So after my really cranky Thursday,
The weekend was killed by homework... I'm finding the software engineering class to be _really_ annoying; partly because it's stuff I've known for decades, and partly because the sample project in it is retarded.
Got feedback (finally) on my homework assignment from last week and I did good, well enough at least. I had factored their object list down to a simpler form of primary object and variations, and they wanted me to keep them long and complicated, so I'm thinking they may not like what I'm doing with the implementation.
I'm really not enjoying this project as much as I have past ones. Thank god, it will be over soon.
I hope the next classes are less stupid. This one is making me crazing, with my bullshit alarms going off constantly. Makes me cranky.
There are days when I'm a terrible dance student. I don't remember stuff, things I know I can do just won't re-appear in my brain at all. It's terribly frustrating and I get visibly frustrated...
The smooth dances are the worst for me -- waltz and foxtrot, bolero, sometimes even tango (though I loved tango in theory).
I've been dancing ballroom about three years now, but the first year I was doing just two lessons a month and wasn't actually _dancing_ anywhere. So I don't really count that as a proper year at all...
The last two years plus a few months, I've been doing group lessons on Friday (two styles each Friday) and trying to go to Saturday dances to actually _dance_ (though a bit inconsistent there). The last year, I have also been doing higher-level classes Thursday night. Plus the same 2 private lessons a month on top of it all.
These 3rd level classes are the classes that kill me. Level 2 is now not bad -- which makes sense, since they are designed for people who have been dancing about 2 years. Level 3 classes, like tonight's Foxtrot 3, are still a terrible struggle.
I got through almost all 5 weeks of Foxtrot 3 though! But it was hard, and I had a hell of a time remembering stuff from week to week -- since the moment I leave the room I don't think about it again until the moment I re-enter the room the next week.
Because I do school and social stuff weekends, and I'm usually too tired to go to Saturday dancing. And Mon/Wed is Taichi -- no practice then! Learning Chen form, which is also hard. Tuesday is usually house oriented stuff, bills, whatnot. And that's it. All the week there is.
Work, Taichi, dance lessons, weekends for school and life and housework...
So dancing level 3 smooth is hard and frustrating and I'm a terrible cranky angry frustrated student.
Sigh.
Awww, the little red ants carried all of the corpses out of the nest and made piles of them, heaps even, around the entrances.
This will never do. A much bigger soak on that nest, as best I can tell, killed them all this time. I'll keep my eye on 'em, though.
The nest by the driveway -- a big soak, but I still saw activity today. Same thing with the one by the garage. It's hard to soak 'em down to the queen.
Maybe, though, I will have annoyed them enough to make 'em migrate.
Oooh, I sprayed weeds in my driveway cracks with some high-octane vinegar (plus orange oil, plus a surfactant; purchased from the organic gardening store) and they turned brown! Cool! All-natural death. Of course, the driveway smells like salad now, but that's okay.
Spent a long weekend moving slowly -- did some schoolwork (not enough), some housework (not enough), some yardwork (not enough), some recreational reading, played games with friends (too much), and wrote some (not enough).
Ahh well. If I get those school chapters read this week, I can do the assigments Saturday again and still be on track. This last Saturday, though, the discrete math assignment took _way_ too much time. Darn it. And several questions in the assignment had nothing to do with the book, so that was confusing.
I'm kinda between projects at work right now, but that's changing quickly I'm sure.
Doing a little bit of jewelry repair and fiddling in the shop, so that's fun.
And I've been pestering Richard about his American Ballroom Dance book... to ghost it for him, because I think it needs to be published. At least, I want a copy.
While Marla was deflowering the yard (dandelions count as flowers, right???) I decided to test something I had heard about.
We had some fire ant nests -- one under the driveway by the garage door, and one by the street in that useless damn strip of grass there.
I had heard that orange oil annoys and/or kills ants. I have orange oil, mmmm, good stuff! So I threw a handful of ounces (unmeasured) into a couple gallons of water (unmeasured) (theory is 2oz per gallon) and then got the pump spraying thingy and hosed it into their little holes.
Woo-hoo, some activity! When I knocked over the mound in the yard, fire ants boiled out and man did they look mad. So I spritzed all over the top of those to start and then poked around for some direct entrances to their evil underground lair. And then sprayed about a gallon of orange-impregnated water into it. Heheheh.
It wasn't too long before I didn't see more than just a couple surface ants. Hopefully they were packing the babies and moving to the neighbors yard.
Same thing for the garage.
I hear that a light orange spray all over will keep the little bugger away, too -- or orange peels diced up and sprinkled around the yard.
For the curious, I also have another very effective control for any kind of ant. Simply mix borax or boric acid with whatever substance the ant in mind will eat, and place it on or near their trails. They take it back home and in about 2 days, everyone is dead.
It has worked for me every time.
The insect people use borax mixtures for all kind of bug control, too. They sprayed it on my floor beams in Oregon to keep termites out, for example.
The bonuses are that orange oil smells really nice, and borax is pretty innocuous, though bunches of it are bad for your landscaping. I mean, you have to eat spoonfulls of the stuff before you even get sick...
http://www.msdsvault.org//GENERALPDF/33850-USBorax-Borax.pdf
Okay, I think I'll start writing in here again. Had a big break, transitioning from one mode of existence to another as it were.
Smooth-on, my silicon supplier of choice, has a bunch of new products I will play with this year. The two I have on hand are their new food-safe silicon mold making material, good to baking up to 350'F! Woo! I can make edible body parts of any kind! Or, hmmm, anything! Mmmm, lady-fingers.
We are having a party to play with this stuff -- a group purchase -- but it keeps getting delayed. The first time because the shipment came in late, the second delay because Silona (one of the key players in this party) was too bruised to make it. So maybe after next weekend we'll have a fun progress report!
I spent a few minutes with silver clay this Sunday, too -- working to fix a broken piece, and dabbling with a couple of other experiments. Nothing too thrilling, but it's nice to be in the shop. And the weather is beautiful these days! Spring in Austin... except for the pollen raping my delicate membranes, it's beautiful.
At this point in the writing front, I've got four short stories (from 3,000 to 6,000 words per) and about 11,000 words in a long story that I'm scraping out of my brain one paragraph at a time.
All of it will need some serious rewrites to pull them together, but that's expected.
The first three are obsessive love stories of different flavors, the fourth short (the 3,000 word one) is more stream-of-consciousness, but still a kind of predatory story. Later this year I'll do editing and think about marketing them...
If I had the energy, I could easily do a short story each week -- the ideas appear just about as fast as I implement them, and I've also got several novels queued in my brain. When I'm writing, it's not too hard to do a decent 1,000 words an hour... but hard to do more than a couple hours in a sitting! My brain gets all overheated, and starts skimping.
It's funny how so many people I know are professional writers, aspiring writers, recreational writers -- I would almost feel like a "me-to" if writing hasn't been something in my background most of my life. I'm simply moving it up to the fore now.
And I forget that I do happen to have five books published. Heheheh. But they are light technical, they don't count.
Mmm, fiction. While I'm at it, I could try ramming bamboo slivers under my nails, or pounding my head against a brick wall.
But ya gotta do what ya gotta do.