Wedding

Tomorrow's the big day.

Today is the busy day.

Actually, every day in the last 5 months has been the busy day.

Running

It has become a very serious and wonderful addiction.

It's always hard to start a run. The minutes preparing are harder to get through than any part of any run. Yesterday especially.

I drove myself down to Lake George Village around eight o'clock, and parked next to the battlefield. It took me twenty minutes to work up the courage to get out of the car, and then thirty seconds of walking before I had the nerve to begin my warm-up jog.

No matter who you are, the first mile is always the worst, and I always start my runs near the bottom of a hill. So yesterday's first mile was pretty intimidating. Yet, it didn't turn out to be too bad. I kept up a slow pace, waiting for my energy to drop. But it didn't. I continued, slowly increasing speed, and the pavement passed easily underneath my sneakers.

After I had been running for about fifteen minutes, the undigested chips and cheese from the previous evening started shifting in my stomach. Thankfully, my stomach ache went away after a few moments and never came back. By the second mile, I was running at my top speed - about 7mph.

It was around my third mile that it hit me: the runner's high. The reason we get addicted. My body began to tingle from head to toe, and I felt the surge of adrenaline. My pace picked up, and my thoughts focused in on running. It was exhilarating. It lasted only for two miles, if that, but even as I felt my body begin to weaken, I kept the pace up. Chest cramps did hit a block or two before I reached my car, but some deep ab-breathing eased the pain.

I am so tempted to sign up for the peace half marathon in DC this labor day. But I am cheap, and its rather expensive.

But I am training for it. just in case...

Last week I only ran 24 miles (I was focusing on cross training)
This week I am aiming for 31 miles, but I've never run that much in one week, so we'll see how it goes.

What Color is this Egg?

This is a picture of an emu egg I found on line. We have an emu egg at Fountain Rock and my boss always describes the color as "dark jade." Today in class we were talking about bird eggs and the topic of color got brought up. I told my profesor that he should get an emu egg, because it looked really cool and that it was dark jade.

My profesor says, "Oh, it's green?"

To which I reply, "No, it's blue."

And then I realized how rediculous that must sound, calling the egg both jade and blue.  My question then is what color do you think it is? The website I found this picture called it green, as do many others; but many other websites say the eggs are blue, and some have even said black (granted, different eggs look slightly different so some may be bluer while some are greener).

On a seperate occasion Karis has said she thinks I'm color blind. I will state though, that I have passed every colorblindness test I've taken.

*****

I just mentioned my class in this post, and I think I mentioned it in a previous post, but I don't think I ever explained it.

I'm at Star Lake in the Adirondacks with 15 other students taking an Ornithology class, it's a 4 credit class and we're doing it in 3 weeks. We have 4-9 hours of birdwatching each morning and then lecture for about 3 hours in the afternoon.

As part of the class we have to be able to identify at least 123 birds by sight, 84 birds by sound, and know the Order each bird is in (if it's a song bird, we need to know what family it's in). I said at least 123 birds, because we have 4 quizes and my prof gives us a list of about 30 birds that we need to know, but at the end of the quiz (for both sight and sound) he gives us 5-10 birds that we didn't study but he thinks we should have picked up from being in the field.

These quizes are on top of 2 exams, each covering half of a text book about 3 inches thick (and we cover all but one chapter, a chapter which is an introduction to bird watching).

It's an intense class to say the least, and I've probably wasted enough time on here already (I have a quiz tomorrow... and I'm getting married in 5 days).

It's unbelievable to wrap my mind around the fact
That in just nine short days
I will be married
To a man who is loving, selfless,
Loyal, and forgiving; a man who means everything to me.

It seems to me that it is more than I deserve,
and it's magnitude overwhelms me.

what keeps me sane:

Graduation

I graduated on Saturday, I think I can still call it that, even though I will be taking an ornithology class until for the next 2 and a half weeks.

There was a baccalaureate service on Friday, and then commencement on saturday. For those of you who don't know the difference between baccalaureate and commencement, the first is a worship ceremony, while the second is a more of an academic, bureaucratic, ceremony.

My mom and brother came to Houghton Friday afternoon, and my Aunt Nancy and Uncle Woody got there just before the baccalaureate service. To be honest, it felt strange wearing my cap and gown, walking around the quad with bagpipes playing, through a corridor made of faculty members, and onto the stage, where I was sitting in the middle of the front row.

In addition to my mom, brother, aunt and uncle, Karis and her mom came to the commencement service the next morning (Karis' dad couldn't make it, because he had/has fallen ill). By this time, wearing my cap and gown and sitting on stage in front of thousands of people felt completely natural, but it did feel strange turn my tassle from the right to the left side.

As I stated, I'm currently taking an ornithology class, and I'll write more on the in the next post, so I guess technically I'm an "August graduate," but last weekend was definitely my graduation.

Cancer sucks.

Cinco de Mayo!

I had my last exam this morning at 8am.  This is my third year taking Chemistry (in 10th grade I had honors chem, in 11th I had AP Chem - got a 5, and this semester I am taking Gen Chem again (Houghton only counts AP Chem for 1 semester)).  After 3 years, you would think that Chemistry would have been easier, but I after not taking chemistry for almost 5 years, it's actually a lot harder - the final was cumulative back to chem 1!  But, it's over now.

I guess technically my last final was Bio Senior Sem that happened after Chem, but all we did was eat breakfast, so it doesn't really count.

Because it's the last day of exams, the Senior Class had an end of the year Cinco de Mayo Party! We had over $3,000 left in our budget and spent it on a moon bounce, jousting, bungee-run, cotton candy machine, pin-the-tail on the donkey, and of course pinatas.  And then we made food: (non-alcoholic) margaritas, fresh salsa and guacamole that we made this afternoon, and carne asada that grilled while the party was going on.

I love Cinco de Mayo.

Did I mention I was done with college?