My Five-Year Plans

Stalin had fiver-year plans so I figure since Stalin had them, I should have them. However, mine have nothing to do with increasing industrialization and the amount of farms in my country. Mainly because I don't have a country. 

In five years I want...

...to be in the MTC if not already in the mission field.

...to have a high school diploma.

...to have visited at least Germany.

...to have been to MOMA. 

...to be fluent in German.

...to have two years of college done and possibly a nursing degree. 

...to have read all of Shakespeare's plays.

...to have actually read a play by Henrik Ibsen. 

...to have been to the Rijksmuseum.

...to have been in a hot air balloon. 

...to be content. 

Stalin did it and so can I. (I like Stalin.)

My One-Year

Today is my one-year anniversary with Axel. 

For those of you who don't know Axel, he's the steel rod attached to eight inches of my spine. 
Before my surgery, I always thought I would feel differently with a rod in my spine. I don't. I sometimes feel less flexible but then again, I was never very flexible. 

Reflecting back on my surgery, I guess it wasn't all that bad. I don't remember a lot of intense pain but I do remember some. I suppose it helped that I had a morphine pump in my hand...

The worst memories I have about my surgery are the sneezes. Harmless sneezes,  right? 

Wrong. I remember being afraid that I was going to sneeze. 

Sternutaphobia-the fear of sneezing.

The second worst memory is about my third(?) night in the hospital. They had just taken me out of the ICU (ahhh, probably my best memory) and I was sharing a room with some other little girl. There was a partition in between us but we could still hear her talking and what-not. So this particular night, I couldn't get to sleep. It's hard to get comfortable when you're used to sleeping on your side but you're forced to sleep on your back. It's also difficult to get comfortable when a nurse has to come in every hour and put this foam wedge underneath your back and rotate you from side to back to side, etc. Basically, I had gotten no sleep at all. So it's early in the morning and my mother finds this t.v. channel that plays soothing instrumental music and shows panoramic views of lovely countrysides. Just as I'm drifting off to sleep, the girl on the other side decides to wake up and ask her dad to find some cartoons for her. He flips on the t.v. and instead of people talking or whatever, there is this loud static sound coming from the t.v. The dad fiddles around with it for a while and finally turns it off. The little girl whines and insists he put on some cartoons and so he turns the t.v. back on. Once again, static noise. By this time, I'm wide awake and starting to get a migraine. Forget falling to sleep, this little girl wants to watch cartoons. 

Vicodin is also another bad memory. 

So now I have a thirteen-inch scar on my back and I beep when I go through the metal detectors at the airport. 

So what should we do, Axel? Watch Double Indemnity with my new Netflix account that can play videos instantly on X-Box Live? Yes. 

Tutoring and Tori

First matter of business: a Torus (Tori for plural). AKA, a doughnut. I thought it might be called a torque but that's a force that has something to do with physics. Wikipedia tried to explain it to me but I wasn't really following. Anyway, to be technical, a torus is a "surface of revolution generated by revolving a circle in three dimensional space about an axis coplanar with the circle, which does not touch the circle". Just think of a doughnut. ("Doughnut? OH! You mean a torus!" That is what I'm going to say from now on.)

Secondly, today at tutoring we named our smoke detector Peter. The detector keeps making all these beeping noises (probably because we need to change the battery) and the girl I was tutoring, Marissa, was getting a headache from it. So, I decided that since it was making random noises we should name it Peter. She liked it. From hence on, she would say every time it beeped "Stop it, Peter! I'm going to throw you out a window if you don't stop!" 

It was fun. 

Let the Easter Egg Hunt Begin!

Today is Easter. We had a pretty epic egg hunt. Of course Colby and Abigale are totally into it and running around everyone as Leah drifts between the back and front yards, picking up the more obscure eggs that Clayton hid.  But Colby and Abby are pretty good hunters, too. It also helps when my mother pulls Leah and Colby aside and tells them to leave the more obvious ones for Abby to find. 

Overall, Easter is a great holiday. It seemed to kind of come quickly this year but to me, Easter is relaxing. It's also a time to reflect on the meaning of Easter and I'm glad that it's here to help remind me of the sacrifice Christ made.

Evil Tree!

In Texas there is this high school specifically for broadcasting-Crockett Film Academy. This high school made up a fictional high school called "Clinton High". Clinton High is making a (fake)  movie called Evil Tree. They are creating a mockumentary about the making of this movie. It's really funny and I think you should check it out.  They came out with the "preview" today and it's really episode 10 but I think you should start with episode one. It's great :)

My favorite is Bernando.

(I know I've given this link to some of you before so  sorry for the lack of something new and exciting.)

A Most Excellent Adventure

Albrecht Duerer, Melancholia

I've decided to use bullets today because I think this post will be random enough as it is without me trying to organize it into a paragraph.

• I watched Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure yesterday. It was most excellent and I loved it.
• I went to Ann Arbor today. I went into this store and saw "Angry Mob" action figures. It had little guys with torches and pitch forks and grimaces on their faces. It was pretty cool and I was this close to buying them. 
• I went to a local book store in A.A. and got the following three books: Alfred Lord Tennyson: Selected Poems, T.S. Eliot: The Wasteland & Other Poems, and Wild Nights. Wild Nights is about several famous authors (Emily Dickinson, Edgar Allen Poe, etc.) and the days before they died. I'm looking forward to reading them. 
• I'm kind of obsessed with Edvard Grieg at the moment. Especially the Peer Gent Suite, Prelude to Act IV: Morning Mood. I was baby-sitting this toddler and he was watching Little Einstein. (They had sketchings from Albrecht Duerer and a painting by William Pitts!) I heard it on there and came home and I've downloaded the whole thing onto my playlist. 
• I'm in need of watching 5-hours of Pride & Prejudice. Maybe I'll pull an all nighter. 
• AP Euro is really starting to scare me. 

Quotes!

Here are some quotes that I've heard recently which I like and thought I'd share:

"A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing." Emo Philips

"Works best with country, soft rock, and western: hip-hop and rap may cause self-destruct." Bob Thompson (in reference to some cordless speakers) 

"Life is something you do when you can't get to sleep." Fran Lebowitz

"Sometimes the road not taken is not taken for a reason." Jerry Seinfeld 

"Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them." George Orwell

"A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other." Charles Dickens 

"All generalizations are false, including this one." Mark Twain 

"A pair of powerful spectacles has sometimes sufficed to cure a person in love." Friedrich Nietzsche

"I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal. " Jane Austen 

"At fifty everyone has the face he deserves." -George Orwell

"Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first." Mark Twain 

Another great word: 

flummox \FLUM-uhks\, transitive verb: To confuse; to perplex.