It’s continuing to snow for the third day in a row, and it’s supposed to snow for another two days after this. It’s chilly out, but I’d rather put on a hoodie than have it be hot out already so that’s fine with me.

I didn’t go drink any green beer last night, and in fact I haven’t actually gone drinking at all since break started. But hey, at least I get to wake up between 6 and 7 to work on the thesis. Which is almost as fun, right? It’s shifted a bit from the kind of thing it was when I last mentioned the topic, but maybe I’ll post the outline later this week. We’ll see.

After a winter with almost no snow at all, we had tons of it all day today. Very little of it stuck, but seeing it out my window while I worked this morning made me glad I didn’t have to go out in it. I know it’s not very springlike and most people are pissed off that it’s snowing in mid-March, but I wasn’t really ready for spring yet anyway - as soon as the weather gets warm I’m filled with pre-summer dread and can never enjoy it even while it’s nice out. Give me October over March or April any day.

Expect posting to be fairly light this week. While it’s technically spring break, I’m actually doing more work than usual as the thesis deadline is just about a month away, so I’m spending most of my time writing and revising.

Since my mom was in town this weekend (with my dad’s truck), Chris and I made the trek out to IKEA today, where I spent less than I was expecting to, for once. The crowning glory was without doubt the new dresser Chris bought for me (and is putting together for me right now), but other highlights include this 18-piece dinnerware set which I picked up not for the site price of $30, but for only $24. And despite the fact that Chris thinks we already had plenty of dishes, I got six wine glasses for $4 and four little tumblers for $2. I also replaced all my abandoned wire clothes hangers with wooden ones - $3.49 for a set of 8.

The only real problem I have with IKEA is that by the time I make it downstairs and am going through the marketplace, I just feel sort of stunned from the enormity of the place and the sheer quantity of stuff demanding my attention. I never make it past the dishes without wanting to drop everything and run, and after that you still have to deal with finding any of the real furniture you want. We tried to alleviate the IKEA syndrome with by stopping for Swedish meatballs and almond torte, but there’s only so much lingonberry sauce can really prevent.

Of course that doesn’t mean I’m not planning to hop the shuttle bus from the Port Authority some weekend soon so I can go back and look at rugs.

As it turns out, spending a couple of days doing nothing but sleeping and playing Eternal Darkness does wonders to speed one’s recovery from a couple weeks of midterms and paper writing. And will it be good preparation for another week of midterms and paper writing? Only time will tell.

It’s officially spring break now, but I’ll be spending most of it working on my thesis - not so much with the Bahamian drunken debauchery everyone else seems to have embarked on. And since I can’t actually think of anywhere worse to be during spring break than the Bahamas with every other college student ever, I’m actually fine with that. There won’t be any thesising tomorrow, anyway. I get at least a day or two to do nothing but sleep.

I’m taking a class on data structures and algorithm analysis in Java, and last week I was worrying myself sick over a midterm I had on Wednesday, because the sample questions available on the web were trickier than I was expecting. It didn’t help that the day before the exam, I ran into someone who I knew was a good programmer and who had taken the class last year. I mentioned the midterm and she mentioned very casually that she’d switched out of the CS major because of this very same class. So of course I studied and worried and enjoyed the resulting tension headache, but as it turns out I managed a 100 on the exam. (What’s a weblog for, if not ego-stroking?) When I got home, I realized that the questions I had been having so much trouble before with were sample questions from the second midterm - which isn’t for over a month yet.

Well, Leisure Town may be gone, but this mirror lives on, for the time being. I didn’t realize how much I’d missed the pig until he came back into my life.

The second best thing I saw today was the cat playing with a glittery blue superball. He’s got a Thing for superballs, I guess; as soon as one of us takes it out of the drawer where we hide it, he starts yowling and hopping around begging for it. When it bounces down the hallway, he’ll actually bounce up and down in time with it - which doesn’t do much towards helping him actually catch it. When he finally does catch it, he carries it around in his mouth until one of us can get it back from him.

It’s probably appropriate that not one but three of the Amazon purchases made via my one of referral links since this post were copies of Living High and Letting Die. I’ve been leaning towards Oxfam as the recipient of my eventual donation, and Oxfam is also one of the two organizations that, according to the back cover, receives all of Unger’s royalties from the book.

This is the second of two weeks of midterms, and I’m also revising my thesis outline: expect posting to be fairly light through Thursday. These are the sorts of days when I get up at 6 to study, despite the fact that my first class isn’t until 11. Of course, that’s mostly because I really can’t be productive late at night. But still.