This is an attempt to try and sort out some of the things going on in my head. Feel free to make comments or cross-connections if you see them.

Grades posted a couple of weeks ago. I received a D in my nursing course. Now, this is odd, because D is a grade the School of Nursing officially does not give... the 'Screw you, slacker' grading scale requires 75% for a C, and anything less than that goes straight to F. That's strange thing one. Strange thing two is that I haven't received the "You're out!" letter from the SoN yet. Last year, when I failed 350 the first time, they turned it around pretty quickly... I got the letter a couple of days after grades posted.

I called my academic advisor this morning, and explained about the strange things, and she agreed that they were strange, and advised me to talk to one of the fellows in the administration at the SoN. So I went over there this afternoon, and talked to him, and he agreed that they were strange things, and said that he'd look into the situation, and see if there was anything going on that I should be aware of. He said he'd call me tomorrow and let me know.

I also finally heard from the instructor who went through Lab Partner Lady to reach me. She wanted to tell me about Excelsior College which could be a reasonably short path to getting my Associate in Science, Nursing, and getting to practice as a nurse. So I'm applying there, and we'll see what happens. The only thing that concerns me is that there's a practical exam which lasts two or three days, according to the instructor, and there may not be a place in Arizona to do it.

I'm trying to figure out what I want to do about leaving Flagstaff. I took a drive today, out to the other end of town, on Highlands War business, and as I drove, I thought. It didn't help that today was a freakishly beautiful day in Flagstaff. I tried to think of anything that would keep me here. I thought of all the complaints I've made about not having in-town friends here, about the times I've been perfectly miserable, and complained about it.

And yet, for some reason, there remains an emotional attachment to the place. My emotions are telling me that it's not time to leave, just yet.

But I can't listen to that. I know that I'll be happy once I'm back in Tucson, and that I have family and good friends there. I know that there are more opportunities there to find a job, to... well, anything. So I need to see what the Admin Guy from the SoN has to say tomorrow, and then I need to make plans for when I'm leaving Flag, and how.

Sigh.

I'm jealous of people who always knew what they wanted to do with their lives, and had it all fall into place for them. I've always felt like I'm fumbling around in the dark without a clue.

Well, I went over to my storage room today, and went through two piles of boxes... I don't use cardboard boxes, but plastic ones -- they keep the contents safer from vermin and weather, and don't tend to fall apart when you lift them after they've been sitting in storage for five years.

Anyway, as I said, I went through the first two piles of boxes. Each pile is five or six boxes deep, so that was something on the order of ten boxes. I separated out things I hadn't missed in the five years they've been sitting in storage, and took three boxes of books and cetera over to the used bookstore, Bookman's. It netted me enough money to get my accounts out of negative balance, and buy lunch at Taco Bell.

But not enough to make a long term difference in my situation.

I spent a lot of yesterday staring at the wall.

Somehow, both my regular checking account and my PayPal account now have negative balances. My credit card account will be 90 days overdue on Sunday, which means that it will go into collections. I have one paper dollar in my wallet, and a little bit of change in my car's ashtray.

No one has called me back in response to applications, even the place that Lab Partner Lady said was almost a sure thing. My guitar didn't sell on eBay.

I don't know what to do.

Okay, look, seriously, if you're a Star Wars fan, and you haven't listened to A Different Point of View, you need to. It's little vignettes about the SW universe... from the perspective of a Stormtrooper. Funny, smart, and thought-provoking!

childofsnow

I got my clinical project notebook to the point where it was as done as it was going to get for this week, and I turned it in at about 4:30 yesterday afternoon. I called Park Ranger Girl, and we went to Taco Bell, and gossiped. She's going to be working the Lake Mead recreation area this summer, and is excited about it, and she wanted to hear all about Estrella War.

Afterwards, I came home, wrote a couple of posts for cooperative writing projects I'm involved with, got irritated at online people, and went to bed. I like bed. I particularly like bed in preference to sleeping on the ground. I also like insulated walls. And heat. Heat is your friend. There's something I'd like to share with you about my dorm room -- I think about it from time to time, while I'm lying in my warm bed, but then I forget about it when I'm sitting at my computer.

My dorm room is a modern apartment-style building, built on a frame of two-by-fours, with insulation and sheetrock and so on. The thing is, it's heated inside, and outside, it's pretty cold. Throughout the winter (and this is my fifth winter living in the dorm) the heat differential causes portions of the building to expand and contract at different rates. There are constantly little creakings and poppings that I can hear... I hardly ever have a full second of silence in my room. It's more extreeme in my current, third story appartment than it was in the ground-floor apartment where I spent my first year. It's gotten to the point where it's a comforting noise, but I imagine that it's not a good noise, for the long-term health of the building.

Of course, there are buildings on the NAU campus that are a hundred years old. I doubt my dorm will ever become one of them.

I write that it was a long day, I guess because it feels that way, but I didn't actually do all that much. I didn't set an alarm, but still ended up waking up and being out of bed by nine this morning. I did some laundry, played some World of Warcraft (WoW) on Runetotem with my Human Paladin, started a new Dwarf healer and got him to second level, and generally did nothing useful. I ripped some CDs into MP3s, and put them on my iPod.

I went to fighter practice, intending to work on padding my armor and working my rattan staves up into swords, but when I got there, while there was a fair crowd, it was revealed that our Baronial combat marshall had neglected to ensure we still had permission to use the inside of the skydome, so we had to practice outside, in the sub-freezing weather. A couple of guys armored up anyway, fought a couple of bouts, and then admitted that it was too cold. I wasn't one of them... I stood with the Exchequer, and discussed College business. It was too dark to work on a sword, and too cold to work with cutting foam for padding.

So, after a few minutes, we adjourned to Granny's Closet, where I had a brownie a la mode, which I will surely regret before morning, and other people had soda or other deserts, and we talked more about the situation with the college's financial status, which is... a cause for concern.

I came home, where I need to print out some material for orientation to nursing school in the morning, and worked up one of my rattan staves into a sword. After doing the right-hand one, I was tired, and didn't really want to work on the left-hand one, so it'll get done tomorrow. The ROTC roomies were getting ready for bed as I was working on the sword, and they had a lot of questions, so I answered them, and let them handle the completed sword. Who knows... maybe they'll decide they want to play.

Anyway, I'm tired now, and I need to print that material out, so off I go.

As you can see from the campus webcam, it's still snowing. And the weather forecast calls for continuing snow. But I'm going to go ahead and pack up, and see if I can get my car out onto the town's roads. If I can, I'm going to head south today. I'm tired of being stuck, alone, in my dorm room.

The other night when they were over, Park Ranger Girl revealed that, although she'd read Neverwhere, she'd never seen it. And Chivalrous Boy revealed that he'd be done with his Resident Assistant tasks about midday on Saturday. I dug out my DVD copy of Neverwhere, and invited the two of them over.

They came; we watched. We also ate pumpkin pie. Park Ranger Girl fell asleep about 2/3 of the way through the video, but woke up again, and really hadn't missed all that much. After, she went home, and Chivalrous Boy and I went over to Wendy's, had hamburgers, and talked for a little bit.

I came home, did a little writing with my mom, and then fixed my heater and went to bed. Slept late, and woke up feeling ill. Had another piece of pumpkin pie, made a sandwich, drank some strawberry / banana juice I happened to have hanging about in the fridge, and retired to bed. Watched some movies on Lifetime. Was asleep by 8.

And awake by 2. Puttered about on the i-net, still feeling somewhat ill. Starting to feel sleepy again, will probably go to bed, soon.

Had a thought for a wish-fulfillment YA kind of book. Kind of Have Spacesuit, Will Travel, but in a fantasy kind of way. Will think about it. Maybe looking for a coauthor. Maybe not.

Wish I had more mango juice in the fridge. Not looking forward to going out in snow, tomorrow. Depends on how ill I'm feeling. If I leave tomorrow, I'll stay with my folks overnight, breaking up the journey to Tucson. I may wait 'til Tuesday.

Bed now, I think.

I meant to go to bed almost two hours ago. The problem is, it's snowing out. Or something resembling snow... it's not actually flakes so much as wee balls of ice, in the grain of sand size range. A lot of grains of sand. Many lots.

And wee little ice balls fall out of freezing skies. And my heater hasn't been working very well. Last year, I had the fan motor replaced, and I thought the guys had put it in backwards. So, because my room is a mess and I didn't feel like calling someone else to come in to do something I'm perfectly capable of doing myself, I took my heater apart.

It turned out that it's impossible to install the fan motor backwards. So I went out to the living room, where the heater has been working fine, and took it apart to look at it. Looked, put it back together, and came back to the bedroom. After a little more poking around, I determined that the vent where the blower forces air over the heat exchanger had become clogged. Fortunately, I have a can of compressed air, so I blew air backwards over the heat exchanger, and got about a ferret-weight of dust out of the exchanger.

I have to say that this apartment complex is the dustiest place I've ever lived, and I have no idea where it all comes from. They say that the majority of household dust is dead human skin, but there's no way I'm shedding that much.

Anyway, that cleared the vent, I put the heater back together, and it works much better, now. The room is slowly warming up, and I've got the door open so that both the heater in here and the one in the living room are working on warming things up. By morning, I anticipate that it will be livable in here.

As Red Green says, "If the girls don't find you handsome, they should at least find you handy."

We re so apt, in our engrossing egotism, to consider all those accessories which are drawn around us by prosperity, as pertaining and belonging to our own persons, that the discovery of our unimportance, when left to our own proper resources, becomes inexpressibly mortifying.

--Rob Roy Chapter III, Sir Walter Scott

I've been asleep tonight... twice. Each time I slept for about two hours. It is to be hoped that I'll soon be able to make a third assay at sleep, and find some greater duration of rest in it.

Monday passed. I went to classes, I was amiable to classmates and teachers, I pondered mysteries historical and linguistic. I went shopping, and purchased a turkey and sundry other groceries. I helped Xavier School Girl with sourcing a paper she had to write.

I woke up this morning and discovered that the rest of the world (or at least, the United States) had changed time on me. Yes, yes, I know that it's a regularly scheduled event, but I live in the state of denial... I mean, Arizona... and we don't play daylight savings time. At all. Ever. And we like it that way. But it does mean that cable channels from stations in California don't broadcast things at their assigned time.

I called Lawyer Lady and talked with her about the memo her assistant tried to talk to me about on Friday. It turns out that the memo was about the arrangements the SoN has made as to which teacher I'm going to take the class from, and that was acceptable.

I went to Islamic History, and talked about a couple of the identifications I'd not been able to pin down, with some of the girls from class. Then we went in, and took the test. I was, somewhat unusually for me, not the first one done, but I feel I did reasonably well, so that was okay.

Went downstairs, and one of the girls in my Linguistics class was complaining that she'd been having trouble registering for classes. So we talked about morphemes, and then she came back to my house with me, and I walked her through the process of getting registered for classes online. So she offered to buy me lunch, and took me to a rather expensive place... which happens to be where her boyfriend works, so it was cheap.

Took her home, and came back myself, only to discover that World of Warcraft is doing the locking up my computer thing again. I'm pretty sure it's not the same thing as last time, because I uninstalled the program that was causing the conflict. Urgh. So I'm running through the trouble shooting process, and hoping something works.

Now I'm watching Finding Nemo on Disney Channel, and thinking about bed. Act One of King Lear tomorrow. Plus? Voting. Which reminds me that I need to find my documentation so I can vote.

I went to class today. Before Islamic History, the teacher showed some clips from You Tube which featured Bollywood song / dance numbers, and the teacher and I enthused about our GeekBoi Lurv for Bollywood, and Aishwarya Rai, who danced lead in one of the clips he showed. (If you don't know Ms. Rai, rent Bride and Prejudice. Do it now). We talked in class about the Delhi Sultanates, and then ended just before the dissolution of the last powerful Muslim dynasty there.

Went to Linguistics, and listened to a lecture about honorifics and politeness. Rode the bus back home, read the rest of Othello. Went out with RedHeaded Roommate to hit Arby's. Had conversation and Roast Beast sammitches. Dropped off movies (Kingdom of Heaven and Othello) at Hastings, but didn't pick anything new up. Came home.

Worked for a while on homework, got sort of caught up for the moment, and decided I had time to play some WoW. Worked my Alliance Paladin up to level 26.

Got email from the Kingdom's Principle Herald, letting me know that, as things currently stand, the College of Sankt Vladimir can't establish an award of our own... in fact, it would require a change to Kingdom law for it to happen. So we have to be content with recommending people for awards at the Baronial level and above.

One of the girls who attended dance class with me last week expressed interest in knowing more about the SCA, so I wrote her about a page and a half email, giving links to the Society and kingdom web pages, with some information to help her understand what she might find on each.

It's life, Jim.

There are all sorts of things I could be doing. And, it's not like I've accomplished nothing today... in fact, I've done two loads of dishes, in spite of not having dirtied any of them... I just got sick of looking at a sink full of dirty dishes. And, well, the dishwasher is right there. So....

And I kind of need to do some laundry. And the garbage can is overflowing.

But even beyond those sorts of things, there are a lot of useful things I could be doing. But I'm having a hard time finding motivation to actually do any of them.

I'd like some ice cream. Preferably chocolate. And a hamburger. And a nap. But I'm likely to actually get none of those things.

I'm freaking exhausted, and in a moment, I'll go to bed. As previously noted, I only got about three hours of sleep last night, simply because I couldn't sleep last night. And, because this was Friday, I had to get up earlier than usual, not linger in bed, and head out for class. It was the discussion section for my linguistics class, and we got our tests back. I was so certain I'd bombed the test, while she was passing them back, I got light-headed and panicky. And, sure enough, I bombed it. As in, I did not pass the test. It was a bunch of memorization, and apparently, I didn't put in enough time on rote memorization. There was one whole section on which I got zero points.

Which reminds me that, before I crash into bed, I need to sit myself down and try to do the extra-credit problems on the website. The failed test will hurt my grade, but it doesn't mean that I'm failing the class.

Anyway, I went from there to my Islamic History class, where I'm doing well, and enjoying the course. The professor has gotten over his recent illness, and was back to bouncing around the classroom. It was particularly interesting today, as he was lecturing over his particular specialty within Islamic studies, the subject on which he has quite literally written the book -- African Islamic societies.

We discussed Sundiata, which is the national epic of Mali, and is okay, but not particularly stand-out, in my estimation, among hero tales. In fact, it seems like it's about as generic a Hero's Journey epic as you can get. Maybe it just doesn't have a great affect on me because it's not even remotely my culture, but there you go.

I came home, and intended to nap, but instead, my roommate asked me to give him a ride to "Butler." After our trip the other day to Cottonwood, I thought he meant the town of Butler, Arizona, and asked him how to get there. He looked at me as though I was a moron, and started describing how to get to Butler Avenue, a block north of campus. D'oh!

So I ran him out there, and he looked at a truck he decided to buy. Came home, and decided I needed to get my things together for tomorrow's garb day at the College of Sankt Vladimir. I took my sewing machine out, made sure that everything worked, and decided that, while I was doing that, I needed to re-cover my body pillow. I have some cotton flannel that I'd bought for the purpose, so I went ahead and took care of that.

I thought about working on my fabric doublet, but suddenly realized that I'd hit the exhaustion wall, and that I was losing concentration quickly. So, once again, my doublet got put on hold, and I came to bed. Where, in a moment, I'm going to sleep. And hope not to wake until ten or eleven tomorrow. I really, really, really like sleep... it's one of my favorite forms of entertainment.

I got up at the crack of noon today, and walked out to the lot where I'd parked my car. I'd had to park in a different lot than usual, because of the Homecoming game (which I am given to understand we won). I got to my car and discovered that I'd ended up with my front wheels in loose sand, where part of an embankment had given way. I couldn't get out, because my car's drive wheels are on the front. So I called the American Automobile Association (the which I belong to thanks to the kind graces of lysander_cat and his lovely wife) and they sent a tow truck.

The tow truck arrived with the tow truck driver, and his daughter, who was about seven. They decided to jack up my car and put blocks under the front wheels, so we did that, and a few minutes later, I was free of the sand. The little girl seemed quite pleased that her daddy had come to my rescue.

I took movies back to Hastings, and picked up Joan of Arc, the version with Leelee Sobieski as Joan, and Peter O'Toole as the bishop who condemns her to burn. In it, Joan spends a fair amount of time wearing a very simple gambeson, red with white stitching in a chevron pattern. Given that I've decided to go with the argent and azure per chevron, a tree blasted and eradicated counterchanged, I thought, hey, I could put silver chevron stitching on my doublet....

I've decided to make a doublet out of some fabric I've had for a couple of years, a sort of woolen velvet in a deep blue color. I decided to do this to try out my doublet pattern in a fabric less expensive than my leather. Also, I need to be sure that my memory of my proficiency with a sewing machine matches my actual, current competence, so doing something that's a little bit of a challenge is a good idea. A doublet with batting, a lining, and the addition of a shoulder flap to attach my plaid brooch to, ought to remind me of the skills needed for almost any period garb I need to sew. Adding the decorative stitching is another element of challenge, as well as serving the practical purpose of holding the batting in place.

I'm thinking of doing the decorative chevrons in silver thread. I'll have to think about this a little, and see what's available from local sources. Otherwise, I suppose white thread would probably be sufficient. Anyone have any thoughts on metallic thread?

Anyway... I should go and study for my Islamic History test, which is tomorrow. Yay. Not.

I'd finished one batch of homework, and was reluctant to start on the next. So I text messaged Park Ranger Girl and PreMed Girl, and asked if anyone was interested in a taco run. PreMed Girl was hanging with her boyfriend, and said it wasn't a good time for them, but Park Ranger Girl was into it, so we did that thing.

We went to the Taco Bell on Milton, and had, well, tacos. And conversation. Surprisingly, she's a park ranger. What's that? You already knew that? Oh, right. So we talked about how she'd decided to get into law enforcement, and her involvement with the SCA, and like that.

Lab Partner Lady showed up and chatted with us for a few minutes, and that was nice.

At some point during the evening, I noticed that Park Ranger Girl has eyes about the same color as mine. That led to the realization that I'd been looking to see what color her eyes were. And that led to the realization that I kind of have a crush on Park Ranger Girl. Where, you know, 'kind of' can be read as 'emphatically'.

I'm awake at the crack of eleven a.m. For a Sunday, that's too early.

Watching Dark Angel has me thinking about "The Crash." I grew up in a home with bookshelves which contained things like The Foxfire Book, and How to Prepare for the Coming Crash. We belonged to a religion that believed the End Times were Nigh, and advocated self-sufficiency and having a year's supply of food socked away.

I remember my mother's early experiments with a tortilla press (eventually abandoned), with making jelly and canning vegetables (a practice continued for years, and eventually perfected). The big thing, however, in our household, was quilting. I'm one of the few people of my generation to have grown up playing under the quilt frame at quilting bees. My mother, if I may be allowed to brag on her for a moment, was elected president of the Arizona Quilter's Guild.

My point? I suspect that, if The Crash were to happen (which, by the bye, I'm not particularly expecting) I'd be a survivor. And, having been told all my life to expect Bad Things to happen, I confess that I sometimes look around and think, "Well? Well? Where is it?"

The day started with Maintenance pounding on the door at 8:30. As my alarm wasn't set to go off until 8:45, and no one else was willing to get out of bed and let them in, I was a little grumpy. Fifteen minutes may not seem like much, but it was my fifteen minutes... and it wasn't my blinds they'd come to fix.

Got up, showered, dressed. Headed out to class. Cut things too tightly to stop in at the Union for Jamba Juice or a bagel, so grabbed a Snickers bar out of the machine in the Liberal Arts building, and headed upstairs for a lecture about the early conquests of the Muslims against the Persian and Byzantine empires. Animated Professor plays YouTube clips that he thinks meaningful before class, and today's were Iranian musicians playing the tar and saz. There's something about watching a virtuoso musician play, and it almost doesn't even matter what instrument they're playing... it's fascinating to watch them do it.

Downstairs, and I discovered the soda machine was only taking exact change. Muttered imprecations under my breath, and managed to find a classmate in the Linguistics cattle-call hall who had a nickle. Purchased a Dr. Pepper, and sat down to listen to Celtic Professor Lady, back from her vacation in France, talk about first language acquisition in infants.

Lawyer lady called me while I was in class, so I stopped by her office, but she was out. We've been playing phone tag since Friday, and haven't yet caught up with each other. She says she has a question for me, and I confess to a little trepidation as to what that question might be.

Came home, checked the mail box. Discovered my membership card from the SCA waiting for me. Came upstairs, plopped down to check my email, and write this. And now, for having read all the way through this, a special bonus feature!

The Elusive Cowboy R, as spotted at Crown Tourney the day after his birthday! (Picture by raventhourne).

The refrigerator still hasn't been cleaned. Mea culpa.

I've been reading Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sir Nigel, and it's interesting how many character names S. M. Stirling stole from this, and its companion volume, The White Company. It's the sort of thing that, in my late teens, I would have worshipped, but today is just... okay. Nigel's rather young, and driven by the things that drive young men, which puts him at a little remove from me.

Had lunch at the local fast-food Italian place, Fazouli's. Went across the street to the sporting goods store, and discovered that they had no crossbows. Drove over to the little gun shop in town I like, and discovered that they had no lever-action rifles. Realized I was in the neighborhood of the seamstress shop I'd seen the sign for last night, so I wandered over there.

Red Threads is a business owned and operated by two attractive young women, who said they would be happy to repair the fell of my black watch kilt, which had some seams that were starting to come undone. (I've heard from other kilties that they've had the same problem with theirs from the same manufacturer).

Then I came home, sat on the sofa to read Sir Nigel, and after about a chapter, set it aside, and took a nap. And now I'm here, writing this. Wahoo.

So, I'm back in Flagstaff. There are about a hundred and one things I should do around the house, including the refrigerator cleaning that I told satharn I planned to pursue, but instead of doing them, I'm taking baths, reading books, and playing World of Warcraft. I'll get to the household stuff... eventually.

I drove over to the mall today, mostly just to get out of the house, and a little bit also to get some lunch. While I was sitting in the food court, I saw a girl go by, dressed in complete "Anarchy in the UK" punk drag, complete with leather jacket and a safety pin through her cheek. She was Navajo. Cultural assimilation at its finest. Also at the mall, in the toy store, I saw "Mega Clap Hulk." I found myself wondering if he came with Mega Penicillin for that....

The folks at My Rich Uncle have announced that they do intend to let me have some money. The check, according to the email, will go out on Thursday, via FedEx. I'm a little surprised at how slowly these people move, and a little concerned, because I absolutely have to have my summer bills paid and be registered for classes by end of day Friday, or I don't get my financial aid. Ughness.

And that's about all the news that fits, at the moment.