Yay, it's the end of the work week. My plans for the weekend first consist of preparing for a big scary government test that takes place next Thursday. I know this doesn't sound like me, all not procrastinating, but you see, once Monday starts I have no time to study whatsoever between school/work/church. Suddenly Thursday rolls around and I am caught off-guard. Therefore, I plan on being ready. Hopefully.

Secondly, we're going hunting for that deeluxe apartment in the sky. Unfortunately, it looks as though we probably won't move out of our flood/any other sort of damage-proned apartment until late June, but we're going to be darned ready. We really want to get a two-bedroom this time, seeing as how our book collection (er, his collection) is growing like mold and I'd like to have a living room rather than a library. It'd also be nice to have somewhere for friends to stay, should they venture out to Calyfornya. Hint, I say, hint. Anyway, that's about it. Let us know if you hear of any amazing, spacious, affordable, yet safe appartments in the Orange County area. Then I'll thank you and consider you a liar.

Heheh. It never rains here, so I'm not used to it anymore. So last night when I was about to fall asleep, I heard this weird sound. I was kind of getting annoyed, thinking maybe we had our first mouse or something, (or maybe Lord Byron busted out again) when Brandon came in and announced that it was raining for the first time in a while. Right, that's what it sounds like.

I found out this weekend that Roxie, the dog that my family had owned since I was eight, died of old age on Thursday. She lived to be way older than most dogs her size (she was a rottweiler) and lived a very good life, thanks to my mom. Most of my friends remember her, if not because of her size and powerful flatulance, but for her love of socks and her tendency to take the socks off of mine and my sister's friend's feet, oblivious to the friend's surprise and resistance. Roxie ate many socks, slept on the couch many times, and stunk my family out of the rooms of our house many times. Now to teach the cat to live up to such standards next time I visit.

I thought it was pretty cool when Pepperidge Farm starting making Goldfish crackers different colors, but when they added the color green to the mix, it troubled me. I figured out why. It reminds me of cat food.

I had to stay up all night last night, doctor's orders. Why? Because I had sleep-deprived EEG testing scheduled for 11:00 am today. For some reason staying up all night last night was amazingly hard for me, probably due to the fact that Tuesday is the busiest day of the week for me. I worked 8 hours, exercised an hour, then went to class from 7 to 10 pm. Yes I'm sure you oldsters have it tougher but I'm a youngin' and I'm not used to this treatment. Anyway I started off the night okay with the aid of TV, but once Brandon decided to go to sleep things got difficult. Sleep sounded nice. It got cold, so I turned on the heater. Things got too warm and cozy and I woke up with a numb foot and the dvd player on screensaver mode. That equaled out to about three hours of sleep, I think.

So about the test, which began after some mass confusion because the test was to be given at a different location than before and the technician was 30 min late. I couldn't stinkin' fall asleep! The clock next to me ticked super loud. The technician's typing left me curious as to what he could possibly be saying. In the hall, nurses and patients chatted and laughed loudly, slamming doors and making plenty of noise. Then, any time some one in the room next to us used the plumbing, it sounded like the pipes were about to burst into our room. So frustrating, because without me falling alseep the test was pointless. Before I left the technician said, "you know, we may need to have you stay awake two nights and have some sort of sedative next time." Yeah right, two nights. Just find a quiet room.

K, there's this guy who lives at our apartment complex that we call the "antrax man." He has long, wavy brown hair, he's short, and it seems that perhaps his arms are longer than they should be. I originally thought Brandon had been calling him the "anthrax man" because he was creepy and could probably use anthrax to in some harmful way, but actually it was because he has the anthrax band sticker on the back of his little S-10 truck. It turns out that he's actually a pretty nice guy, always waving or saying "hi" whenever he walks by.

Tonight he scared me senseless while I was filling up one of the washing machines in the apartment laundry room. Actually, I was kinda waiting for the water to fill up, which is totally loud, while the dryers behind me whirred causing even more noise, when the door directly behind me flew open (in order to get into the laundry room-if you're holding anything-you have to give the door a good kick and lung in, because the spring will pull the door right back on you) and in jumps the anthrax man. I can't imagine the look that must have been on my face because he immediately burst into laughter and said, "I scare you, eh? Hahah!" Yeah, he scared me good.

We are now gathered here to mourn the death of Q, a dear departed pet. He was a good betta, a fiesty betta. He would have fought any goldfish and won, you could have bet your lunch money on that. It wasn't that he received poor treatment while we were down south, no, he'd been laggy way before then. We called him dramatic, said he wanted attention when he would float upside down for intervals and only swim with his old spunk when we fed him flakes of fish food. He had a nice long life for a fishy. I bought him and another betta (Synoptic Problem) as a gift for Brandon while I visited him during Spring Break of 2002. Can Q be replaced? Never. Will we try to replace him? I dunno, cleaning out that bowl was a lot of trouble. Eh, we'll see. Until then, so long, dear friend Q. You were a good fishy.

Brandon and I are now taking the same basic PE class. This class requires an orientation, which we went to last night. The video was great. On the video, the type of clothing that should be worn while working out was described. Only athletic shoes, they said, and then showed a picture of someone in snakeskin cowboy boots with a red circle and line going across them like a no-smoking sign. Then it showed a picture of some guy with a mullet wearing a belt and a button up shirt, and said not to wear anything that could get caught in the machinery. Especially a mullet. Then it said that reading and listening to walkmans on the stationary bikes and treadmills was not allowed due to past injuries. Unfortunately it didn't give an example, because no one is really clumsy enough to get hurt that way. The video was really just cool because it was so 80's. Lovely.

Happy birthday, Mom! See, I usually remember my Mom's birthday because she shares her birthday with the Martin Luther King, Jr. Day Holiday. Not so this year, since MLK day is Monday. Sorry, Mom. But happy birthday anyway. We love you and hope you enjoy it.

So I signed up for an aerobics class, certainly not because I wanted to. No, it was because I need a PE credit and it seemed to be the only class with a good time slot. I hoped for the best.

Brandon helped me find the room, kissed me and left. I walked in trying to think positively. However, what I got was exactly what I feared. The room's walls were entirely mirrors, leaving a person with no false perceptions of themself. Each girl there looked small and cute, and was ready to work out. I didn't expect to. Silly me, it was the first day of class. I expected a talk about stretching and wearing the right kind of clothes or something and leaving after fifteen minutes. I looked like a mom compared to these kids, since I just came from work. I looked like a mom, and I am twenty-one. After a glance at their cute work-out clothes and guessing that each one had probably been a cheerleader, not to mention hearing horrid dance music blaring from the front, I marched my mom-looking self to the add/drop stations to drop the class. It was all good, tho. I was able to find a way more suitable PE class I could take at leisure.

Our first classes start tonight. It feels right, especially since we spent our lunch break doing errands. It has begun...

Saturday night we went with Russ and a couple of his friends to see Big Fish. It was really good. I was proud of myself because I figured out the ending early, so I made sure to elbow Brandon and whisper it to him just so I could get credit for calling it. It's not often that I actually do that.

Classes start next week. My schedule will be pretty simple, since I'm taking a PE course and then a government class half the semester and a speech class the other half. Brandon's the one that will have a weird schedule, taking a class at Cal State Long Beach and a few at IVC. It should be interesting.

We spent our first night back in the apartment last night, after a night of cleaning and moving all of our furniture back where it once sat, now above brand-spankin' new carpet. The smell of mildew has been replaced by the smell of what I described as sushi most of the night last night, until finally Brandon complained that I don't even eat sushi. For the record, I've tried it once. It's aight, but if I'm going to have to develop a taste for something, it shouldn't be so expensive. Anyway, I corrected myself after his complaint and began saying that the place (mostly the kitchen) smelled like a California roll. With ginger and wasabi, for the record. Yummy when it's the real thing, downright nauseating when it's the smell of your water-damaged home.

Well, we've spent pretty much all of our spare time once we arrived home cleaning the mildew and preparing the apartment to have new carpet put in. Brandon will be here when they come to put it in tomorrow around noon, while I'll be at work. It's definitely best this way. Brandon's been packing his books away into boxes and plastic containers. I think the thing that really got most of the harm was the couch. It caught most of the water. However the whole apartment was shut off and allowed to mildew while we were gone, from New Years Eve until our return on Sunday, so some books were warped and a few things turned up moldy (a shoe, for instance). Hopefully we'll be able to sleep in our own apartment tomorrow night. I'm sure Lord Byron and Q would love to come home as well.

Our time in Alabama is almost up. On Sunday we'll have to leave by 4 am to catch our flight out of Atlanta. In a way it feels like we've been here for a while, but then it feels like I just got here two days ago. Tomorrow will be a day to pack and say goodbye, take pictures (like we should have been doing all week) and basically try not to be sad. Or think about how our apartment was flooded due a pipe breaking upstairs and we have that business to look forward to. I'm just happy we got to see most of my friends and family and the trip has been so nice... I'll think about everything else later.