Sha Naa Naa

It’s the first day of spring! A perfect date to start blogging anew.

Of course, it helps that the world outside my apartment looks like this today:

And that my living room currently looks like this:

Also, the design of this blog has temporarily changed. Stay tuned for more news and changes.

• Guess I should probably start using this thing sometime… #
• Test tweet to see if I can tweet to and from http://www.marteki.com #
• Great. The spammers have found Twitter. :-( Blocking r7rqDj and It7OXa. #

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It’s been a little more than 4 weeks since my last blog post. Want to know what have I been doing with myself?

Well, mostly I’ve been sick:

• Week One: Hey there, Sunday! Hey there, sore throat and coughing! I guess I caught a cold. Ah well, I’ll be fine.
• Week Two: Coughing, coughing, and more coughing. I cough so much that I can’t go to sleep. I cough so hard that I throw up — on multiple occasions. My sinuses feel like my face has been hit repeatedly with a baseball bat. I’m exhausted. On Thursday, I stumble into the closest Urgent Care Center and walk out with a diagnosis of a sinus infection and a prescription for two weeks’ worth of antibiotics. (For the medicos in the audience, 875mg of Augmentin twice a day. That’s co-amoxiclav to the Brits and Canucks.)
• Week Three: Cough, cough, cough. Also, antibiotics can have some nasty side-effects. And that’s all you need to know about that.
• Week Four: I will never, ever, ever stop coughing. And now I’m sneezing? Why, Lord, why???
• Week Five: Cough, cough, co — hey, it stopped. WEDNESDAY IS A HAPPY DAY.

I also added a feature to this blog that should send all posts to Twitter and compile my Twitter tweets as a daily post. Enjoy.

And now, off to finish my statistics homework. The first quarter of grad school ends in two weeks…

• I failed at everyday blogging. I think I’ll still try for “much more frequently than previously” blogging.
• I succeeded in fixing my church’s internet.
• I failed at not getting sick during tax season. Too many sick people handling my ballpoint pens. So now my throat is raw, yet coated in mucus. I cough when I want to  laugh and I cough when I want to cry and I cough for no reason at all, except for when I sneeze instead. And my slowly filling sinuses are foretelling a world of hurt and headache for tomorrow.
• I succeeded at pestering various UPenn officials into approving and officially posting the completion of my undergrad degree. My transcript even says that it’s as of “12-17-08″.
• I failed at finishing the schoolwork and freelance work that I hoped to get done today.
• I succeeded at starting the two hundred sit-ups program, despite my tendency to cough more violently when lying horizontal. Week 1, Day 1 results: 15+18+10+10+20 (column 3).

I am five feet three inches tall. From the age of 18 to 25, my average weight was 95 lbs. Not healthy, not good.

I began to put on weight two years, and have gained 35 lbs so far… which is about 5 lbs more than I’d like. I have a belly now. My husband Andrew told me, “You have to watch what you eat now and exercise like normal people.” He’s right.

I’m starting with some basics — no more soda, drink more water, and more cardiovascular. That means no more sweet sweet Sprite, a harder working Brita filter, and lots of Dance Dance Revolution. And for the pudgy belly: the Two Hundred Sit-Ups program.

I took the initial test of my skills tonight, with the results listed in this blog post title. I’m in the third column for Week 1 starters. (Which I interpret as “you’re not fat, you’re just out of shape”.)

Exercises on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. I’ll keep you posted as to the results. If I’m brave, I’ll even take belly photos…

1. I didn’t have a single paying client at the tax office today.
2. I am drowning in grad school work.
3. I almost hit a very large SUV today.
4. I suspect that my undergrad university is actively attempting to keep me from graduating. (Latest example: Imagine that I needed you to receive my transcript in the mail, look at it, and click four buttons in acknowledgment of it. My transcript sits on your desk for three weeks, until I call and cajole you to take  a peek at your desk. Oh wait! There it is! And look, it then takes you almost exactly 1 minute to click those buttons — since you send an e-mail that you have finished about 1 minute after I hang up with you.)
5. I am exceedingly grumpy today because of the previous four bullet points, which has colored all the potentially good things that happened today.

New Jersey Bill to Require Personal Finance 101 for High School Seniors [EDIT: link is now dead]

It passed the Assembly and just got out of committee on its way to the full Senate.

HOORAY NJ!

Disclaimer: I was raised in New Jersey. I lived there from my birth until I was 16 years old. I believe New Jersey is the best state in the USA. I will continue believing this, regardless of what you say or do or joke about.

I love XKCD (an online comic):

I just flat out forgot about blogging yesterday.

It was a “hide away from the world” day, anyway.

My brain is addled from doing taxes and homework all day.

Andrew made an amazing beef stir-fry for dinner.

I haven’t watched SportsCenter in 3 days. (I keep catching the X Games and college basketball. I’m not a fan of either.)