Grey's Anatomy at 2 a.m.

Edit: probably you shouldn't read this.





I finally caught up on Grey's Anatomy. And this past week's episode?

OHMYGOSH SHONDA RHIMES WHY DO YOU DO THIS TO ME?

I AM ALREADY A CRYING EMOTIONAL MESS AND NOW THIS?

No more African child for Meredith and Derek? Young mother patient with the son and the husband and Avery messed up her first operation and the screws he put in to fix her spine fell out and are now shredding her heart to tiny pieces? And Teddy has to operate on her while her own husband is throwing up blood and he needs an operation because a tumor is growing in his chest? So Yang has to operate on him and she doesn't know that it is her mentor's husband she is operating on? AND HE DIES?? And the poor child whose face was half torn off from a dog bite and Derek has to operate on his brain? And Meredith and Alex go to a tiny rural hospital to bring back a premature newborn child and their ambulance breaks down in the middle of the rainy night right on a hill on the curve so no one can see them and if they get hit the ambulance could blow up because it is full of oxygen? And they have to call back to the hospital and while Derek is listening the ambulance gets hit BY A CAR. WITH MEREDITH AND ALEX AND THE TINY NEWBORN CHILD SHE PROMISED THE MOM BACK AT THE TINY HOSPITAL SHE WOULD TAKE CARE OF IS INSIDE. AND DEREK WAS LISTENING. AND THE PHONE WENT DEAD. SO HE DOESN'T KNOW IF SHE JUST DIED. And they are actually ok but they have to take the baby out of the incubator and go out into the night in case the ambulance BLOWS UP and they step outside and there in front of them are three bodies laying on the road from the car that hit them. AND THAT IS HOW IT ENDS. THAT IS HOW IT ENDS, PEOPLE. NOW WHAT ARE THEY GOING TO DO? She has tiny baby in her arms who needs to stay wrapped up in the blanket and they have to manually pump her breathing tube thing because she can't even breathe on her own and there are people lying in the road who need their help but they can't just leave the baby because it takes two people to keep this poor child alive because HELLO SHE ISN'T EVEN BREATHING ON HER OWN and OHMYGOSH WHAT IS GOING TO HAPPEN I CAN'T TAKE THIS AND YOU LEAVE ME HANGING AND IN TEARS AND WHY IS EVERYTHING HORRIBLE FOR THESE POOR DOCTORS AND I JUST WANT EVERYONE TO BE HAPPY AND I JUST CAN'T TAKE THIS SHONDA RHIMES WHY??????

174 days til graduation

Sometimes I daydream about what it will be like when I graduate.
It's pretty much going to be awesome.

I hear lots of other people in my major talking about grad school or (*gag*) law school as we near the finish line. (I just can't fathom why anyone would want to go to law school. It sounds as appealing as encasing my legs in cement and throwing myself into the middle of the ocean. And that's probably what those law school grads will want to do when they finish with a hundred thousand dollars of debt and realize the country is currently flooded with law school graduates and there are not enough lawyer jobs for all of them.)

I'm not into that kind of thing. I just want to be done. I've been in school since I was six years old! I'm sick of it. I'm tired of paying tuition, of homework, of deadlines, of pointless classes, of stress and anxiety and sleeplessness. I'm ready to move on!

It's just getting to graduation that's the problem.
Some days I'm so busy going from one class to the next, running to the computer lab to do homework in between, and on top of that working 20 hours a week, that I don't even have a chance to eat until I get home at night.
Thursdays are the worst--once I went all day and didn't eat anything til 1 a.m. (Well, that day I came home and was talking to Mark for the thirty minutes I got to see him that day before he went off to work, and was so exhausted I fell asleep right after he left. Woke up three hours later STARVING!)

And then I registered for classes on Tuesday night and realized that for my final semester I will be taking twenty credits. TWENTY. I had a little emotional breakdown that night. Poor Mark had to comfort me, haha.

The next day, after some sleep, I realized that nine of those credits would be my job, which I would be working at anyways (yay for a new job that counts as an internship! but anxiety at working almost 30 hours a week now...), so it's the other 11 credits I need to worry about. And since I'm a person who procrastinates classes she doesn't want to take, one of those classes will be statistics.
frowny face :(

Basically I complain every day about how I want to be graduated. That is all.
Have some pictures.



Here is Mark on his first day of school:


How cute!


Here is Mark helping me rearrange our bedroom furniture:

He was so excited, you can just feel his enthusiasm.


And here is a picture of us being cute together with some autumn leaves:

Also I was not wearing makeup. Oh well.

Books I read this summer

My last post was a little angry. I'm sorry. Can you tell I'm not enjoying my first week back at school?

But I wasn't lying when I said I read about 116 books. I read A LOT. There's no way I will remember everything I read, but here's some of the ones I remember/have strong feelings about:

Artemis Fowl and the Atlantis Complex:
This is number 7 in the Artemis Fowl series, and I know it's for middle-schoolers, but ohmygosh, I love this series. And this latest installment is, in my opinion, one of the best. Usually the books are about Artemis being the super-smart 14-year-old criminal mastermind who saves/occasionally exploits the technologically advanced hidden fairy population in Ireland he has befriended.
And #7 was like that, except different. It had a different feel about it, which I LOVED. Instead of following the same tried-and-true formula, Eoin Colfer shook it up and gave Artemis a mental condition, the Atlantis Complex, which he developed because of meddling with magic and feeling guilty about the past crimes he had committed. So instead of everyone depending on Artemis, his friends had to save him. All the same surprise twists and turns that I loved about the previous were in The Atlantis Complex, but, like I said before, in a different way.





What Happened to Goodbye:
Sarah Dessen's latest novel wasn't bad, but it didn't blow me away like Just Listen did. The main character, McLean, lives with her dad, who moves around a lot because of his job. At every new place, McLean invents a new persona, a different character to be. And like every other Dessen book, the broken girl meets The Boy, makes a Best Friend, and overcomes her Family Issue. Her books have gotten a little formulaic, but she's talented enough to pull it off, because she makes her characters so unique and interesting. Eventually, McLean survives everyone finding out about her many personalities, makes up with her mom, and gets a boyfriend. Don't get me wrong, I actually enjoyed reading the book because Dessen is so awesome at writing interesting characters and scenarios. If you haven't read any of Sarah Dessen's books before, I highly recommend you do, all her books are really great.








The Time Traveler's Wife:
I really loved this book. I saw the movie when it came out a few years ago, and it was just OK. But wow, the book is amazing! It's about this guy who has Chrono-Displacement disorder, a genetic mutation that makes him randomly travel through time. He can't control it, though it happens more when he drinks or is stressed. He shows up at some place in time, usually during his lifetime, (though he does go further into the future a few rare times) and at a place that he usually familiar with. That's how he meets his future wife when she's only 9 years old. Through the years he shows up and visits her in a meadow behind her house. Of course, he was in his thirties when he would show up, so when she finally meets him in a real world setting, he has no idea who she is. She knows so much about him, but he has no idea who she is. Audrey Niffenegger (what a last name!) handled the complexities of time travel really well, and the book flowed well. Definitely a sweet love story.







Need:
I don't even know why I'm telling you about this book. It's about a girl who finds out she is half-pixie. Yeah. One of those books. The characters really annoyed me. The story annoyed me. And yet, I still read the sequel. Which was even more annoying. I told you I read a lot of books this summer. Even ones I didn't like, because Provo library does not have a good selection of books. Also all the good books are always checked out.







Delirium:
Officially the last book of the summer I read. I actually finished it just last night. Delirium is about a dystopian society where love is a disease they "cure" when you turn eighteen (like a lobotomy of emotions). Of course, the main character Lena gets "infected" a few weeks before she turns eighteen. Usually I love dystopian books (The Giver, The Hunger Games, Uglies, Matched (which is only slightly better than this book)) and maybe those other amazing books have ruined all others for me, because I didn't enjoy this book very much. It actually took me a week to finish it, and this summer I was averaging 2-3 books a day. I thought about it and pinpointed what went wrong: right from the beginning, Lauren Oliver tells you everything. The whole history of the society, the whole history of the character. There was no suspense, no sense of mystery that keeps the reader going because she wants to find out more. You know everything, about the "cure," about the new organization of the United States, how dissenters run away to the woods, why she lives with her aunt and uncle now. There was nothing to look forward to! But after reading The Hunger Games, where everything was so intense and crazy and I never knew what was coming, I guess reading about a girl who mildly takes a stand in the name of love seems a little hippy-ish and lame.

Dear Professor

Dear communications professors,
Please stop asking everyone in the class to stand up and share what they did over the summer. My classmates full schedules of summer classes and internships in Washington D.C. and New York City make my accomplishments of watching every single season of Psych, Smallville, Grey's Anatomy and reading approximately 116 books this summer seem so much less amazing.

Dear weather,
Please stop being 99 degrees every day. I have to actually go outside during the daytime now and I don't like being a sweaty mess.

Dear air conditioning,
Don't ever change. I love you just the way you are.

Dear Provo,
I hate you and everything you stand for. And all the people living within your unholy borders.

Dear BYU,
Thanks for causing me so much anxiety, sleeplessness, extreme stomach pains and for taking all my money! Here's to one last year!

Dear Mark,
You are cute. And I like you a lot. Thanks for being the best husband and putting up with my grumpiness. You are my little chocolate mouse pie, my squishy teddy bear, my dollop of sour cream!


Love,

Heatherwhoisperpetuallygrumpybecauseshedoesn'tlikeschool

summertime

This picture pretty much illustrates how I feel about summer.

I'm not one of those people who looks forward to summer. It's hot and I get all sweaty when I go outside. I HATE being hot and sweaty. gross. I can't even walk up the short hill to get to work every afternoon without wanting to die, it's so hot in this state.
The best thing about this summer is that I don't have roommates who always turn the AC off. I bask in glorious coolness all night long, and not wake up in a pool of my own sweat.

ducks

When I see a duck:

Normal people:

Me: “ Duck, duck,duck, come here duck”

New mattress!

After months of pain in our backs and legs (and Mark getting chronic tension headaches), we spent a week sleeping on a decent mattress at my parent's house. That finally sold Mark on what I have been trying to convince him for weeks--we needed a new mattress! He was actually more insistent on it than I had been before.

I had already shopped around and knew which one I wanted--from Sam's Club. Best price for the kind of mattress we wanted.

Of course, Mark didn't want to pay the delivery fee, but since we don't have a truck/big SUV and neither does anyone we know, I told him to stop being cheap and just pay the fee. But he insisted, and he strapped that baby on top of our little car and drove it home (I put on sunglasses and hid my face. Some BYU girls walking down the street pointed at our car and laughed, and Mark stuck his head out the window and laughed back at them. That actually was pretty funny.). So we brought our new purchase home without paying any delivery fees or getting pulled over, so I have to give him that one.

At least we used rope.

Speaking of cheapness...

Our landlord is having new doors installed on all the units, and while they are very nice doors, I am a little annoyed he got rid of the screen doors. I liked having a screen door. While the note the landlord left us said that he was having a friend install the doors, I don't think his little handyman friend thinks too highly of him.
He was this little old Cambodian man with a very thick accent, and he was pretty funny. Now, I learned pretty quick that our landlord is a DIY kind of guy when I realized that to get the outlet to work in the bathroom the lights had to be turned out, and Mark says the texture on the wall looks like it was done by an amateur. He also comes around and mows the lawns himself once a month, and hand delivers the gas bill instead of mailing it like a normal person. But our little Cambodian friend was like, "What kind of landlord mows own lawn?! You ever see that? He very cheap."

The landlord didn't even want to pay the guy to paint the wood around the doors (now bereft of screen doors, boohoo), saying he'd do it himself.

The handyman wanted us to realize just how rich our landlord was. I was like, "Yeah, I know. I send him a check every month."


But, our landlord does keep the place up really well. I almost feel like something is wrong because I'm not calling in work requests every other week to report some new disaster.
It is nice to not live in a place that is constantly threatening to tumble down on top of us.

Still, I do wish the the guy would spring for bigger water heaters. I haven't shaved my legs all week.