November 2008

In one of my classes, one of my fellow students posted this link:http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2008/03/24/what-will-life-be-like-in-the-year-2008/

It's a pretty hysterical prediction from 40 years ago about what life will be like in November of 2008. This being the last day of October, I thought we'd better get ready for hands-free, thought-free driving and about 24.5 million more people to live in the United States. Four-hour work days and self-maintaining houses sound pretty nice.

Happy Halloween!

Hungry?

Holy cow it's been a month since I last posted! Let me just tell you that working, homework-ing, cooking dinner for your husband nearly every night, and being pregnant makes you lose track of time. I'll try to do better...

Anyway, on to what I've learned this week. I was going to talk about what I learned on my trip to Springfield earlier this month, during which my husband and I visited several Lincoln sites. However, I found this today and I just couldn't wrap my brain around it very well:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20081024/lf_nm_life/us_taiwan_contest

Really? Sixty dollars? Plus, I love the last sentence that says: "Taiwan's education ministry has halted campus-based eating contests while an investigation is launched." This makes me think that Taiwan's campuses have regularly scheduled eating contests, other than this annual one in the story. Who thought this was a good idea? What do the kid's parents think? This is very sad, that a basic necessity of life (eating) can be made into a potentially deadly sport. I feel bad for the student's family. Do things like that happen here? I have no idea. I work on a University campus and I can say that I have never heard of an eating contest here. I guess this isn't any different than hot dog eating contests or pie eating contests, but still... Gross. Maybe it's because I am too "girly" to enter myself into a binge eating contest. Maybe it's because I get too grossed out by vomit, which I'm sure is a staple at events such as this.

In case I've offended any previous "Big Stomach Kings" out there, here are a few Lincoln tidbits I found interesting:

Abraham Lincoln had a clean-shaven face until a little girl wrote him a letter saying that she thought he would look pretty nice with a beard.

Lincoln's oldest son Robert sold the house in Springfield to the state of Illinois for $1 as long as it remained in it's 1860 state and no one would ever be charged admission.

Mary Todd Lincoln was not the first woman Lincoln was engaged to.

Have a great weekend!!

Worth pondering...

An email went out at work this morning linking to this:
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/09/24/buttons

Several more emails arrived in my inbox from the University Library listserv people about how it seems just a tad off that this is "unlikely to enforce this for faculty" (a quote from an emailer who heard President White at a meeting). The resounding question: What about civil service staff? Mind you, this really doesn't bother me as I'm not one to parade around my political opinions on a button, t-shirt, or bumper sticker, but why the special treatment for faculty? The answer is what I would like to learn this week. Whatever the case, I have gotten to read some hilarious emails from staff members about how when they are hauled out for wearing their political button they'll be sure to toss it to a faculty member.

Have a great non-partisan kind of day!

I am not crazy.

Over the last week in school, I continued to learn about how I learn. More specifically, I found out that I combine thinking about things with learning by doing. I already knew that I learn things best by jumping in and doing them, but I hadn't thought about the thinking part. It's true, though. I usually try to work a technical problem out in my head before I get to the hands-0n stage.

More interestingly (for me at this time, anyway) is what I've learned about pregnancy hormones (an example of learning by doing?). A couple of days ago, in the span of about ten minutes, I went from tearing up at a song I heard on the radio, to thinking something else on the radio was ridiculously funny when it probably wasn't, to having to keep myself from laughing while walking from my car to my building because I was thinking of something else "hilarious." I just kept thinking that people out walking near me must have thought that I was totally insane because here I am, just smiling away at nothing. All I can say is I feel bad for my poor husband, who usually gets to experience these mood swings when they're on the not-so-funny end.

Finally, the best thing I learned this week is that in February (or perhaps March, if being late is hereditary) we'll be welcoming a baby girl to the family. Now I just have to get used to thinking of Baby as a she instead of as an it.

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...