The Results Are In

Good morning!

Once again I am sorry for the week delay in my next post.  Here's a little catch up with what's been going on in my life.

Wednesday I worked, nothing spectacular.  Watched Survivor Redemption Island with the family and probably thought about working on homework but never got around to it.

Thursday I had my first Managing Global Organizations class from 11-1:30.  I think I will like the professor but it sounds like this class will be a lot of work :(  Prior to going to class I was trying to read all of chapter 1, that didn't go so well.  After I got home I can't remember what I did so obviously it was nothing productive, whoops!

Friday I worked from 8-2 and planned on coming home and getting my homework done that was due that night.  If you're thinking "Yeah right she didn't get it done" you are absolutely correct.  I've mentioned in a previous blog that I'm a NASCAR fan so when my dad had practice on I was getting hooked into watching that instead of working on my homework.  My mom had won a basket at church (it was a silent auction) that had a $25 gift certificate to Homestead Inn (a bar we go to occasionally for Friday night fish).  At work she had already mentioned wanting to go there which is part of the reason why I was planning to get the Friday night homework done right when I got home.  But anyways, we went out to dinner and ended up staying out until 11.

Saturday morning I wake up at 8 and am thinking to myself gotta bust out this homework you didn't do last night.  Of course plans changed.  I ended up going to town with my parents for the morning before meeting up with Jackie and her two children Lane (7) and Lauren (3) to go see the movie Hop.  We had seen them at Homestead the night before and when Jackie mentioned she had no plans for the weekend I asked if she would want to take the kids to the movie with me, she said yes obviously.  It was a cute movie and I thought it was good.  I was a bit frustrated though, Jackie mentioned that she'd pay for my ticket and we'll figure out something for food when we get in there.  I'm thinking OK that's fine.  But when we get in the theater she's just like "I'm going to get food" so I give her $15, which is all I had on me in cash.  I didn't expect her to use it all!  She comes back and had gotten the big bucket of popcorn and the two big sodas and didn't give me any change!  Lane ate 3/4 of the pop corn and the one soda was for the kids to share, the other was mine because of the caffeine.  I would have rather paid for my $7 movie ticket than $15 for the food.  I know she had to pay a lot more for tickets because she had herself and two kids (which are $6.50, 50 cents cheaper?!) but she didn't ask if it was OK if she just used my money to pay for the food.  I guess that's what irritates me the most is that she didn't communicate what her plan really was for the food situation.

Finally when I got home from the movie I got my homework done that was due Friday.  After that all of my productivity went down the tubes.  If I recall correctly I spent the rest of my weekend with my nose stuffed in a book.  I finished Riding Lessons towards the end of the week, started and finished Flying Changes probably Thursday/Friday-Saturday, and then started The Horse Whisperer Sunday.  I'll see what I can do about writing up some reviews.  I forgot to stop at the library yesterday to pick up Water for Elephants so I will definitely be doing that after work tomorrow!

And now onto yesterday!  I worked 7:30-2:30 so I could arrive at my doctor appointment on time.  At the end of the visit my doctor talks to me about my cholesterol, which I had blood drawn for last week (mentioned in So much to say, so little time).  It's a bit high, 236 when it should be 200 or less.  But on the bright side my good cholesterol is good at 66 (I can't remember what it's supposed to be over).  And then again on the downside there is something that is a bit higher than it should be, but because I have 0-1 risk factors it's OK where it is.  I'm sorry I don't have a better explanation for you all, this is just what I remember.  Anyways, she wants to check it again in a year.  Oh!  And she brought up my weight, said it had gone up since last time.  I was like "Yeah and your scale sucks because just last week I was 187 and now I'm 195!"  We decided it was the shoes and clothes because when I weigh myself at home I only wear shorts and a t-shirt, nothing heavy.  But still she wants to see my weight go down, and the dieting and exercising would help the cholesterol go down.  Guess I'm now under a bit of pressure to really see some results in a year with my weight loss.  Wish me luck!

Now it is time to buckle down on my homework.  I am not turning the TV on today so it cannot be a distraction.  I have so much to do so if I can make today really productive I will have a weight lifted off of my shoulders.

Questions...

When you're unmotivated to do something you have to do, like homework, do you set up a reward for yourself to help motivate you?

I'm kind of thinking being able to watch TV with my family in the evening might be a good reward for me since that's what I like to use to distract myself from homework.

How do you deal with what feels like an overwhelming work load?

If I made a list of everything I need to get done this week it would be super long, and just seems like I can't get it done unless I ONLY work on homework whenever I'm not in class or at work.

Looking forward to reading your answers about these questions!


Until next time...

Blah Blah Blah~Ke$ha (Thanks iPod on Shuffle for my blog title)

Good evening bloggers...it's been a bit longer than I had hoped since my last post (so much for the 5 days/week :( )  I honestly just haven't had anything that I really wanted to write about...and I really still don't.  What do you do if you have nothing "worth" writing about; post a blog just because or take a few days off?

Thursday I did go to Best Buy and get my new laptop.  As soon as I got home I was of course taking it out of the box and getting it all set up. Everything was working just fine and dandy for me until this morning when I turned it on for the first time.  It had just started up and installed some updates when it blue screened on me.  I was shocked and seriously upset.  Alexis helped to calm me by letting me know that it could just not have recognized the start-up (which sometimes happens) and that as long as it didn't happen again soon it should be alright.  I seriously don't know what I would do without my tech-savy friends sometimes.  I'm not horrible when it comes to computers but there are just some things I need someone smarter than me.  For instance moving my music library from the iTunes on my old laptop to the iTunes on my new laptop...Putting the music files on my flash drive should work right??  But then my next question is, how to I get the music into iTunes?? Sorry if that's a totally dumb question and has a super easy answer to it.

Friday my dad and I went fishing by dams where the water is open.  Because of the snow storm we had on Tuesday there was A LOT of snow to walk through to get from the roads to the water.  I guess plowing those areas out isn't something they're concerned with.  It was a good work out though...I'm talking knee-deep snow.  Unfortunately no fish were caught :(  I did take pictures of the geese at one of the fishing spots but haven't uploaded them onto my computer yet so I can't post them to my blog.  Which is another thing I have to move from my old computer to my new one, pictures.  And I need to figure out how to install the camera program on my new laptop.

My dad and I ate lunch at Freddy's Pub & Grill; both of us having chimis (shredded beef for my dad and shredded chicken for me).  It was soooo good!  I'm sure it helped that I had forgotten to eat breakfast because I woke up late to be ready to go fishing.  Dinner was a home-made fish fry with the fish we had in the freezer from prior, more successful, fishing trips during the winter.  Usually we have home-made french fries with our fish fry but we didn't have enough potatoes to make french fries so we used frozen waffle fries.  I don't know what it is about waffle fries but I really really love them.  Strange that I could like different styles of fries more than others even though they're all made out of the same thing, potatoes.

Today has been a pretty uneventful day other than my freak out this morning about the blue screen.  I actually read the text for my history of rock and roll class last night and then today I listened to the lecture, took the quiz (13/15), posted to the discussion board, and responded to two other student's posts.  All of this was due either Monday or Wednesday so I feel great having it done already today.

Tomorrow I will be working ahead a week by reading the text, listening to the lecture, and doing the discussion board posting so that I can use the next two weeks to work on my organizational behavior class.  My next exam is coming up and I have yet to do any of the work (readings & assignments).  Because this class does not have weekly assignments, unlike history of rock and roll, it's very easy to put off doing the work until right before the exam.  I also need to look at my speech class to find out when the next unit has things due.  I am going to do my best to NOT put off doing the speech until the night before because as we all know that did not work out very well last time at all ;)

Starting this week I will only meet at school for class on Thursdays from 11-1:30 which means I will have Tuesdays off.  I am thinking I might work a full 8 hour day (8-4:30) on Mondays rather than just 7 (8-3).  Or maybe I should start going in for a couple of hours on Tuesdays?  I mean I did just spend quite a bit of money on a new laptop that I didn't REALLY need... Ugh I don't know.  On one hand I think I should work more hours to make more money and help out my department but on the other hand in my perfect world I would use the time off from school and work to work on homework/studying.  Realistically we know I don't use the extra free time to be working on school.  Maybe if I had a fuller schedule I would be more on top of my school work because I would only have limited time to work on it??  Who knows...

Sorry for the completely random and boring post about my life...Like I said I had nothing I really wanted to write about :(

Questions...

When planning to make a semi-expensive/expensive purchase do you get nervous?

Thursday leaving work to go to Best Buy I was very nervous and I think it was because I was spending quite a bit of money on something that I didn't need.  I didn't leave the store feeling much better because the employee that helped me made me feel rather dumb.  I walked in there knowing what I wanted and told him that.  He went on to ask me a bunch of questions like "Do you need anti-virus or Microsoft Office?"  "You sure you know what you want, did you do your research?" UGH!! I was thinking to myself the whole time "Yes!!! I know what I want and if I needed something else I would ask for it!!"

I guess I should clarify that it was more the way that the guy a Best Buy was asking me these questions that irritated me more than the actual questions he was asking me.  I do love a good helpful employee at a store, don't get me wrong!


Are you tech-savy or do you rely on tech-savy friends to help you out with those things?  If you aren't tech-savy do you try to learn from your tech-savy friends?

Like I mentioned before I'm not horrible when it comes to computers but there are things I definitely ask for help on.  Thank goodness for Alexis lately :)  I'm super happy that I "met" you through your sister's blog!

Check out Alexis's blog here!

Until next time peeps!

Who doesn't like a 4-day weekend??

I know I sure as heck freaking love them!  Thank you marketing professor for having to go out-of-town :)

Last night I was thinking about how I could use today as a "sit around and do nothing but relax day", except for taking care of some speech evaluations that are due, but when I woke up this morning (9/9:30 FABULOUS!) I thought to myself "heck no Amy you're going to use this day to be productive".  So, I ended up doing laundry, cleaning up the mess I had in the living room of all my school stuff (online classes mean you never have to pack your books up to take them with you lol), vacuuming the living room, Swiffering (dry and wet) in the kitchen and dinning room, and unloading/reloading and running/unloading/reloading the dishwasher.  Major brownie points with my mom for all of that work I did today (+20 jk).

Those darn speech evals got pushed to the bottom of my priority list, even though they're due today.  It is now after 11pm and I am still working on them.  Because my internet connection=waiting for videos to load I am able to type this post as the last speech video I need to watch loads.  Definitely should have done this earlier in the day when less people had posted their evals.

I hope you don't mind but I need to vent about these evals.  Not about doing them but about people not following directions AT ALL!  Each person is supposed to have 4, ONLY 4, evals for their speech.  My professor cannot get much clearer..."Please make sure that you do not choose to critique any student who has already received four critiques--if you do, another student will receive fewer than four. It will always be safest for you to choose those students who have received the fewest critiques so far in the discussion."  We're in college people, many are "older" students, it is not that hard to read and FOLLOW THE DIRECTIONS...or is it??  Now I know you might be wondering what the big deal is, or if it really is that big of a deal...and you're right, it's not.  But I am just the type of person who follows the directions, and obviously doesn't like it when others don't follow the directions.  But enough about this...

Tomorrow I am planning to work on homework but I may go snowmobiling for the last time this winter now.  My dad mentioned tonight he would have gone but my brother had already gone out with a friend and when I mentioned this to my mom she said well maybe you and your dad will have to go tomorrow then.  And when I mentioned that my dad asked what I was doing tomorrow and I told him homework my mom also said well maybe you could mention going out for a quick ride to get lunch some where.  So I guess we'll see where tomorrow leads me but I forizzle will be doing homework while I am home.  Then at 6:30pm my parents are meeting up with two other couples; one of the couples the woman works for my mom (and at the same place I work at) and the man was both mine and my brother's hunter safety instructor, and the other couple has gone to races with my parents (and the other couple).  I am just tagging along for the food because I love the fish fry at the bar they're going to.

Questions...

Is there anything different about Greek yogurt compared to "regular" yogurt??

Do you enjoy a long weekend??

I would honestly be surprised if there was someone who didn't like a long weekend!

Time to watch (& listen) to this fourth speech so I can get this evaluation done...and then it's Jersey Shore time! :)

Have a good night peeps!