Senior Year Blog

Jr/Soph weekend is this coming weekend. It crept up on me this year! My brain feels like it's swimming just with school work and obligations, so I've been trying to put off thinking about social events until the last possible moment. There will be a Jr/Soph dance "Where the Wild Things Are" Saturday night at the Birmingham Zoo. Thankfully I picked my dress earlier this year. It's a red strapless semiformal with a full calf-length skirt. I chose it mostly because it should be easy to dance in. Unfortunately I made a bad decision and chopped my hair a few weeks ago to shoulder length and am still getting used to fixing it. Luckily Mary at Tangles, a hair salon in downtown Marion, was nice enough to fit me in Saturday morning!  

I'm planning to go with a group to the dance. It'll be me, my friends Susanna and Bev, and Bev's sister Deborah who goes to Samford. Being an all female college, it's not unusual to be dateless at a Judson dance. People just go and have fun, no worries. The dance starts at 7:00 and there will be animals there until 7:30, so I'm hoping that we can get there early enough to get some good pictures with them in our formals! If we get a good one, I'll add it!

Tonight I'm putting the finishing touches on my paper about the first two batches of quail (fluorescent light, light deprived) for the April 1^st meeting of the Alabama Academy of Science. I'll do a run through of my power point presentation tomorrow afternoon for Dr. Wilson. I already have the revised honors project proposal and abstract, so really just have my results and conclusion sections to add into the paper. It's already after midnight. I wish papers could write themselves! On the bright side, I am treating myself to coffee, listening to Pandora radio music, and drafting a blog. It isn't so bad!    

I just got back from Ashes of Roses, a play based on short stories by Mary Ward Brown (Mary T), a Judson graduate and Marion resident. I've read all of Mary T's books - Tongues of Flame, It Wasn't All Dancing, and her memoir, Fanning the Spark. I highly recommend them! The play was a meshing of stories, but still quite true to the tone of the books.

The play was written by Dr. Norman McMillan, a retired University of Montevallo English professor. The director was Col. Deborra Street, the band director at MMI. The play only had five characters. Sarah Looney Eckermann, the daughter of my old ballet teacher Libby Looney, played a salesgirl in a hip clothing store. Dr. Betty Campbell, my voice teacher, played the shop owner of a fine established dress shop, much like Nathan Harris' in downtown Marion. Dr. Winnifred Cobbs, my French, Women in Society, and English Composition professor had a huge role, playing the daughter of the main character, "Mrs. Rose Merriweather." The two actors that I didn't know were Georgette Normal, the director of the Rosa Parks Museum in Montgomery, and Neil Richardson, an actress and former teacher from Birmingham. I was impressed by how well the natural personalities and voices of each person fit their roles.

The play was a nice break. On a normal week I have Biochemistry class 4-9 and go straight to a SGA meeting from 9-10 if Biochemistry doesn't run over. Today Dr. Bartley couldn't make it to Marion, so gave us lab instructions to make it through to next Monday. Because of the play, SGA was cancelled as well. It felt odd to get home before 10!

I'm nearing the end of the Judson chapter of my life. I'm finding myself packing my schedule a bit more than I used to. Over Spring Break, I couldn't get myself completely out of school mode. My sister is the same way. Because of our similarity we didn't get to see each other. The plan my family worked out was that my parents would go to visit my sister at the University of Houston so that she could stay with her practice piano (she's getting a major in piano performance) and I would stay in Marion and work on my projects. I got to shadow Dr. W. Shane Lee at the Vaughan Marion Clinic and on his nursing home rounds Monday through Thursday. My eggs are doing well. The last batch of eggs came in Sunday. I was able to stick them in the incubator Monday over lunch break. I've done a lot of thinking and a little work too on two upcoming papers - one on Gaucher's disease for Biochemistry and another about vegetarianism during pregnancy for Biochemical Nutrition.

Even being in Marion instead of hanging out in Houston with my sister, I had fun over break. My mother is very picky about the food we keep in the house. Anything too desserty either gets used as sugar in a milkshake or gets fed to the chickens, no joke. Monday I saw a caffeinated brownie mix on a site and since my mother was not there to scold me, decided that I'd make my own version. I just did a normal brownie recipe, but instead of adding liquid, I added coffee. The first batch was alright. The second that I made later in the week was a killer though. I got a little carried away with the coffee pouring. Instead of the few tablespoons that the first batch had, I added 2/3 cup instant coffee powder to the liquid. The whole batch fit into an eight inch square pan, so quite a bit of coffee per brownie. I got a headache when I ate 2 of them. That probably isn't healthy. I looked up caffeine toxicity. According to eMedicine, 10 or more grams are lethal, so considering that one cup of coffee has only 85-250 mg, I think I'm definitely alright. I really don't think I'll make them again though. The only other crazy thing I did other than the brownies was to take two of my three dogs to Perry Lakes park in my car. I took the black lab Solomon and mutt Town Dog. They had a good time and got insanely muddy. I have a hatchback and put the seats down so they could just jump in the trunk, but mud still got everywhere, even on the windows. It'll take a while to clean the car, but we all had fun. It's finally feeling like spring!

My first Biochemistry test is this coming Monday. Biochemistry is the first class that I've taken under Dr. Bartley, an adjunct from UAB, so I'm more than a bit nervous about the test. I've been carrying my Biochem book around with me all week, studying a few paragraphs here and there. Earlier today I started making molecules out of modeling clay and writing them repeatedly on my dry erase board. Normally for my biology tests I highlight lecture material and write it on note cards, then just memorize those. I think this time I'll just memorize the few things that I know will be on the test, then focus on the broad concepts. There will supposedly be a lot of "thinking questions."

In addition to writing this blog, I've taken a few breaks from Biochem today. The first was the SaveFirst tax preparation program that I mentioned in previous blogs. I've committed to doing taxes Saturdays from 9am-3pm. Thankfully for my Biochem studying, there weren't any appointments today. This afternoon I called Judson alum Dr. Daveta Dozier to schedule shadowing. She and her husband, Dr. Frank Dozier, have a clinic in Thomasville and have been very kind to let me follow them around.  Throughout the day, I've been checking on my quail chicks and quail eggs.  My incubator thermostat hasn't been acting very well, so I'm monitoring as frequently as I can. This batch of quail was raised under a 20 watt plant grow light. Eighteen chicks hatched. Considering that no new ones have hatched in the last two days, that's probably all that I'll get from this bunch. My thermostat problems are annoying as I don't know whether the low hatch rate (18 chicks out of 50 eggs) is due to the thermostat or the light treatment. A girl from Judson who keeps birds took 10 of the chicks with her when she went home yesterday. Earlier today I took the remaining 8 to a guy who raises quail.

It seems like it was just an hour or so ago when I woke up. Actually it's 10:30 at night.. My first few years at Judson, I worried that I was socially awkward due to my shy personality, nerdiness and homeschooling. I pushed myself to participate in Judson traditions and other social events. Now it's all that I can do to keep up with my obligations. This weekend I was planning to visit a good friend in Tuscaloosa who is getting married soon. Last night, a Friday, I realized that I was already in jittery cram mode for the Biochem test and had to call and cancel. I wish I had photographic memory... Back to the Biochem!