Prepoceros

Ant & Roach - flavored Raid also works reasonably well on wasps, though it’s probably best to wait until the invader leaves the kitchen before releasing that poisonous blast.

It flew by this year. John and I spent two nights at a friend’s place in Austin and took a day trip to Enchanted Rock nearby. Big granite formation, fun to clamber up. We had to wait forty-five minutes to get into the park, but it was worth it.

Yesterday we were all over town running errands and visiting people. I picked up my old bike from my parents’ house and, wonder of wonders, it needs only cosmetic repairs after sitting unused in the garage for nearly a decade. I’m looking forward to riding it on short errands and around the trails by the bayou.

The weather has been lovely and spring-ish this week. Seventy degrees, crisp clean air, sunshine, yum yum. If I could wear a tank top and a swingy skirt every day of my life, I would.

But alas, school starts again tomorrow, and while I’ve been enjoying the outdoors my homework has piled up undone. Back to work.

I finally remembered to listen to my brother’s college radio show tonight, after knowing about it for months and months. He gave his family a shout-out and played a Bob Dylan song for my mom . . . except it was a reggae cover of a Dylan song, because that’s what they play on the show. Reggae and ska. Hey, whatever dude, I’m not judging.

This is the first time anybody’s ever said hi to me on the air, so that’s some sort of milestone. And dude, he has a sweet radio voice. He’s got this deep ladies’ man thing going on, which is weird to say because in my head he’s still eight years old and shorter than I am. But no. Now he’s six-foot-something with stubble and a subwoofer of a voice*. When did THAT happen?

Anyway, shout-out back atcha, buddy. You can check him out here on Thursday nights (at some time or other—look up “Rebel Music” in the schedule). If you can’t pick him out by the voice, his name is Nick.

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* How d’ya like them metaphor, eh? I first had “super-deep” here, but that was just too literal. Imagery for the win!

Is the semester half over already? It seems hard to believe, but by Tuesday I’ll have had midterms in all but two of my classes. All of my professors this time around have opted for the midterm-final exam schedule, which I guess is a vague sort of preparation for the your-final-is-your-grade plan I’ll be on in law school.

I’m keeping up with my classes for the most part. I haven’t been quite keeping up with my lab reports, but then again there is a good deal of historical precedent for this. Which, you know, doesn’t excuse me, but knowing that I will never ever do lab research again is not the best motivator for slogging through long, tedious reports for one piddly credit hour. I write the reports well, with all the pretty plots that take hours to debug, but they’re usually two days late.

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Hey, Texas actually mattered in an election, for once! I personally never made it to the ballot box—John and I tried to vote early on Friday, but the line was about an hour long, so we gave up.

My mom is an election judge for the Democrats, so she had a hectic 16-hour day yesterday. She said our precinct saw about thirty times the normal turnout on the Democratic side, so they were understaffed and busy all day. The Republican judges, who normally have a much bigger crowd (we’re in Texas, remember, out in the suburbs), sat around with not much to do watching Democrats line up out the door*.

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Some people living in my apartment complex, or maybe their friends, have a strange habit of leaving food and associated debris in the parking lot. I don’t mean empty wrappers or fast food bags that might have blown in from elsewhere; I’m talking about half-eaten dinners carefully placed between parking spaces, as if someone had eaten a meal in their parked car, decided they were finished, and set the remaining food on the ground before driving away.

It’s a chore to keep Sam away from the leftovers on our morning walks. None of it is probably inherently poisonous, but he’s probably better off not stuffing himself with people food, especially when the first half of that food was eaten by apparently-crazy people. Nine times out of ten*, when he darts off between two cars, he’s spotted half a hamburger or a milkshake or a box of mostly-eaten chinese food or a run-over dinner roll.

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The neater you keep your lawn, the easier it is for me to pick up the poop. I’m just sayin’.