Time flies by.

I didn't mean to wait until so late in the week to get this out. In fact, I knew what I wanted to write about on Monday. However, a wicked sinus infection has kept me home in bed for most of the week, and so many things have not gotten done yet. Exhibit A: We are moving to a bigger apartment tomorrow and have yet to pack up most of our things. Luckily, we get a week to complete the move.

On to things I've learned this week. I did a lot of reading about how we learn this week. It got me thinking about how I have retained so much information that I learned on my own (i.e. not in school) and not so much about some things that I was taught at school. For instance, I can remember my favorite Backstreet Boy's (product of the '90's anyone?) favorite color, sport, and food, but geometry proofs escape me entirely. I'm not entirely embarrassed to admit this, because boy bands were wildly more interesting to me at the time than math. So for me, it seems, self-directed learning has more "stay-power" than things I was made to learn. I learned a little about how I learn this week. I'm sure that by my next post I'll have learned a little about how I pack up a life in one evening.

Too busy.

The real thing I learned this week (so far) is that piracy is a real problem off the coast of Somalia. This caught my attention because after we've glamorized pirates - Captain Jack Sparrow, anyone? - piracy is an actual problem in the world. As far as I could tell, they're not taking crews hostage on the Black Pearl. Here's the story I found: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=93893918&ft=1&f=1004

Some things that I've learned about myself this week include:
- A pregnancy craving for strawberry Pez will not be taken care of with cherry Pez.
- I am very excited, though overwhelmed, about starting school again.
- No matter how early I get to work in the morning, the car with the license plate "yelosno" will always get a better parking spot than me.

This week.

At work this week we had a staff party. I work for the College of Medicine's library on the UIUC campus. Technically, though, we're considered to be a UIC department. So whenever Chicago does something fun, in this instance, an ice cream social, we get funding at our library to do something fun too. Hence the aforementioned staff party. Anyway, our grad assistant came up with some trivia questions for us, and one of them was: "What is another name for a tropical cyclone?" The correct answer was hurricane, although there was an argument that 'typhoon' would have worked too. So the staff was then curious about what exactly is the difference between a typhoon and a hurricane? Apparently, there really is no difference, but they're called different things based on the location of the storm. So that's what I learned this week. Now if we could only negotiate a raise on who found the answer first...