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Refrigerator Tetris

My lower back is still sore and I wasn’t sure how well I’d do wandering around in a grocery store for an hour and a half, but it turned out pretty well. I felt reasonably okay afterward and we now have plenty of food to eat. But there was a bigger challenge waiting for us when we got home: it needed to fit in the fridge.

One problem is all of the Thanksgiving leftovers buried in its depths. Turkey, venison, goose, small cobs of corn, some mashed potatoes… all sorts of good food that’s sitting on the shelves, lonely and waiting to be eaten. Sad to look at, really. If I’d been the one putting it all in smaller containers a day or two ago, I might have burst into tears, but if it hadn’t been done, there wouldn’t have been enough room.

The second problem is that Mom and Dad are heading up to the family cabin on Saturday and staying there until next Monday. (That date is dependent on the weather—if the forecasters are right and a storm carrying 8-10″ of snow hits the cabin next weekend, they might be home a few days early.) Thus, their ten-day menu needed to fit alongside the food that’s staying home that I get to eat, lonely and waiting to be… wait… never mind.

So we got the groceries home and into the kitchen, at which point Mom headed out to go shopping for something else, leaving me to put everything in the fridge, shift things here and there, shuffle and turn them around, move the butter to one shelf, then another, then back to its original spot, then precariously on the edge of a third shelf. I managed to get everything inside and most of the cabin food on one side so it’ll be easy to separate. As for the leftovers, well, they got buried even further into the back, so they may be stuck waiting even longer to be eaten. If it’s any consolation, everything is packed in pretty thoroughly, so there’s no concern about being lonely anymore.

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Everything on the screen looks so tiny…

My other Cyber Monday gift to myself (not the new laptop battery) arrived via UPS today: a new 22″ widescreen monitor that I can hook up to my laptop. I’ve got a mouse and keyboard I can connect to it via USB ports, so once I get used to using this keyboard (which is wider, the keys feel different, etc.), I should be able to play around with my computer at my desk instead of sitting in bed. Not to say that I won’t use it in bed anymore, but I might be able to spend more time sitting upright and not slouching according to doctor’s orders. He’d be so proud of me right now.

Aside from the keyboard and mouse, though, there’s one thing that’ll take some getting used to: everything is really tiny. It’s probably because the resolution on this new monitor is a lot better than the laptop, but things that used to fill up most of the screen now use a very small portion of it. When checking my email, I used to have to scroll down to see the last few messages. Now there’s about three inches of white space at the bottom. The icons on my desktop were organized according to functionality: web browsers here, antivirus and maintenance programs there… it looked very organized. Said organization is now officially shot to hell. And if I decide to change things around on the new monitor, everything will be all screwed up when I go back to using the laptop on its own.

But the bigger question here is WHY AM I COMPLAINING? This thing is awesome! I’m hoping it’ll show movies and YouTube videos that fill up the entire screen, but even if it doesn’t, this thing is still pretty awesome. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to start getting used to this different keyboard. (It’s been around for a while, so I think it’s safe to complain about it after so long.)

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50,000 Words!

I wrote an entry on 750words.com earlier this morning about… whatever I was writing about. I don’t recall offhand, but I do know that I was really ticked off about something that happened earlier tonight, so I decided to go online and vent about it. I apparently vented a lot more than I expected because when I was done, my word total for the month was 50,274 words. Victory!

NaBloWriMo Goal #1 (write 50,000 words): Achieved!
NaBloWriMo Goal #2 (write every day): Results TBD, but if at least one thing ticks me off on each of the next three days, I’m golden.

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Demand relief and it apparently doesn’t matter

I’m in class right now and we’re talking about the results of the midterm. I’d like everyone to take into account the fact that most of the people here are working adults trying to earn a graduate degree. They’re smart people. It’s an important point because the professor was… displeased with the results. It was a 60 point test and the mean was 42.4. The average score was 70%. That begs the question of whether that result is the fault of the students or the instructor.

I’m leaning toward the latter for a handful of reasons. For example, Question 5 was worth six points: “List some factors that determine the size of a business firm.” I listed seven different reasons. He did not mark any of them wrong, but he still gave me five points out of six.

But the worst reason is that the midterm followed his teaching methods. It was a test on Chapters 1-8. That was stated explicitly in the syllabus: “Mid-term examination in class, Ch. 1 – 8”. Now scroll back to last week’s entry. He was teaching us information from Chapter 15 in our third class; Question 3 was asking for information from Chapter 15. I didn’t focus on my notes from class—I studied the information we were supposed to learn from the text. Thus, more points lost.

(In case you’re wondering, I asked him outright during the review where that information was in Chapters 1-8 because I didn’t remember reading it in the text. He told me I should have known what we talked about in class. “So you tested us on something that wasn’t in Chapters 1 through 8?” Yep, he did.)

I’ve heard rumors floating around about students talking to the administration about this professor. Before now, I was kind of indifferent—he’s not very good at teaching the material, but I was managing okay. Now that it may have had a fairly significant impact on my grade, that discussion pales in comparison to a renewed urge to indulge in an ass-kicking. I’m pretty sure he won’t talk about it in class and I doubt it’s anywhere in the textbook, but it won’t be the first time I’ve improvised.

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My Cyber Monday gift to myself

It’s still up in the air. There are a lot of things I don’t need (such as a laptop, video gaming system, or mail-order Russian bride), but I’ve already got one item in my cart on amazon.com just waiting to be purchased: a new battery for my current laptop.

The one I have now lasts for about… three minutes. I’m not kidding. If I’m sitting on my bed and accidentally wiggle the cord a little bit loose—it doesn’t even need to come all the way out of the computer—I’ll be typing and the whole thing will suddenly turn itself off. If I want to move from one room in the house to another, I either have to move quickly or shut it down. Or it’ll shut down on its own.

Given that a new battery should cost about 25 bucks, I’m thinking that’ll be less expensive than upgrading completely, which would give me more money to pay for something I don’t need, such as a mail-order Russian bride. That’s important because I don’t know of any websites that offer special deals for inexpensive women on Cyber Monday.

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Thankful for capitalism

You can find the comment all over the Internet these days: the irony of people being thankful for what they have followed by a day of trampling other people to get crap they don’t need. Well, what’s wrong with that? Can’t people be thankful for the ability to trample other people to get crap they don’t need? Black Friday, Shop Local Saturday, Cyber Monday… America should be thankful for capitalism!

On a separate note, I was thinking about how stores have been opening on Thursday night (Thanksgiving) the last few years instead of Friday at midnight. Black Friday is expanding. It’s swelling beyond its boundaries. It’s infecting holidays that happen earlier than it starts. It’s like… it’s like… it’s turning into a tiny version of Christmas.

STOP IT! I wanna enjoy each holiday separately! I wanna go to Jo-Ann Fabric and Craft stores in October and see scary things that don’t involve Santa! I wanna eat turkey on Thanksgiving without shopping for or distributing gifts! Seriously, is that too much to ask? *sigh* Capitalism sucks.