Another Countdown Post!

You might have begun to believe that I am no longer obsessed with keeping track of the number of days until my upcoming excitements; alas, I have simply kept them to myself for a while. It is true however that I don't pay as much attention to them because it's way more fun to be startled by the dramatic difference between checks.


I hope these numbers bring as much excitement to you as they do me!
1 day- Grady comes home (closridium perfringes report due)
3 days- Thanksgiving!
25 days- The end of fall quarter/The Prices and I embark on the drive to North Carolina
31 days- Christmas!
37 days- Welcome 2009!
49 days- Winter quarter starts
64 days- I turn 21!
10656 days- One for y'all to figure out :)

Also kind of fun: tallying!
I've been alive for 7607 days so far!
Grady and I have been dating for the last 892 of them!

Ahh, good times

Playing the DART Slots!

Upon arriving at the DART train station yesterday morning, I found out that I was short of one-dollar bills, and would either have to "steal" a ride or break a 20... While they NEVER check tickets, I know that the one day I try to get away with a free ride will be the day they check (and that whole convictions thing- I'm pretty anti-thievery), so the 20-dollar bill was really my only option... So I put in the bill up top and shortly there after, down at the bottom, along with my ticket, came falling $17 in Susan B. Anthony's, Sacajawea's, and quarters... People all around were staring at me, so I yelled "Jackpot!"

Just kidding; I didn't really. But in retrospect, I wish I had :)


While that was kind of a fun feeling, the novelty wears off when you remember that it's just $17 that you already had and now take up far more space than the dollar bill ever could have...


In other news, I just started Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix on the train ride home today!

Not So Worthless

When informed that I would be required to attend college orientation class every Monday, I figured that it would be silly and worthless. I guess there was no way to know that Mr. Coronado would be awesome! We're not learning just silly meaningless stuff- we've done stress tests (I racked up 386 points on mine...), learned about eye patterns, and yesterday, we learned about speed reading!

I always thought that I read slowly and that would always just be what it was, but speed reading is an acquired skill. In my first round, I read 330 words per minute. When following a pen with our eyes in the second round, I was able to read 363 wpm. Then we took a few times through where we scanned the page with increasing speed, not looking for actual reading or comprehension. And once we took a third stab at reading, I was able to knock out 638 wpm! Mr. Coronado told us if we practice this activity for 20 minutes everyday, we'll be reading 1,000's of words per minute in no time!

So, I climb on the train, determined to use the ride down as practice time; however, upon opening my book I remembered that I love my adjectives and adverbs too much to skip right over them. I want to know precisely what the situation looked like when Harry got caught in the trick stair in the middle of the night. I want to know just how silly Rita Skeeter looked while sneaking on the Hogwarts grounds. And thus I concluded that leisure reading and speed reading are simply going to have to be kept in separate spheres of my life. Maybe I'll practice with a text book- I'm just looking for the nouns and verbs there anyways...