One Norwegian Alaskan in Madison.



Happy Birthday to meee!

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It's my birthday!  I'm 20 as of 11:56 am.  I think I'm going to put it off till the weekend, though, as I have a bone to pick with a little reaction called Electrophilic Aromatic Substitution.  Friedel and Crafts can bite my ass. 

I was going sneak into the 8K Torchlight Run Saturday night with my uncle, but he's unavailable now and my lovely Rachel will be in Cd'A for the weekend with her gramma.  I need a new plan, people!  Come visit me on Friday and make me de-stress for once, because I need it.  Badly.



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 Dear Rena,

You've evidently expired and require a replacement.

To that effect, I have seduced your cat, am on the verge of taking your job, and will immediately look into changing my last name to something rhyming with "Pindsor".

Love, Sarah.



From my favorite dad ever:

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"Just remember: if it has tires, transistors, or testicles, you're gonna have trouble with it."


Heeyah! Take that, cis-1,2-dibromocyclopropane

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I just finished the final for O Chem 1, and I feel like crap.  Not because of the test, but because of the lack of sleep and food that have built up to it.  But this cup-o-noodles is promising comfort and nourishment (it may be lying on one of those two accounts), so I'll be upped in no time. 
 
Sooo...the first half of summer school is done.  I feel like I missed something, like it was supposed to be more of a struggle and my days were supposed to be busier with ungodly amounts of studying.  Not that I'm complaining.  Nooo...not me
 
Before you throw that hamburger patty at me because you've taken O Chem too, and you know exactly what it's like, I didn't do as well as I could have.  I'll put it this way, though:  it's like that joke about hiking in the woods with a friend when you come across a bear - you don't have to outrun the bear...just outrun your friend.  And I outran all the crazy people who decided taking a 10 week O Chem course for the first time in just 4 weeks would be a sane thing to do. 
 
I just got back from the lovely reaming of Spyridis' final "exam" and want to fall over, but in anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours, I will be the proud owner of not one, but two new roommates!  The estrogen concentration in this house will double...and that doesn't factor in Roomie #3's mom, who's crashing here for the night before driving back down to Cali.  Roomie #4, or R4 as I've decided to call her, is coming south from Bellingham.  R3 and R4 have never met.  R4 has met both R2 (current roomie) and myself, but R3 has made phone contact with only me, and only once.  I found them on the net (I *heart* craigslist), and if my landwoman likes them I get to keep them! 
 
I'm going to become my mother and clean the apartment in anticipation...and because I have no life when I'm not being a student.  It's the weekend and the sun is all shiny, so maybe I could nip over to the beach while the girls are getting settled in, eh?  Or I could study.  Tovin said he'd be over sometime today (possibly due to the increase in girl density?) so maybe I could convince him to take me to the store if he's got transport.  And Dano will be over, no doubt, sometime tonight or tomorrow, though he may steal R2 away to Canadia for a few days.  If you'd like to come over too, we'll call it a party and grill something.  Oh yes, we now have a grill on the back porch.  Just come up the back steps.  ;)


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Look at what Lindsey can do! I got to be a test model for her to iron out her face casting skills, and she did an awesome job. Now all I have to do is paint it...and then run up and down Broadway on Hallowe'en with a perfectly-fitting mask. Eeexcellent...


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look, Martin gave me a knife!

...and I named its creation Vlad the Impaler...

...and then used it to do O Chem on the rocks. That's the free energy equation on the left there, and a pair of enantiomers on the right. (R)-1-fluoroethanol and (S)-1-fluoroethanol, to be exact. See, I can take my work with me! Take that! :P


We're baack...

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Mmph. Damn allergies. I can't stay awake, even without the drugs, and that's a problem now that Spyridis has cranked up the speed in his lectures. While I'm sniffling and silently yearning for a tissue, he's trying to demonstrate how an SN2 reaction will proceed with "backside attack" and that if the substrate (read: sitting duck inviting the nucleophile to attack its backside) is too bulky in back, the nucleophile just can't fit in there, and will be turned off...i mean, deterred...it was a tie between cracking up and sneezing my head off. Never mind that I've already heard this lecture with this exact description nine months ago.

Lindsey, Dano, Martin, and I got back from our Cuatro de Julio adventure to find Rachel asleep in my room! She's leaving today, but was back to decompress from a week of hiking switchbacks and digging latrines, and to stock up on hugs and Family Guy, of course. So...our adventure to Wynoochee Falls went trippingly well. It was beautiful over the weekend and we found the falls while it was still light on Saturday, so we climbed up to them and I found a way down to this flat rock right next to the falls where I could sit and catch the spray.

We made camp on a bed of grass upriver a bit with a rocky bar across a little stream where the guys built a fire ring. This led to problems when Lindsey wanted to cross the stream from the tent to the fire (and food) and opted to jump rather than walk across the logs 15 feet away. She can jump about as well as I can sing. She has forward momentum, but no lift, which explained why she was drying her shoes by the fire that night. Wait, no it doesn't. She dunked her shoes when she tried to go back over the stream to the tent, and put all her weight on a piece of wood no one had tested. We heard an odd sound and then a sploosh as her entire right side went underwater.

This is hilarious because only a few hours earlier Lindsey and I were up at the tent after dinner while the guys when to find more firewood/explore. Only a few minutes after they headed out, we looked up to see Martin standing in front of us, dripping. He was soaked from his feet to his chest. Apparently the piece of wood he put all his weight on wasn't sturdy either. His cell phone has great spiderweb cracks now, though.

We ate hot dogs and roasted corn on the cob to the sound of exploding M-80s and sparklers from the campers across the way, so our Cuatro de Julio was pretty much perfect. We talked around the campfire until it was so dark we couldn't see each other's faces any more and then continued the debauchery in Lindsey's huge tent. Yay for car camping, because I wouldn't want to pack that beast in unless I were weight training for Mt. Ranier. I returned with mosquito bites, scratches all up and down my shins, and a lingering eau de campfire that won't wash away, no matter how hard I scrub. Must...erase...evidence...


Are we there yet?

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I took my second organic chem test this morning. I got a 99% on my first one, and I think I could get as high as a 95% on this one, if I'm lucky! Just call me the OCM (that would be Organic Chem Master). This is very likely the "display of hubris" that will be closely followed by the "inevitable downfall". But being aware of this will make the fall hurt less, right?

Lindsey and I are going to run off with Dano and Martin this weekend to a lake on the Olympic Peninsula and camp. And hike, and swim, and have a fabulous Cuatro de Julio. I'm really excited about the Cadbury's Dairy Milk chocolate we bought tonight for the smores. Mmm, I think someone may filch it if I don't keep all three bars unwrapped and next to my pillow...for security, you know.

A lot has gone on in the two weeks that I've been back from Alaska. I flew in Sunday night and it was at least 85 degrees here at 1 am (and I though AK was hot at 80!). I started in on o chem the next morning with my first class, and it's been going steady ever since. There're about 20 other crazy people taking these two classes back to back with me, and we've formed a really good study group relationship. We've been kicked out of Bannan at 12 and 1 am multiple times this week, because they notice the lights blazing. We're just in there working problems on the whiteboards, but it's paid off in our test scores. In two weeks we've covered what normally takes 5 weeks, and we're now halfway through the quarter. And in two weeks we have the final. I think I'm going to go crazy.

Tom flew in from Mexico and stayed with us for almost a week starting sometime last week. He left Tuesday to go work on his parents' herb farm. No, other herbs. I'm going to miss him a lot more than I ever thought I would - we had a few long talks last year, but living with him let me see a little glimpse of who he is on his downtime, and he's pretty cool. He picked up Ender's Game and got through half of it before he had to go. Those of us in the cult know he's alright if he's a self-motivated convertee.

I'm 2/3 of the way through Felante pelos Muertos, Rachel! See, I'm even going Portuguese for you. It's hard to read that and my o chem book at the same time, but all the devious little twists and turns have me hooked again. Most of what I remembered is happening in this book, so I'm doubting how much of Xenocide I read. I remember the whole plot of Path and the OCD society, though. My memory is as holey as one of Patrick Bateman's victims. Maybe I'll get to the fourth book by September. And then we can talk.

And now I will sleep. Tomorrow we get to drive around Puget Sound to the O-P and find a lake that has free campsites. It'll take maybe 3 hours, but Dano's stereo is broken. We get to make our own music. Definitely will need full night of sleep. Noche, patos!


I'm not dead yet!

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Hey, I have this nifty new address! Send me something random at malicho@gmail.com and I'll send you something random back. And after a while, I won't respond to my hotmail account.


About me

  • Homebase Madison, Wisconsin
  • I was raised in Alaska, am the shortest person in my family, and I can wiggle my ears.
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