My A&P instructor must be the fastest grader in the world, because she had all of our midterms done and was able to show us our grades by the beginning of lab today. 93%! With the assistance of a generous 4-point extra credit problem. Woo!

Micro...well...who knows. Plenty of the questions seemed pretty straightforward and easy, but some of them required educated guesses. One of my classmates & I were discussing how we both oscillate between wanting to strangle Dr. V and thinking of him affectionately as an adorably socially inept old science nerd. There were strong elements of both today. On the one hand, he brought us popcorn and blueberries that he'd picked and Hershey's kisses to snack on during the midterm--and made sure that everyone had a paper towel--but then on the other hand he has promoted the most annoying person in the class as a T.A., despite the fact that she is just a normal student, and is giving her extra credit.

Allow me to elaborate. This girl is also in my A&P class. She was in my group for the first of our group quizzes, and wasted nearly half of our total available time on the first half of the first question, going on and on about hydrogen bonding in triglycerides when it was not even relevant to the question being asked. She regularly asks questions about tangential issues, like asking for the specific mechanisms of complex biological processes, asking not after class, when it would be reasonable, but during lecture when we are trying to cover a great deal of ground at a pretty general level. These are not graduate seminars, they are 200 level Community College classes. It's really great to be curious about such things, but hey, that's what office hours and the library are for. Brainy McSmartypants goes to a lot of effort to impress all of us with how smart she is while simultaneously strongly projecting a sort of teacher's pet, preppy, popular girl sort of vibe. This is not social behavior that I've encountered in well over a decade, so it's a little disconcerting.

So, +1 annoying that Dr. V. has actually singled this irritating person out for extra credit, an opportunity not extended to anybody else.

Prids in a van accident, according to the Merc..!! This, as they said in the Blogtown piece, is very much making me think of the Exploding Hearts. Thank God everybody is still alive, though evidently there are some fairly serious injuries. Thoughts and prayers going out to them.

Stratum corneum, (in thick skin) stratum lucidum, stratum granulosum, stratum spinosum, stratum germinativum.

Team Carpenter is once again back in action!! We've been having a totally lazy day. Except for the four-legged family member, who has gotten to obsessively chase his tennis ball around until he was too worn out to run anymore.

After the much-anticipated reunion with my better half tomorrow, one of the things on our itinerary is to pick up a wall cabinet from Home Depot that has finally come in. When we bought this place, there was a weird gap in the cabinetry over the stove, with a non-functional but very noisy range hood that vented...into the attic. It went up through the ceiling and flopped over into the insulation. That's been pulled out and the hole in the ceiling patched, leaving a completely empty space. We already have a replacement (recirculating) hood, so with any luck by tomorrow we can cross this project off the list. Next one is probably going to be putting in a new bathroom floor...might have to call in some reinforcements for that one.

There's a big to-do at work tomorrow morning in anticipation of the catalog drop, which I am obliged to attend, but luckily it gets over just before Ty's flight arrives.

He just texted that his dad caught a 45 lb king salmon! Yum.

Just tried unsuccessfully to fix iTunes on Ty's computer, it will not load. We don't have any Norton products, QuickTime is up to date, and there was nothing in the Music folder....and so my computer repair Google-fu has failed me. Needless to say I am not about going to "upgrade" to 7.7 on my notebook.

We buy Harlow stuffed animals from Goodwill--he can reduce an expensive pet store chew toy into tiny fragments in a manner of minutes, so we could easily render ourselves penniless by going to Petco. It's a cyclical process: every couple of weeks or so he gets a new one, which in the span of minutes, hours, or very rarely days gets completely eviscerated, usually dismembered, and converted into a filthy pelt which he will then play with until he loses interest. We give him a new bunny or gorilla or moose or whatever and surreptitiously dispose of the remains of the old one.

Zebra is somehow different. He's had it for about a month now, and while there are a few small tears and the batting has been pulled from one leg, he's far gentler with and more attached to this toy than he has been with any of his others, bringing it to bed with him at night, carrying it around when he was upset by the 4th of July fireworks, presenting it to us when we get home from having been out. I have no idea what it is about Zebra that makes him so special--one would think that either the floppy limbs or the yarn in his mane have been ripped off long ago, but no. There's something weirdly touching about his affection for his favorite toy. He often curls up on his bed with Zebra tucked under his head like a pillow.

As soon as Ty gets back (with the camera), I'll finally start posting pictures of some of this stuff. Anyway.

As of last night:

The chard is huge! Well, not really objectively huge, but some of the larger ones are getting tantalizaingly close to eating size. Crop 2.0, sowed last week, is beginning to peek through the soil. It's a little weird that the beets, a close relative, are so much slower growing--but I guess they have a large sugary root to work on, though one would think they'd want more leafage at a faster pace in order to make more sugar to store, at least based on how crazily fast the potatoes grew. So yeah, beets are still little.

The corn is growing at totally uneven heights. Some plants are at about 2', some are at 4-6".

As an experiment, I'm leaving the bolted lettuce in to see if we can get seeds from it. The baby french lettuces are stunningly beautiful, with glossy, deep-red leaves.

The tomatoes are going crazy, all of them at this point are either in full flower or are just about to be. Lots of little green cherry tomatoes.

Both the zucchini and summer squash have a gazillion flowers...no delicious baby veggies yet, though. Going to plant more of these next time around, I love them and zucchini can be secretly added to everything. The winter squashes seem to be recovering from their initial shock, especially the pumpkin.

We have some infant peppers! Baby jalapenos are about the cutest things ever.

No cosmo flowers yet, but they have very pretty foliage.

First A&P lab practicum: 97%!!!!!!! I am totally shocked by that, to be honest. No resting on laurels for me, midterms for both classes are on Tuesday, so there's lots of review, and the next unit is on bones which is going to be a toughie. It's going to be harder to identify those than it is histology slides, and a there's lot more to memorize.

And my dorky malaria poster went over pretty well. People actually liked my construction paper mosquito.

But best of all, only one more day and then my sweetie comes home.

Doofy malaria poster is taking shape. Going to have to finish up the last of the writey bits during the interstitial between classes, though, and hope that my glittery construction paper and foam letters will sufficiently wow the audience enough to overlook the slapdash nature of the rest of it.

After eating a small handful of chocolate chips, I feel better. Still a little cheesed off at Ty, though.

Nothing makes me feel better than not having a single phone call from a friend in weeks, not being able to go out or do a damn thing or even the time to have a substantive conversation if anybody did call, and having Ty ignore all of my text messages today. On top of the effing world, tonight. Going to fix myself a cocktail and go to bed early.

Eating coffee grounds?? Along with the filter? Really?? He does not seem to be showing any adverse reaction, and it was only a couple tablespoons of mostly decaf, but did he have to drag it over to his bed and get it all over the place?

I made the mistake of leaving the bathroom door open, and he also brought over to his now coffee ground-encrusted bed (but did not chew on or otherwise damage, thankfully) a bottle of St. John's Wort and Ty's glasses case. Not getting to go out to the dog park and run himself into exhaustion is making him a little naughty.

Our first A&P lab practicum was today. Think it went okay, which of course could also mean FAILURE, but I'm feeling cautiously optimistic. Midterms are both next week...my micro instructor relented and moved it back, which is good, since he's assigned us a boatload of homework and sundry other projects due this Thursday that I don't have time for and consequently am skipping out on lecture (the first and hopefully only one I've missed) to get done. I could not express how emphatically I do not want to do any of this crap and would rather go to the beach or something.

Finally got into the garden yesterday--a fellow gardener gave me the combination. Missing a watering did not seem to do too much damage--most everything is just fine, the tomatoes, despite their late start, are really beginning to take off, and even the winter squashes despite some older yellowy leaves have some good, healthy looking new growth. The scare tape seems to be working well at keeping the birds away, as our raspberries have remained unmolested (except by us) since we put it up. The only bad news is that many of our lettuce starts have freaked out in the heat and bolted. Yanked those, reseeded, and cut some to eat at home which Harlow & I shared last night. Put in some more beets & chard--we are big fans of Beta vulgaris, the greens are so good, with none of the texture issues or bitterness of spinach and kale. Very much looking forward to eating them this fall. Starting to think of what we could put in as winter crops--fava beans and some English peas would be good options, once the corn & tomatoes are done.

Harlow does seem to have taken it upon himself to be my alarm clock--he barked at me at 6 this morning (my usual waking time), only to find himself exiled from the bedroom. Poor guy, only trying to be helpful. :) His coat is getting long again, just in time for all of the really hot weather. He looks like a large, fluffy stuffed bear.

One more cup of coffee, and then it's time to really buckle down--lots of stuff to get done today and I'm getting a very slow start. Integumentary system, here I come.

Thinking about registering for a beginning sewing class--it is $65, meets in the evenings once a week for 4 weeks, and is at the Fabric Depot a block or two away. Time to get some use out of my sewing machine.

Also today I'm going to assemble a sourdough starter. Partially inspired by microbiology.

My mandolin is now more-or-less in tune! Am able to plink out tunes by ear, but I need to learn some chords.

We all got our "unknown" bacteria this past Tuesday. So far, my lab partner & I have determined that our mystery critter is a HUGE streptobacillus--easily visible under 400x magnification--and that it lacks a capsule, causes litmus milk to remain violet, and is gram-negative.

I am obliged today to attend a "multicultural event" (?) at the Hazelwood Hydropark, in the hopes that someone there knows how we are supposed to get in to water our gardens now that there's a lock on the gate. I would have climbed the fence last night, but having walked there with the dog, was unable to do so. Poor plant babies. Hope they are okay. Some of the squash transplants are not looking so well, I think their mounds are too high and they are not getting enough water. Going to mulch around them to see if that helps them out some. The zucchini & summer squash are growing like gangbusters, hopefully their winter cousins will catch on. Next year we will do things differently, our layout is alright but could be improved upon and we will for sure do a better job at tilling and amending the soil. Also paying attention to things like "planting in a straight line." It seriously looks like I was drinking while getting the corn in, the rows start out straight but then get a little bendy somewhere along the way.

As of Thursday, we were getting lots of flowers on the tomatoes and two of the peppers, our lettuce starts are getting to be around eating size and the some of the wee French lettuce seedlings are now about 4"--they are a beautiful deep red & green. Beets are slow but steady, and the chard was doing great, growing fast.

Hope everything is still alive.

Ty gets back in a week and a day...doing alright at not moping TOO much, so far. Being this busy does help out in that regard. He got up at 4 am today to help his Reuben award-winning big brother out at the Anchorage Saturday Market. Last time we were both there, maybe 3-4 years ago, there was a trapper selling bits of fur from various critters who had a basket on his table with an attached sign that said "Faces: $3."

Harlow evidently thinks that he is an alarm clock. It's hard to sleep in with him whuffling in your face every five minutes.

My Microbiology instructor is difficult. And by that I don't just mean 'challenging.' He was in fine form tonight. :P He means well, and tries in his way to be helpful to us, but he can be very fussy, socially inept, and easily flustered. Lecture went on for two and a half hours before we got a FOUR minute break (breaks are always some weird interval like that. Four, or seven, but never five or ten) before the last ten minutes of class. Our homework, due Thursday, is over crap that we are not going over in either lecture or lab. He gave us our lab quiz during lecture--one of the questions was identifying an illustration of a tapeworm...but then gave us a choice between beef and pork tapeworms, despite the fact that the picture in question was a drawing in the book that did not specify which one it was, we only looked at slides from the beef worm in lab, and the identification settled on the type of hooks in the scolex (the sucker part), although we never discussed the differences between the two in either lab or lecture. Now, odds are good he will drop the question, but still, WTF!! Like I said, he does not seem act like a jerk on purpose, but it still makes for a very long five hour stretch twice a week.

I need to refocus...expending too much time on micro and not quite enough on A&P, which is the one where my grade REALLY counts.

Midterms are next week. Oy.

Ty leaves for Alaska tomorrow, he will be there for 10 days...going to be both stressful and lonely.