Summer school is almost DONE!

I am so close I can almost taste it! I took two exams today on campus. Now I just have one more that I can take online and I will be done! I think I can take the last one by tomorrow night. It will be my birthday present to myself! All done with summer school. Man, that will feel good! Then, I'm going to sell my books on Ebay and use the cash for some new tunes for my ipod! Now that's a plan.

Gosh, I Wish Column Mom would start posting again.

You would think she had just moved, has three little kids and is really really pregnant by her poor posting history. If only she would come out of hiding and tell us about the glomour of living in VEGAS!

That short commercial break turned into a month long hiatus

Not sure how that happened but things just got incredibly busy all of a sudden and my blog got put way on the back burner. WAY on the back burner. So i'll try to be back more.

I'll try and put the last month in pictures...

Our trip to Sea World prior to going to Mo-Ranch for church family camp. We went to Sea World over Spring break and got suckered into the "Turn your two day pass into a season pass for $10 more" deal.

James and I went to Pennsylvania for a long weekend. It was a working trip but we got to eat a real philly cheese steak (YUM!) and see the Liberty Bell.We went sailing with some friends on Galveston Bay and these dolphins came right up to the boat. It was very cool!

I got a new bed spread for my bed. It's soooooooooo pretty! I love it! Here's a close up...
Read The Things They Carried, a novel about Vietnam, for my history class and wrote a bunch of essays on it. Took a couple tests for Gov't class. Almost done with all that. Can't WAIT to be done with all that! Hope you enjoy the pics!

The Lads, musical guests for VBS

This is a shameless plug for this awesome band that is playing our church's VBS this week. The Lads are three-guy group from New Zealand, currently based in Nashville. Go to their website and take a listen to some of their music. They are awesome with the kids and play some really kickin music. It has been a blast getting to know them and listening to the kids scream their heads off when they take the stage. I highly recommend their music and their talents to all of my readers! (And no, no one paid me for this, I just really like them!)

Modor is on the rise...

This is what happens when you have school work to catch up on, unexpected dinner guests, expected dinner guests and Vacation Bible School all in a week's time. Modor gets an advantage on you. You see Modor is my clean laundry pile. When everyone needs clean clothes I have little problem getting the laundry in the washer and drier but folding it is a whole nother ball game. For the past couple months I've been pretty good at not letting Modor get too big but this week it really got out of hand. I think a small child could easily get lost in there!

Last night, I spent two "House, M.D."s (I've totally hooked Hubby on House. Very cool!) that I'd DVRed folding clothes and reduced Modor to about 1/3 of its size. Whew! I thought Middle Earth was doomed this time!

Books I read on vacation

I have finished 4 out of 6 chapters in my history book in three days. My government book is so borning and awful to read that my history book is like a breath of fresh air. I'm remembering that I really liked history the first time I did this college thing. When I said history is like reading a story, a friend said, "Yeah and the government book is like reading an instruction manual." Very insightful and very very true!

So on vacation I read...

1. A Wise Birth by Penny Armstrong, CNM. Insightful and a little depressing. Hospital brthing is so, just, wrong in so many ways. (This coming from someone who wants to help women give birth in hospitals and who has had 3 hospital births herself.) Armstrong highlights particularly that birth is about power and without the power of birth creating a mother we really undercut a woman's ability to effectively mother her little one. The story's that contrasted hospital birth were Armstrong's experiences with the Amish. That culture and community is so vastly different than anything else that it is hard to imagine that the comparison is helpfulbeyond being depressing. I hope I can maintain a sense of wonder and awe about birth and help women tap into the power of it without losing a little part of my soul to the medical machine.

2. How Doctors Think by Jerome Groupman, M.D. A doctor friend of mine recently hosted this guy for grand rounds at his hospital so I got the book from the library. Really really good and readable. Empowering for someone like me who researches stuff and will happily tell the doc what I've found and expect him/her to listen. The book describes various decision making models and how doctors can fall victim to "cognitive errors" while trying to treat a patient. Heavy on case studies, which i love, and also on advice to patients to help your doctor avoid these mistakes. Well balanced between pointing out doctors mistakes without villianizing them and encouraging patients to be respobsible without recommending a trip to medical school before entering the hospital. I really liked it.

3. Survival of the Sickest: A Medical Maverick looks a Disease by Sharon Moalem, Ph.D. This books looks at disease from an evolutionary perspective. What benefit might certain diseases confer that might make them likely to surivive natural selection's process? Interesting perspective on things like diabetes but a speculative too. i don't know anything about this guy except that his book got published so I took a lot of it with a grain of salt. He described on theory of the development of humans that describes us being descended from a "semi-aquatic ape" and uses the efficiency and safety of water birth as supporting evidence. That definitely perked up my ears but the semi-aquatic ape stuff is a little fringy to take too seriously. (And I'm not opposed to long term evolution as a method of species diversification.) He also talks about the possibility of viruses providing huge genetic variability within humans over a short amount of evolutionary time, "infectious design" he called it. Ha ha. I liked the biology and the physiology but I'm very skeptical without some decent resource to back it up.

And two chapters in "An Instruction Manual For Creating Democracy - How to Take an Amazingly Brilliant Governmental System and Describe it in a Way Guaranteed to Make you Fall Asleep".

God bless my mother

My mom took the younger two to the movies this after noon while the older one is babysitting for another family. I have read and taken quizzes on two chapters and gotten my house cleaned (relatively) and organized for our dinner guests tonight. Teri- the McCarty's are in town. (Where are my emoticons when I need them?)

Now I need a shower and some lunch. But the college anxiety dreams are fading a little.