I also remember there was a public service announcement ad which ran on tv during my childhood that flabbergasted me. In it was a simple animation of a kid in a bathroom brushing his teeth and letting the sink faucet run water all the while. Right outside the bathroom was a small pond with a fish in it, and the running sink drained the pond nearly dry. Even now I don’t understand. What in the world do people need to run their sinks for when they’re standing around, brushing their teeth?

Currently L.A.’s water resources are running low, impacted both by low rainfall the past few years and an expanding population.

With all this history, I like to be aware of how much water I’m using.

So when one issue of National Geographic came, it didn’t have the usual Nat Geo map insert but an advertisement by Dow for something called Blue Planet Run 2007. Dow also included some numbers about water usage.

(2007? Wow, it took me a long time to get around to writing this entry!)

Some facts (or claims?) they list about water usage:

• A shower can use 25 to 50 gallons of water.
• Leaving the water running while brushing your teeth can waste up to 5 gallons. [GRRRR ARRRRGH]
• The average full-tub bath takes 36 gallons.
• One flush of toilet uses as much water as the average person in the developing world uses in a whole day.

That last factoid was something I already knew. It makes me feel guilty sometimes when I flush the toilet. With just one simple flick of the toilet handle, I essentially toss out clean water, about the same amount of water that some other people have to walk miles for, carrying buckets of water back home over a number of trips, in one day. And I flush multiple times a day! But then I remember back to when I was a kid and learned the rhyme, “if it’s yellow, let it mellow, if it’s brown, flush it down.” (Shudder.)

The other numbers made me curious, what were the flow rates of my family’s faucets? Over the years we’ve bought different faucets and installed water limiters on a couple of them. So exactly how much water came out of these fixtures?

My procedure was to turn on the faucet full blast and see how long it took to fill a four-pint container. (Equal to half a gallon.) This isn’t entirely scientific because I didn’t repeat my procedure enough times to get a good range of data. But I’m not doing this for science, it’s just out of curiosity. (I’d say my numbers are accurate within two more or less seconds.)

The results:

• kitchen sink, which is the newest faucet in the house, 20 seconds
• my bathroom sink, the oldest faucet, also has a water limiter, 23 seconds
• my brother’s bathroom sink, the second-oldest faucet, had a water limiter but my brother switched it out, 20 seconds
• my parents’ bathroom sink, newer than the previous two faucets, it’s upstairs so my mom thought the pressure difference would influence the time, 21 seconds.
• the shower in my parents’ bathroom, 32 seconds
• the bathtub in my parents’ bathroom, 4 seconds
• the hose outside, 2 seconds

Basically, the faucets all run about the same rate except for my faucet being a tiny bit slower. (My mom was kind of upset with the new kitchen faucet, because the lower flow takes her more time to fill the sinks to wash dishes. I never timed the old faucets to compare.)

According to Dow, 5 gallons would be wasted from our faucets if we brushed our teeth for 3 minutes and 20 seconds. That’s a healthy duration; dentists recommend about 3 minutes. But that’s if the water is running full blast, both hot and cold. Nevermind why someone runs the water while brushing their teeth, why would someone run the water full blast?

Moving on, our shower runs a lot more slowly than anything else in the house. It’s a water-conserving shower head, most likely. But this just further proves my point about why I don’t use the shower: it takes forever to rinse the shampoo out of my full head of thick hair. Double that time now, too, since I started using conditioner.

(Ideally I would like a shower head with variable rates of water flow, from high enough to rinse out my hair within seconds, to turning off the water without having to touch the handles which I’ve adjusted to exactly the temperature I want. :P But my brother likes the shower head we have, and he uses it most often.)

The rate of water flow from the bathtub faucet by itself doesn’t mean much. Regardless of how high or low the water flow rate is, the tub is going to be filled to the bather’s liking. But what I did do with the information was time how long it took to fill my bath, then multiply by the rate of flow to find out how much water I use in my bath.

What I found out was that I obviously don’t turn on the water full blast when drawing my bath. It’s somewhere more like 50% to 75%, which takes 5.7 seconds and 4.6 seconds, respectively. Not too drastic a difference, but for the sake of simplification I’ll go with 5 seconds to fill half a gallon. At that rate, and about 3 minutes and 10 seconds to draw my bath, I use 20 or so gallons.

(Yes, I draw very shallow baths. I don’t like showers and love baths, but not at the expense of “36 gallons,” according to Dow’s average. Don’t worry, I’m an environmentalist. I suffer for Mother Earth.)

A 20-gallon bath would be less than Dow’s numbers for a shower, but my shower head is water conserving. A 15-minute shower in my house would use up only 15 gallons. We could take a luxurious 20-minute shower and still only use about 20 gallons!

Of course, if I have to spend those 5 extra minutes rinsing out my hair, and cursing the shower head all the while, I don’t see the point. (Yes, I suppose I did go through all this data gathering to justify why, in L.A., I choose water-hogging baths over water-saving showers. *grin*)

I gathered the last datum just on a whim. I’d measured every other water fixture in our house, why not the one outside, located at the very source? (That being the water main.) I expected it to be about the same as the bathtub, I mean the hose isn’t all that big. But surprisingly, the tub faucet’s flow rate is twice as long for the same amount of water!

What could I extrapolate from this information that would have some significance? We don’t use the hose to water the gardens, but we do use it to wash our cars. Aha! So at 2 seconds to fill half a gallon, or 4 seconds for one gallon, letting the hose run while washing the car for say 10 minutes would use up 150 gallons. 150 gallons! That would provide enough water for 100 people in third-world countries!

Don’t you appreciate having running water in your home so much more now? Doesn’t it make you want to use it wisely, so we don’t run out of clean water in the future? I sure hope it does.

Today I checked my e-mail and I got a message about gray wolves and how they are no longer protected as an endangered species. The message went on to say pretty much that the U.S. is shifting responsibility for managing wolf populations to the states and not the feds, which means that wolves are gonna be hunted down and killed mercilessly!!

(Well okay, Idaho and Wyoming have voiced their plan “to remove wolves by whatever means necessary.” [From my e-mail.] And I guess Montana doesn’t have a “wolf management [plan] that will allow wolf populations to grow.” Just reporting to keep my entry informative, and not inflammatory. *grin*)

I don’t know what made me question the message, but I checked Wikipedia (purveyor of general knowledge) for information about wolf populations. It said that while wolves as a whole are not in danger of becoming extinct, local populations are.

So I wondered, would it be so bad if there were no more wolves in the U.S.? It would make America that much less of the “frontierland” that it used to be. Move over American Indians and wildlife, the rest of the world is here to take over!

The Wikipedia article stated that mostly wolves do not like to interact with humans and will run away from humans, except for the few times where they attack—mostly women and children. Of course, one has to wonder what women and children are doing in areas where wolves are living or hunting, maybe those people should just go back to the cities.

Or is it that the cities have expanded to the wolves’ grounds, and the wolves have nowhere else to go? If that’s so, and not just a case of mommies taking their kids for a day hike through the forest, I guess it’s a case of human rights versus wolf rights. Who deserves to live there more?

I don’t want to answer that in this entry, just wanted to write out my thoughts and perhaps make others think.

I also wanted to mention, in a case where little Timmy is going for a nature hike with his Boy Scout troop (are they called troops? Darn, my Girl Scout history is clouding my memory) and gets mauled by a protective mother wolf, can you really blame people for protesting to whomever they think is in control? They want their children safe; it’s the 21st century, smallpox doesn’t exist in the general population of the U.S., polio is gone, and we’ve even brought cases of mumps down to small numbers.

Shouldn’t people be free from the worry of protecting their children from wildlife, instead worrying about that creepy man down the street who’s always watching the kids? Or even the people online who talk to their children?

I could never bring myself to face Timmy’s family and say, “I choose wolves over you and your little Timmy.” Nor could I tell them to leave the area, pick up their whole lives and relocate, find new jobs, new schools, new homes, new friends, so that wolves can live in peace.

But then, then I read more of the Wikipedia article, and it said, “Wolves … are often referred to as an indicator species; a species delineating an ecoregion or indicating an environmental condition such as a disease outbreak, pollution, species competition, or climate change.” Later on it mentioned that reduced numbers of wolves in Yellowstone had allowed the elk population to explode, in turn causing more and more trees to be stripped to feed all the elks.

Well if the e-mail had said that I would never have questioned it and instead immediately signed the petition! *snrk*

In all seriousness though, I still don’t know whether to sign or not. It’s one of those cases where I feel I don’t have all the information and therefore can’t make a smart decision, instead allowing others to do it for me.

I came home from work one day last August and found this manila folder in my place at the dining room table—the usual way my mom sorts and doles out our mail—addressed to me, from the White House. For a split second I thought, Oh no, one of the petitions I signed must have pissed off someone and now I’m on the FBI’s list!

Mum and C came up to me ’cause they were wondering what in the world the White House could be sending to me. I told them it must have been a response to some petition that I’d signed online. Opened it up and yup, the letter was about preserving our oceans.

I guess the White House does keep track of e-mails it gets ’cause I couldn’t recall recently signing a petition to Bush about oceans and figured I must have been on some list. Either that or bureaucracy is really really slow and it took many months to send my letter.

I’m inclined to believe the latter because the letter was about something that Bush had done to Save Our Oceans back in June. What was this action that he took to ensure that our oceans would be around for generations to come? Why he declared June 2008 as National Oceans Month! Yes sir, he took action that was not at all proactive and then decided to spend $1.17 telling me about it months later!

See, that’s the real kicker. If I’d received an e-mail from the White House (even months after the fact) I would not be as annoyed as I am right now. (Which honestly isn’t all that much on the annoyed scale. Maybe a little miffed. But I thought this was … unique … and should be commented on.) I’m used to getting “Due to the large volume of e-mail received, the White House cannot respond to every message” auto-responses.

But this time, someone(s?) in D.C. thought it was worth $1.17 to inform me of past acts of “preservation” which I am concerned about? The petitions I sign usually get somewhere around 5,000–20,000 signatures, but let’s assume an absolute average of 10,000. If I got a letter, doesn’t that mean that 9,999 other people also got the same letter? The White House wanted to spend $11,700 sending out information when they could have sent out e-mails?

Or even just send it in a regular business envelope. Why spend a whole $1.17 when postage was about $0.43? Just so I get a flat piece of paper that hasn’t been folded? And I’m sure even the feds can get discounts from the post office if they’re sending out enough pieces of mail—$0.27, right? They spent basically three times more so I get a fancy, special letter about Bush tooting his own horn.

How many meals can $11,700 cover? How many doctor visits? I know the U.S. has a budget in the billions, but come on, every little bit helps!—Oh wait, no, we’re now $10 trillion in debt, so a few measly thousand doesn’t count for much there. Thanks, Bush.

“Peak Performance: A U.S. Department of Transportation study averaged the fuel-efficiency curve for eight cars and light trucks.”

It’s one thing for my brother to tell me the highway mileage stat on cars is obtained while driving 47.5 mph and somewhere above that speed the mileage starts to go down. It’s another to see that at 70 mph I get the same mileage as at 15? And the sharp decline as the speed rises…

The rest of the page:

Teutonic Shift: Freedom to speed is an inalienable right in Germany—at least on those portions of the nearly 8,000 miles of autobahn that have no posted limit. Some drivers well exceed 450 mph. So there was an uproar when a European Union official suggested last year that Germany cut greenhouse emissions by imposing a limit of 75 mph or so on the entire expressway.

The idea has merit. Cars burn fuel to overcome friction, air resistance, and other forces allied against them. The more fuel a car burns, the more CO₂ it produces. Every car has a peak fuel-efficient speed that gains the greatest distance per unit of energy spent. That speed varies by make and model, but according to David L. Greene, a corporate research fellow at Tennessee’s National Transportation Research Center, “there would be very few cars with an optimal speed above 70 mph.” Still, an autobahn limit might not be a huge help. Even now, its drivers average around 80 mph.
—Tom Zeller, Jr., National Geographic, October 2007

The Fanlistings.org has a listing for “Tommy February6 / Tommy Heavenly6 (Kawase, Tomoko)” but when I go to that site the website says it’s a fanlisting for Tommy February6 only. (Okay it doesn’t use the word ‘only,’ but seriously there’s no mention of Tommy Heavenly6 on the site.) I don’t know who to be more annoyed with, the site owner for not including Tommy Heavenly6, or TFL.org for including her! (…That phrasing is awkward, seeing as it’s the same person….)

To be honest, I don’t really care as much as it seems. I don’t pay much heed to the list itself. (As evidenced by all the buttons on my joined page that don’t have a fanlisting. XD) I just feel really really … weird … when I think of joining the fanlisting that TFL.org says is for Tommy Heavenly6 and using a button with Tommy Heavenly6 on it to link to a site that mentions only Tommy February6. Maybe I should just stick up a button and not link to any site. XD That works for me. Now I just need to get unlazy and do it…

(Note to self: don’t ever write a post about Tommy Heavenly6 and Tommy February6 both. I’m tired of typing Tommy Heavenly6 and Tommy February6. Which makes me wonder why I keep typing Tommy Heavenly6 and Tommy February6. It’s not for SEO, honest.)

Oh, a point I forgot to include and am feeling entirely too lazy to try and work in now: The ridiculousness of TFL.org expecting, because it’s the same physical person, that everyone will be a fan of both her personas/recording personalities. I mean, from the fanlisting itself, “Tommy February6 is all about 80′s style cutesy pop music; so sugary sweet that you’ll grow cavities!” And Tommy Heavenly6 has a rockier edge. I like the rock and am willing to pay the price for imported CDs, but the ’80s pop … not so much.

On to the next topic! Hopefully it will be as short as it was in mind, unlike the previous portion of this entry. Okay, so I’d been thinking of writing this post about paper or plastic bags and which to get at the store, which to line trash cans with, but I may have built it up too much in my mind to essay proportions, and you should know how much I can’t stand writing. Basically, I heard recently that paper bags are getting banned in certain cities and that only 1% of plastic shopping bags get recycled and about 17% of paper bags are recycled. (These numbers are off the top of my head from my somewhat faulty memory, so don’t go citing me as a source or anything.) (Also someone in GPC said plastic films can’t be recycled, period. Ziploc bags, shopping bags, all those little baggies they use to package children’s toys and then warn that plastic bags and kids Do Not Mix Well, they all can’t be recycled. boo.)

So that just made me feel worse about using plastic bags to bag my trash. But I still can’t bring myself to use paper bags for trash. Why? Paper always gets recycled with me, no matter what. It’s been instilled in me since grade school. (I was reminiscing earlier that my city used to not recycle colored paper. And now they’ve moved up to recycled shredded paper! *sniff* They grow up so fast…)

I looked up biodegradeable trash bags, but I can’t find any. At least not any in stores around here. I am really not interested in going online to search for trash bags. Seriously? Have something shipped to me that I’m just going to toss out? Besides, another person in GPC said biodegradable plastics don’t degrade in landfills, because of lack of sun or too much pressure from other waste or something, I don’t know. Basically, biodegradable potato starch=not for landfills.

Yeah. That was a little longer than I’d hoped. Am cutting it short here, no more thoughts on that, except to say that I am still stuck in this moral conundrum.

Third and final topic, this blog needs a new layout. x.x I was planning one I think it was last September, but uhh stupid research paper (that I don’t think I talked about on here … I like to keep my blog clean and PG-rated) got in the way. But it’s sort of ugly anyway. I like the idea, but I don’t know how to carry it off in a pleasant way. Hey! Much the same way I designed my tea box project for Advanced Digital Typography! I love my idea (mommy and baby gorilla, awwww), but … I don’t like designing packaging. Do I make it look similar to other products out there so it’s recognizable as that type of product, or do I go waay out to left field and make something eye-catching that people might pass by because they don’t know what it is?

*cough* Uh, anyway. Yeah. After that idea in September (I did draw what I had in my head out on Illustrator, but I didn’t move beyond that ’cause I don’t know how to lay it out), I have no other ideas really. blegh. I’ve had ideas for images to use, but then the layout would just be a variation of the current one. And I thought, if it’s just basically this layout, then what’s the point of doing all that work? I’ve had plenty of schoolwork to occupy time outside class, thanks. Also, the green fits in with my posting a lot lately about environmental stuff. (Hah, that’s the only thing I can make myself care about enough outside of classes to write something.)

But then, I’m getting really really really tired of the huuuuge margins/padding around all my text. (Margins: typography; padding: code.) And my Twitter box is stuck all the way down there, hidden and inconspicuous. (I want more conspicuous! More!)

I just don’t know what to do. Even my Livejournal has been sitting all blah and boring and grey for probably over a year. (Yes, grey. I have nothing against grey, but seriously, that’s how drab the layout is. Nothing but shades of grey.)

I think I’m tired of the basic layout. Header, text below like a magazine or book or anything, and links somewhere. I was considering a horizontal layout but I either can’t be arsed or am tired of that as well. (My touchpad doesn’t scroll horizontally like my brothers’ do … oooold laptop.) Right now I like Noelle’s layout she made for me a long while ago. (Layout 14 under Flimsy Silence at Shadows they fall if anyone wants to see. Man, I need to restructure my layout archive. I can’t even reference layouts. Maybe that was part of the reason I stuck to frames so long for that site. No one link to anything on that site! Not even me! XO ) But I dunno what to do with it. I wonder if div auto overflows are out…

This is a very long post, when I meant to write only a handful of paragraphs…

They did not think of the environment, however, when they built their website. All-laundry.com, thank you for bringing my browser (Firefox) to its knees and making it unresponsive or really very slow with your pointless use of humongous Flash animation. A few extra minutes required to power my computer to load your website, to get the information (very slowly) in the intro, which I could not skip because of aforementioned speed, more power required to transfer that whole big Flash animation to my computer from your servers, more energy required to run the servers your site is hosted on.

Thank you so very much.

Length of time for items to decompose
hall pass: 2–4 weeks
cotton rag: 1–5 months
gym sock: 1 year
tin can: 100 years
aluminum can: 200–500 years
glass bottle: undetermined

Of course, the cons: no cassette player (used only to listen to mp3 player though), only one CD slot player, no bass/midrange/treble control on the panel, doesn’t switch from FM to AM and back (goes through FM1 band, FM2, FM3, then AM band), and it’s not part of the manufactured car. Pro(s?): auxilary jack! XD The system is made for iPod, which I will never own as long as Creative is in business (and offers a fairly good product), but I guess I’ll get over it.

I don’t really like not being able to switch from CD player to radio, and have the CD player pause while I’m listening to the radio (getting traffic reports from 980 and 1070). (Or, I’m not quite sure, maybe the new CD player does pause, I wasn’t really paying attention…) Mostly by CD player I mean my music. With my old system I had to go to my mp3 player (i.e., reach down and fumble around for the pause button) then switch to the radio, and I accepted that and didn’t listen to my mp3 player often (didn’t hurt that it’s only a 1 gig Zen Nano *grin*). But now, since I’ve got only one slot for CDs, I decided I should (finally) move over to mp3 player.

It’s sort of a trade-off. I’ve got two different modes of driving/music-listening: driving to work during the summer, about an hour-long trip (no need for more than one CD), with frequent switching over to radio; and then there’s driving to school (from L.A.), just straight four CDs in a row three hours of non-stop music. Driving to school isn’t too much of a change, I just have to set up my mp3 playlist before leaving, instead of gathering CDs and loading them in the car. But driving to work … gah, I hate the instances where I have to fiddle around with things just to not miss the traffic report or a bit of the music I’m listening to.

(Funny thing happened on the way home today. I turned on the radio and plugged in my mp3 player but didn’t turn it on because it turns off after a minute or so anyway…. So ten minutes into my drive, while on the 101 going 65–70ish I turn on my music, and a couple minutes later I realize that I wasn’t really paying attention to traffic around me; I didn’t recognize any of the cars around me, just the van [far ahead] in front of me, and I couldn’t recall driving past all the offramps to near the point where I have to start moving over. hahaha!)

One last thing I’m not particularly happy with: the new system seems to up the treble more than I like. :( As I said before, there’s no bass/midrange/treble control on the panel like there was with the Dodge system, and it really really spoiled me I see. Now I can only adjust the bass and the treble. Ouch. I’ve got the bass and treble lowered, but while listening to my Anastasia soundtrack (CD) I could hear the highs, which hurt my ears. Then today, listening to Aly & AJ’s Insomniatic on my mp3 player the same thing happened, only moreso (hadn’t noticed while listening to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Gorillaz, or The Used, hah). I turned down the treble from −6db to −12db where it was comfortable-ish to my ears, but the music sounded flat and besides there were still some semi-highs hurting my ears, so I changed it back. (Later at a long red light I went into the mp3 player’s settings and lowered the highest frequency.)

Now if I had a midrange control, I could simply increase that and be perfectly happy. But no! N says audio companies must think we’re idiots or something, because a lot of stereo systems don’t come with equalizers. Mum’s system has an equalizer, but the ones N look at have only a control for the bass and treble (like my car!). *twitch* That’s like … the one thing that makes buying audio bearable for me. Buy something I find decent, then adjust the hell out of the equalizer. Grar.

(Ack, why do I always end up typing way more than I plan?)

The very last, very minor annoyance I have: the knob. It’s shorter, making it harder for my long-nailed fingers to get a grip on it XD and it’s made out of metal which honestly I would never think would be a drawback, but in the valley where it gets to 110° … say hi to little burns on my fingers.

Today my car read the temperature at 113°, at 3:30 in the afternoon. That wasn’t really so bad. The bad thing was being in an office where for some reason the air-conditioning wasn’t going below 85°. (Yeah, it’s taking 115° air from outdoors and lowering it 30°, and I’m complaining because it won’t go down another 10°.) I never thought 85° was sweltering, but apparently it is. I found it really hard to concentrate on my work (updating my boss’ website, woo) and sat there thinking about the old “Japan Dresses Down” article, wondering how they could possible work in an environment that warm. Like, do accountants make a number of mistakes? Because I found myself making mistakes today … forgetting an " for one. o.O

Later in the car I heard on the radio that power companies were asking people to turn off their thermostats and conserve electricity. I know a lot of places were only in the 80s today (this house, for example, and us with no air conditioning, oh me oh my how do we survive in such primitive circumstances?), but still, sitting in a hot car in 110° … that bit of advice drove me a tad crazy. I’ve always thought people should keep their A/Cs at 78 at the lowest … but sitting in an office where the thermostat was set to 72 and I was sweating just sitting at a computer, I don’t know, I guess I have to rethink that.

Also, I felt more guilty than usual running my A/C in the car today. haha. It’s one of the hottest days this week and I’m trying to keep from getting dehydrated, and I turn my A/C down to the lowest setting (on max A/C though) which I never do because the lowest setting is pretty weak. Heck I even opened my window at Santa Monica Blvd. just to see if I could withstand the 85° heat. (The answer was no.)

Then again, I could have lessened my use of gasoline by not gunning the engine driving around slow cars. But gahhh, semis going up the pass at 50 mph … *dies*

Yesterday I typed up commentary then printed it out cut it out glued it down. Oh yeah. When I say “glue it down” I mean I have to follow a specific grid that I’m supposed to follow throughout the whole journal. I have to try to make everything align right and be straight and all that. I also talked to Lisa while doing it.

After that … I’m not really sure. *blink* OH! Before that I spent practically all that time putting together blog (and Livejournal) entries that I’d made about art class. And making them look nice, and editing out useless stuff, then printing them out. After, I just glued more stuff down. And I got to bed a bit after 11. ehehe.

Woke up about 8:30, glued some stuff down, got ready for my printing final and left at 9:30. Gave myself some time to study in the car. ^^; That was about all the studying I did, other than looking over the study guide the previous night. But can you believe it, I forgot my scantron. D’oh. Practically the one thing I told myself I needed to bring. Oh well. I bought one at the bookstore right before class. It’s a weird new design though. On the 882-E instead of the outlined boxes it has these green pill-shaped areas that (I assume) you color over. I don’t know why they changed it. I was wondering if it had something to do with cheating. *snicker* I think it’s very hard to hide your scantron answers from anyone who really wants to look at them.

I also decided to not buy scantrons in the package anymore. C was asking me whether he should buy the single scantrons or the ones in a package (why can’t he think about that for himself? O_o), and I was saying you save money with the ones in a package. But then I thought, you have to think about the pollution and whatnot that goes into making the plastic packaging. And probably all that plastic just gets tossed out in the trash to fill up landfills. So! It’s single scantrons for me. >) I’ll pay more to save the planet, yes I will!

Anyway. I bought matte board and vellum after the final. Came back here and put a matte frame around my pictorial space. Then I made folders and glued them into my journal and glued some last minute things in. Would you believe that took me four and a half hours? I even skipped lunch.

At 3:30 I grabbed my journal, my pictorial space composition, my purse, and my rubber cement pick-up and headed to my art class. It was about a third full when I got there. I spent the few minutes before 4 (the deadline) removing rubber cement. :o I didn’t get all of it though. But I definitely wanted to get it in. No more stress oh yay!

Except I remembered grades for the final were posted and I looked and I got a B-. *sniffle* I guess I’m gonna get a B in this class. I don’t know what my problem is. A B is above average. But to me it somehow feels subpar.

Well. I got back here and cleaned up the floor and kinda felt dejected. But after I made myself rewrite my notes for my final on Friday. I’m all the more determined to get an A in this class! And I need a pretty high A on the final to do that … bah. I dunno.

Now I’m really tired. But … I dunno. I don’t really feel like doing anything. Including sleeping.

Oh! I heard on the radio this morning “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” by the Pretenders. ^_^ That was nice.

(It really is “a big dark echoing room” now. Maybe I should stop calling it that. *ponder*)

But I must keep up my blog, if only for myself! *super pose*

I don’t remember whatall I did Saturday. Sunday I went grocery shopping with C. I mention that only because I was looking for something to clean the shower with and found a Bon Ami cleaner that says on the front, Environment Friendly, no bleach or perfumes or a couple other ingredients I don’t remember. I thought, ‘Wow, Bon Ami really is my good friend!’ (Okay yes I’m an envirodork. *grin*)

I didn’t get it though, ’cause I’m too lazy to scrub the tub. >_> I’m an environmentalist up to a point. After that I’m a germophobe and I don’t wanna touch anything that’s touching something dirty. (Seriously. Germs can, like, travel around on objects, and walk onto my hand. Or … something.) So I got Lysol shower cleaner. (Kills bacteria! Woohoo! Er, at least until someone touches it again. *furtive glance* Then it’s dirty again.)

Boring diary stuff: Monday lecture then lab. In lab we had a final project that day. We pretended we were a design firm (or something) and the teacher was our client and we all had to work in teams (or departments) then split up the work (like there was advertising, then there was … I don’t remember :x in advertising we had to make a magazine ad, certificate for something or other, product logo, and a memo pad for internal company use [I don't get it either, but meh]). I was on the advertising team and made the memo pad. ^^;; Yeah, I thought it’d be the easiest since we couldn’t know what the product was, just what the code name was (Wonder Widget), and since in my Intro to Graphic [Communication] class at the community college I went to we had to design something like that, so it wasn’t something completely new.

Every so often the teacher would send us messages over the network (like what’s the progress? and stuff). It was fun! Well, you know, if you forget the part where I thought I’d run out of time to print it out ’cause no one else had done it yet and there was 5 minutes left of class. Ahh!!

That’s one thing I didn’t learn while working over the summer. I don’t know how to work with a deadline. There was one, but it had already passed before I started working, haha, so I was pretty much just told, “Work as fast as you can so we can get the catalogue out.” Oh well.

Last night practically right before bed I planned out most of my art journal. Woo, go me. (Dare I say “Goby!”? I haven’t played Animal Crossing in the looooongest time. *tear*) I just have to get around to actually putting it together. *shifty eyes* I’ve decided on a guinea pig as my personal theme! XD I hope I can use it again next year. *furtive glance*

Today I went to lecture, then art lab. Had a critique in art lab. It’s cool, seeing everyone’s version of a project with guidelines. I also like hearing the technical explanations of why something doesn’t work, and what would make it better. XD

I asked him later to clarify what I had to do with my project. I understand it for the one I’m going to turn in, but the other one I still don’t understand what he means by “scale everything.” ._. I thought it was a pretty nicely scaled piece. He also said the columns going off into the distance are too strong (kind of why I put them in XD I just liked looking at them). I guess it’s because there’s too strong of a focal point. There’s nothing to move the piece from the back of the room around again to the front or even the middle. (But I still don’t understand the scale thing.)

Now I’m here. Need to eat dinner.

From about 1:30 (when we got out of art) to now I was stressing. meep. I felt like I had lots to do, and so little time to do it in (from that point until now, or when I have to go to art lecture), and I couldn’t do anything to change or lessen either problem. So I just didn’t do anything. *laugh* I just tried to make myself not stress.

I could have studied for art, but again I really don’t know what to study. I could read the book, but it’s really boring, and I don’t know what I’m supposed to get out of it. I find some stuff interesting, but of course it’s not what we’re supposed to be learning in the course and thusly get tested on for a grade. I looked over notes, but again I don’t know what we’re getting tested on and don’t know what to focus on and everything just goes over my head. It’s easier when it’s a technical subject, you understand how and then the quiz is easy. You don’t have to memorize stuff!

I could have written all the stuff I need for my art journal, but that would just remind me of all the work I still need to do and it would make me stress more.

I could have worked on drawing the guinea pig pictures on the computer but one: I didn’t want to turn on the computer (desktop) for such a measly amount of time, and two: I didn’t really want to get into something that I didn’ have the time for. I could do it tomorrow, I have practically the whole day and don’t need to interrupt my work to go somewhere. (Oh yeah I have to work on the pictorial space project.)

And … that’s all I really have to do. *nod* I’m currently working on validating the (X)HTML of all my websites. I didn’t want to do that either because I would just feel guilty goofing off when I have all this other stuff I need to do.

But I really should go eat dinner so I can stop stressing about that, then get ready to go to class and take the art final and come back and watch Gilmore Girls. woo!