the title

I'm feeling depressed. And I really would rather not get into it much, who needs a lot of whining? Yeah.

So I will say I got a 91% on my history paper. Yay, good.

I sure wish I had some extra money. Though I would be torn about spending it on our credit card debt, or actually doing something. And the thing I would really like to do right now is go to Glenwood Springs. I would love to be able to do that on my break between semesters.

Ryan and I took a trip up there when I was a bus driver. I drove a group of high schoolers up there for some business thing... shoot, the name escapes me. Anywho... Not 30 minutes after we arrived there Ryan had a grand mal seizure. While we were out eating. A kind man asked me if I needed any help, but I had it pretty well covered. Too bad this same man got to see Ryan throw up all his food he had just eaten.

Then we had to hobble back to the hotel room. Where Ryan puked some more. *sigh* And I wasn't feeling well myself, which is typical back in those days. I was nearly always sick but especially when I was supposed to be on a fun trip.

Ryan slept all day and I rode the shuttle bus nearly in tears because what was supposed to be a fun trip was turning out utterly miserable.

I ended up driving myself to the ER in the BUS later that night because I was having difficulties breathing and at my parents urging. "You don't want to be too sick to drive them home." This is very true but then I got to spend 4 hours in the ER where there were only 3 other people waiting. It was ridiculous. EXTREMELY ridiculous. Then I had to pay the $400 bill out of pocket.

(BTW, my last chest X-ray showed that I had some scarring on my lungs. Gee, I wonder why when it seems like every time I turned around I was sick, especially with breathing issues.)

Just miserable all around. I hate how things have to work against me at times. This was supposed to be a fun, free, great trip and look at all the stuff that went wrong!

But anywho. I would just really like to sit in some hot springs. I love hot springs. I wish I lived a little closer to some, there are some in Idaho Springs I think... but I've heard you don't want to go there.

Ryan and I honeymooned in Pagosa Springs. :-)

Same old, same old

Really, just school work, school work and more school work. Feeling stressed. What else could be new? Ugh! And I have 2 more years of this. Oh well.

So I will share this joyful piece. My French teacher played this for us in class. Without subtitles and without the ending at first.

J'Attendrai Le Suivant.

Ferrety Fun

Ok, I'll post a few pictures of one of my ferrets. I just happen to have these handy.
Ferrets. They can get into a "dead sleep" that will scare the hell out of you. One of my boys did that to me today.

I think, since I'm about to post a few of his pictures, I'll finally try to tell the story about Mordecai.

My Mordecai is a privately bred ferret. I adopted him and his brother because it would be nice to have a pair who don't come from Marshall Farms. I have lost more ferrets to adrenal disease and other problems... it's just outright sad.

But all wasn't exactly smooth sailing. First I lost Mordecai's brother, Zeek. Turns out he was born with a heart defect. :-( Rest in peace, darling Zeeky boy. We love you and we miss you!
Then I had to get Mordecai neutered. I took him to a vet that my ferret shelter friend recommended.

First they kinda did the surgery wrong. They neutered him like a dog when they should've done it like a cat. So this caused swelling and scar tissue inside my boy. We had to deal with massive bleeding and an infection too. The poor sweetheart.

So we get him on a road to recovery from that eventually, but then he starts having another problem. Turns out he had a hair ball in his tummy. That had to be surgically removed, only 3 weeks after his first surgery. (Ferrets cannot throw up their hair balls like cats can.)

Then more complications arise from his neutering. Now the scar tissue has cut off his urethra. The doc had to cut out a part of it, insert a catheter and we just had to wait for the urethra to regenerate over the catheter. Meanwhile have you ever met a ferret? Just how do you keep them from chewing on things??

The poor boy had to have a party cup attached to a harness to work like an Elizabethan collar. Ooooh, he hated that of course. I did too. But it was necessary. I had to make some adjustments to it and we had to hand feed him pieces of food.

It was a round-the-clock operation. I was up all night with him, worrying about him and attending to him. Because of the permanent catheter, I would have to clean him frequently to try and prevent urine scald.

Even though all this was the vet's "fault" to begin with, I will admit they did right by us. They didn't charge for the third surgery because it was a complication from the first surgery. (remember: 1st neutering, 2nd stomach hair ball removal, 3rd urethra surgery.)

And they were willing to babysit him all day long for 2.5 weeks while we waited for his urethra to heal. I would drop him off before school and pick him up before they closed. (one time I had to take a math test on NO sleep because I was up with him the entire night before.)
Everybody fell in love with him at this point. When he's not fussy from being uncomfortable (understandable!), he's a lovey dovey boy who demands and soaks up attention. One day he was being really pesty about being in a cage in the back at the vet's, so a receptionist said she just held him in her arms all day long while she answered phones. Attention sponge!

So that is the story of Mordecai, in a nutshell. I tried to sum it up fairly simply. It was quite the ordeal. And it was just worse that we had lost Zeek only 3 months earlier.
But my Mordecai is doing very well now which I am extremely happy and thankful everyday for. He's such a momma's boy. :-)

See? Momma's Boy! :-)


Silly boy, sleeping with his head out of the hammock, tongue out of the mouth.


This is actually the paw of another ferret of ours, Luke. But how cute!!


ETA: I forgot to add in the story about the bathtub.
Mordecai had to live in a small cage up in our bedroom so I could tend to him all night long, plus we had to limit his movement. So here is the poor boy in his cage in our room:
(He was really lanky at this point due to all that he's been through.)


And then The Bathtub. He would be so antsy about being cooped up that I put some towels in the bathtub with some toys and let him "play". It was better than nothing.

Shaaaa, you know what?

I have Spring Fever, big time. I just have to admit it. With a bad case of school-itis. Bad combo.

I refuse to go to bed until I do my annotated bibliography. But like a kid who is ordered to stay at the table until she finishes her brussel sprouts (one veggie I hate, along with okra), and consequently the child would rather sit at the table all night to avoid the disgusting, vile food... I think I'll probably just stay up for the next 100 years just to avoid the homework.

OK. Focus Funnel. Get to it.

ETA: Holy Noodle. 2.3 hours later... and I'm finally basically done with that damn annotated bibliography. No wonder I didn't want to do it, it was horrible!! How many times can you say "This source was information for our project." (basically.) I think I did an okay job, but we'll see. Whatever. At least I did it and there's something I can actually turn in now and call it an annotated bibliography. *sigh*

Lookee over there... to the right of the screen

After being blase (you know, with the accent grave or whichever accent it is) I finally succumbed to Twitter. I decided it just might be kinda nice to state short sentences here and there, because there are times I want to but it seems silly to make a whole post for it.

I'm stuck here at school of course. I should be doing an annotated bibliography, but I'm choosing to ignore that right now. I have more pressing matters at hand, like choosing an icon for Twitter.

I got a 95% on my history test. Yay! However, I have done the unthinkable, I put off the term paper until the very last minute. Oy. So I get to write that this weekend.
I also had to go to a friend/classmate's house last night to work on our group presentation which is this Saturday. Boooooooo. I hate presentations. And we had to work on our project for 7 hours. I didn't get home until almost 2 in the morning.

I guess that's about all in my life right now. My husband will be having surgery for his nose/sinuses on the 30th.

Man, school is almost out for the semester and I am having a really hard time staying focused. All these remaining papers and tests.... they all can just bite me.

What's worse though... is that I'll have one month off before my summer semester. That's kinda bad because then you get out of homework/study mode. But at least when I go back for the summer, for the first half I'll only have one class to deal with. That will be nice.
Now let's just hope I can get the financial aid for the summer semester.

PS
One final thought. I do have Irish in my background. My dad has an Irish name and I was indeed named after the Shannon River in Ireland.
My husband happens to have a really great Irish name in his family, McCaffrey. It was his mother's maiden name. I wish so much that it were his actual surname. How perfect a name would that be? Shannon McCaffrey. Not to mention his fine Irish name, Ryan. We should just change it. :p

double edged sword

You know... I am aware that what makes a blog, or a person, interesting is what they write or share. Sometimes I wish I could share much more of my life, but I also am petrified of giving too much information away.

Maybe I could start taking some pictures or something, to at least make this blog a little more interesting. I can certainly show off all my cute critters, at the very least! So maybe I'll work on that.

But here's something... I am actually concerned and a little scared about something. I'm not usually a person who is an extreme alarmist but I am a tiny bit worried. When the VA Tech shootings happened, I had to go to college the next day. As I drove onto campus I actually thought to myself "I hope I don't get shot today."

My school is holding our graduation ceremony at New Life Church of all places. If you recall, there was a shooting at that place as well, in which 2 young girls died. As I drove onto my campus last week, I looked over at the church and... you know... it's just when you know something horrible took place at a certain location, you can never really look at that location the same again.

I'm not super worried or anything, but it is a rising concern in the back of my mind. I asked if we will have campus security at our graduation. I sure hope so.

Ok - Here are some photos. I should play around with Photobucket's new editing feature more, that could be fun. I thought I would kinda start things off by showing my gerbils.

This is Storm. He was the poor wittle one who had surgery back in January or February. This is the only picture I took of that. What a big scar for a little critter! His skin tumor was pretty large. :-(


He's doing great. Here he is with his fur grown back now.
Mr. Cutie McCute


This is Teddy, his brother.


Teddy is a bit harder to get photos of because he's mostly black and he's a little stubborn. Stormie at least has a sense of humor and likes to be a camera ham.


I don't have any great photos of me just yet, but I took some photos to ask opinions about my glasses somewhere else... so I'll post one of those.

taxes and grants

Bleh. I just tried to do my state taxes... I'm sure I did them all wrong. I'll have my dad check them over. I feel so confused on them this year because of my unusual circumstances. I only made about $1000 for a work study and I closed out a retirement account (only about $4000 worth) to pay bills last year. So I'm not sure what to do exactly. *headache*

But onto the more nice thing... I got my financial aid award letter from my college yesterday. They estimate my tuition costs, with books and fees, to be about $7,951.00. They gave me grants for $7,900.00. Pretty cool! I'm glad I caught my mistake with FAFSA from the first time I filed, or else I wouldn't be getting anything.

The tricky part is the credit hours. They based their estimations on my taking 12 credit hours. That wouldn't really get me out of college in the next two years. So I will have to go in the summer time. I'm fine with that, it's just the grants only cover the Fall and Spring semesters. I have to apply for extra aid for the summer. I hope I can at least get a work study or something. Because I will have to go in the summer, for about 6 credits, to make it to graduation on time in 2010.

I just hope I can get the financial aid I need for the summer time!! I won't be able to even apply for aid until roughly the end of this month when they finally put out their forms. :-(

-Picard out.

Ring a ding ding

Ring update du jour. LOL. Should be the last one, and it's quick. I found some rings I really love, for a decent price and we have them on layaway. There ya go. They really don't cost much at all, but I don't want to put them on a credit card. Anyways, moving on.

I did sign up for the Philosophical Filmmaking class. At least to hold a spot for me until I make a full decision. I'll have a strange summer schedule. But I'll talk about that more when it's more concrete and it's a really boring topic right now anyway.

I could make a photoshop picture and upload it, but I'm feeling too lazy for that. So I'll just tell you about something. I went into my history class yesterday to take a test. (ugh. Tests. Especially when they're over 5 chapters. Sucks.) Anyway, I grabbed a test off the pile in the front of the class and saw something strange on the paper. It wasn't until I sat down in the back of the class to look at it... and the prof had drawn 3 dots on the top of the paper, triangle formation, and the directions were: For extra credit, connect the dots.

I really did LOL.

Give me $20 and I'll give you nothing

I went to my $20 big fat waste of time and money orientation today. Lame. Totally and completely lame. I paid $20 just to make these administration workers do their salaried jobs.

If you had a chance to take a class called "Philosophical Filmmakers" would you? I'm a little intrigued... but... I'll try to find out more about it, I suppose. I think it would fulfill a humanities requirement.

I have to deal with the useless financial aid people again. I am so not looking forward to this. I was given such a massive dis-service the last time I was in there. It has left an everlasting rotten taste in my mouth of this college. I wish so much the *********** that "helped" me would get fired because I think it's ridiculous that she gets a great salary just to say "I can't help you. I don't know."

Ok. Didn't mean for this to be a major whine-fest. I really do want to know about this film class. I wonder if I should take it, or will I hate it? But it all depends on my financial aid I suppose. That is the center of the cog for me and I can't get any help about it!

ring my bell

Ok. Nobody cares... but I think I found a wedding ring set that I love. It's $540 on sale though. *cries* That's actually not too bad, given all the other inflated ring sets that I've been seeing out there... but still.

So what I'm going to do is this. I'm buying a set that looks almost identical in sterling silver and CZ's. I do not mind CZ's one bit, but I would rather have 14 karat gold. Oh well. This set was only $40. This way I can wear them for awhile and make sure that I really love them before I even think about spending $540 on a wedding ring set. And even then it's going to be awhile before we can afford them. We'll have to save up.

It's shiney

Aw crud! I feel the need to share something with y'all. I went to my college's computer lab and played around online for a little while. On a very crappy "old" computer with a keyboard that seems to have acquired some mysterious sticky fluids over time. Then I came to the library to do some studying for my history test I have on Thursday.

BUT! There are 2 new computers here in the library. In excellent spots, where you get full privacy. And I couldn't resist. Now how the hell am I supposed to start studying when there's a shiney new computer to play on? Even this keyboard feels like buttah.

This is terrible! No fair! They can't dangle fun in front of a college student who has a touch of "eff-it-all-itis" and should be studying. Nuts.

Well, I will try to peel myself away in just a few minutes.

I'll ring you

My dad, my husband and I golfed again today. Colorado in the springtime is just great. We saw sun, thunder, corn snow, wind and the sun again. It got pretty miserable for a short while there with the ice cold wind blowing right in the ears.

I'm really trying to think of ways to not be super boring. This blog thing is still... interesting. I mean, why read me? I attempt to be witty and entertaining at least a little bit. And try not to be a total snooze fest. Oh well. So I shall just bore you. There we go, can't kill them with kindness at least you can bore them to death.

Anywho... I am ring shopping. I have been ring shopping for, oh what, 6 years now? I just CANNOT find a ring set that I like for my wedding rings. I have very picky tastes coupled with short small fingers. And I like jewelry that can take a little bit of a beating. It's a very tough situation. I don't like diamonds, but I think I might have to give in and wear some. I prefer sapphires, but it's hard to find them in a set. If I ever did find a solitaire sapphire ring I could have a shadow band made for it... but I haven't really found something I love. That I can afford.

Picky tastes and also, apparently, expensive tastes. Dude, most anything that I really like is 2 kajillion dollars.

I don't know why it's so important to me. Well, actually, I do. My wedding jewelry is the only jewelry I wear daily. That and earrings. And jewelry expresses who you are to the world. It expresses your personality. And we women just tend to notice this stuff. I'm forever looking at other women's wedding jewelry. (And may I just add... some of this stuff... I just cannot understand why women like it!)

And there you go. You now have a richer mind for reading my blog today.

You ever bite into a chocolate bunny from Easter and it turns out it's hollow and you're disappointed? Frankly, I think I might prefer that from now on. I'm trying to eat a solid chocolate bunny from Easter and it's not going too well.

Duty

In French class... I missed the first part of this conversation so I don't know what it was, but the professor replied "Ca. Just don't say it twice though." LOL
Dang, I am going to miss her, she is great. I might try and take French II with her, even though I'll have to pay for it out of pocket.

She also said that she calls port-a-potties, biffies. LOL! I love that too. I so have to remember that.

Okay. So. I am going to graduate in May with my 2 year degree. I know tons of people look down on those, but so what. I am going on to get my 4 year. Anyways, there is also a lot of looking down on a graduation ceremony for a 2 year degree. Lots of people are saying "Why bother? It's my 4 year that really matters. I don't give a shit about my 2 year degree."

This annoys me. It's just the way these people say it... they say it as if going to a 2 year degree graduation is worse than having to be a biffie scrubber. They have total disgust and disdain in their voices.
I just don't get it! NOT ATTENDING your 2 year graduation isn't going to make the 4 year degree that much harder, easier, cheaper, costlier, longer or shorter to obtain. Why is it just going to positively kill you to go out for an afternoon and walk across the stage in a cap and gown?

It's only costing $20. I'm very, very poor and if even I'm saying that... then it's no big deal.

I don't know. Just go. Have fun. Enjoy yourself. Give yourself a little pat on the back for the first 2 years of hard college work. Have a little warm up for the 4 year graduation.

Boneheads.