The reason I bring up bees is for three reasons:
#1 There's more daylight outside, some of my plants are starting to grow back, and it just might be getting slightly warmer which means gardening can commence! And with gardens commencing, bees will be back in business. I love honey bees.
#2 I've been very busy.
#3 I'm craving summer.
The New Year has brought a lot of wonderful things already, minus the first few days of food-poisoning (is this a new-found unconscious habit that I'm fueling? see last new year's blog entry).
The last few months have passed at lightning speed.
- I went to my first conference/workshop in Victoria, Canada in November. I gave one of the lousiest presentations of my life. Quite similar to my first Glacier Bay one.
- I completed final exams in retro-style by having the flu during finals week again. I got A's again! I'm beginning to think that there might be some benefits with the flu...
- I climbed like a mad-woman. I took my first lead-climbing and scared the crap out of myself by taking a large fall, on purpose. No injuries.
- I spent Christmas in a blizzard in Kansas with horses, cats, fish, a dog, and family.
- I went to Oklahoma. Kansas. Colorado. New Mexico. Texas. Minnesota. Washington.
- I got my senior thesis approved! Now to write it...
Writing-required school papers can be fun, but it also takes a lot out of being able to write freely in a blog. I mean, here, right in this spot, I can write without a single reference and create a run-on sentence about my senile father's driving habits that nearly made me puke on the way back from Colorado through the sand dunes where we climbed to the top where one side was completely frozen and the other was perfectly wind-blown and it was neat.
Graduate school application season is over for U.S. schools, excluding Alaska. Next is Norway's, Australia's and Alaska's applications.
These applications are the potential gateways to new endeavors/significant changes in life. The best way I've found to cope with filling out these powerfully tedious documents is with a glass of wine, ~941,421,214 proofreads, and a hug. There's nothing quite like grad school limbo to keep you on edge...
My next scheme is the potential European tour I'm concocting. Now all I need to do is make it happen, although I'm not sure if convincing chairs of departments to let you take final exams early is always an easy thing to do. BUT, the symposiums ARE a legitimate case. Let's hope they think so too. I'll find out this week, I hope.
What the food-poisoned sand-dune hike felt like:
