I'll Tell You What I'm Not Thankful For

...the GRE. Specifically, that I have to take it in T-6 days. The Quantitative Reasoning sectioning is gonna kick my booty. Just reviewing the properties of numbers -- you know, with those fancy ones like exponents and roots thrown in for fun -- is giving me headaches. And obviously my times tables have suffered a little since I memorized them in second grade and was quizzed on them in fourth. And it's been ten years since my last geometry class. Well, okay, only five and a half technically, if you count Euclid freshman year at SJC. Which was awesome, but it's not algebraic geometry. Sadly, the GRE isn't going to ask me to construct an equilateral triangle using only circles and a line. (I probably couldn't do that, either, but I bet I could make a decent go of it. A better one than remembering the rules of exponents or roots.)

2 + 2 = ...4? Really?

If the GRE tested on Korean pop culture, I would totally rock that section.

Mourning My Baby

Remember my last post about how much I hate uncertainty? And the one a few more before that when I shared my "compelled to be humble" moment? Well, here's another wrench thrown into the rapidly deteriorating machine that is my life.

Just a few hours after my uncertainty post, as I was surfing the net and watching an old Japanese drama (*gasp* Yes, I do watch other kinds of dramas), I saw the light on my charger change from orange to green, indicating that my computer was fully charged. Since I'm not a fan of leaving my computer plugged in when it's charged (it's bad for the battery and for the environment and your electric bill), I immediately unplugged it -- only to have it suddenly die without warning. I admit to being more than a little confused, since my little battery icon had clearly stated it was fully charged. So I plugged it back in and attempted to reboot it. After an unusually long time, it finally booted, but up popped a little message that said the computer had reset to a date before Jan 2008. So I figured I'd reboot it again and it would hopefully straighten itself out. It never rebooted after that, instead getting stuck on the grey Apple screen that shows up while the computer's booting. Normally it's there for a few seconds, then transforms into the login screen, but it was perpetually stuck in grey-Apple-screen-land.

So I took it into our local Apple dealer to get it looked out. The woman helping me ran a few tests and determined that the battery had exceeded its lifetime of 1000 charges (by 51) and had just died, nothing too strange about that, and would just need a new ($120) battery to work again. Still, that didn't explain why my computer wouldn't boot, because it should work just fine as long as it's plugged into the wall. To make a long story short, I left it with them to examine, and got a call from them last evening. I went in this morning to the very bad news that the hard drive was shot and I'd need a new one ($183, at the very least). The sort-of-not-bad news was that the techs said they'd most likely be able to recover some/most/all (?) of what was on my old hard drive, but of course there's no guarantee that they'll get everything or that they'll get the most important things if they can't get everything. I've been meaning for a long time to get an external hard drive to back everything up on, and it was literally at the top of my list of things to purchase when I finally get a job, but I've been mostly living hand-to-mouth for the last...well, always. If it just could have held out another three or four months! ~tears hair out~ Thankfully, the very most important things, my mission pictures, are backed up on a flash drive, so at least I have those even if I lose all my music (~sob~) and all my documents from high school and college. And I'm pretty sure I have backups of my mission emails somewhere.

Really, though, I can't have imagined a worse time for this to happen. Maybe this will become a good thing when I look back on it a twenty or five years from now, but right now I'm very upset. The only real things I own at this point in my life are my books and my computer, and most of my books are at my parents' house. I suppose I used my computer A LOT in the last two years I've had it, but still. If it could have just held on another year or so, that would have been ever so much more convenient. But I suppose life and challenges don't happen when it's "convenient".

눈이 또 왔어

It's snowing again. Apparently it's supposed to be a major storm; they've even canceled all the public transit after four today and all day tomorrow. From other reports people have been cleaning out the grocery stores and probably racing to get gas and other such things. Seriously, what better argument do you need to have a food storage? Of course, here I am, a college student living in the dorms -- my food storage consists of half a jar of peanut butter, some seaweed, a package of saltine crackers, and some craisons. Oh, and I have some ramyeon. And tea. And a summer sausage, from Christmas...so I probably won't starve, but I can't say I'll be very nourished, either.

This week has not been a good one. I would think that going to the temple twice in the last two weeks would improve the quality of my life, but strangely I think I've been stupider than usual this week. Not even the thick curtain of falling snow coating all the trees and turning campus into a life-size snowglobe can improve my mood right now. Not even not having to go into work today can improve my mood -- mostly because I actually bothered to put on make-up, and now I'm miffed that I have nowhere to wear it.




Actually, I think I'm just miffed at everything. Everything I can think of seems annoying right now, even watching kdramas. *gasp*

I miss my family. I wish I was home. *sigh*