about it. This was the first time I've run into a situation where I'm actually physically limited in being able to get something done, and the solution isn't a matter of staying up / pushing myself harder /etc. So I've learned a bit about myself, which is good, and next time I'll know exactly what I need to do so I don't have another embarassignly poorly done assignment to turn in...


*Finally, I had some strange dreams last night, per the whole sleeping for a long time thing. Here are the fragments I remember:

-Talking with some girl who looked kind of like me, but had a different face and bright red glasses. I liked her glasses, and my glasses bent funny so then I couldn't really wear them anymore.

-Being at my Grandpa's house (for some reason, a LOT of my strange dreams take place there) and there were a bunch of guys I didn't recognize sitting around. They all had their shirts off, and their um..."upper body anatomy" was decidedly FEMALE. I was serving them milk or something to drink, and they were all just hanging out like nothing strange was happening. Then Christina's ex showed up, and he was the only one who looked like a guy. At first he was really embarassed that I'd recognized him there (in my own grandfather's kitchen) and he was really hesitating to take one of the drinks, saying that he didn't really want to end up like a woman. So I pulled him into another room (for some reason I didn't want the other guys to hear) and told him that with the amount that he worked out, he'd have nothing to worry about.

Er. I'm not sure why I'd care at all about Christina's ex being emasculated. But for some reason my dream self did. Blerg. I mean, he's obviously a symbol for someone or something else but I don't know anyone like him...? Blah.

*Finally: I came across an awesome quote this morning.

Ahem.

"Love is the difficult realization that something other than oneself is real." -Iris Murdoch