areolas

had my class presentation last week & just got the grade back, 95! Some comments about how I talked fast (which i knew) but man whatever an A is an A I don't care.

So today was my second pressing concern, the gyno appt and my first pap test. I should have gone before now but I spent my 20s neglecting my health checkups lmao so I'm catching up in my 30s. Next stop dentist I guess.

It was... ok. Like it wasn't the worst experience of my life and my dr was nice. She at least listened and had concerns about my issues with bleeding outside of my period. We chatted about how if my results all come back normal we'll meet again and talk more about it and see what next steps are. Hopefully it's just all down to stress and hormones and maybe it'll be an easy fix. She didn't seem extremely concerned which is good, because non-hpv cervical cancer is an extremely small chance which I didn't know!

So, whatever. Ultimately I'm glad I sucked it up and went and am taking care of myself how I should be doing just to be on the safe side. What I'm extremely glad about is they no longer suggest getting the test yearly lol they suggest 3-5 years these days, whew!

Anyway bleeding again after the stupid scraping test which she warned me about but is annoying!!!!!

whatev whatev my project is due Tuesday so I have to work on that, I should see my results in the next couple days and know what I'm doing next soon. fingers crossed i am NOT dying after all

TO PLAY
Death of the Outsider
Deadly Premonition
Fallout NV (try gog)
Redfall
Darkwood
Garage: Bad Dream Adventure 1/15/25
RE4
A Way Out (with Tony)

TO FINISH
Elden Ring (multiplayer)
Card Shark (restart)
Cult of the Lamb (restart?)
Dragon Age Origins (try gog)
Outer Worlds
Weird West (restart?)
SEASON 12/17/25
Dragon Age 4 (cas)
Pathologic 2
Rise of the Golden Idol 1/20/25

DLC
Shadow of the Erdtree
Dredge DLCs 4/8/25

RE-FINISH
Deathloop

At the end of July we went to the Hozier concert in Pittsburgh and I kept being like "I need to write a post about that" and then.... not doing it. but then didn't want to write some other post before that one, and then I just fell into a hole of never posting anything at all.

Well I'm at work and I'm bored so what better time than now.

The Hozier concert was fun, there, that's that whole update. It was nice, we got to go for free and had decent seats. And then the two tallest women on Earth came and sat in front of us, but we could more or less see. It was nice and cute, he played more than one of my faves, and his opening act was really good!
Toward the end he gave a speech about the effectiveness of protesting and went on to talk about how Palestine should be free and that what's happening there is a genocide, and a couple people near us left!!! It's possible, I guess, that they left because it was toward the end and they wanted to beat leaving traffic (a good idea, it took us over an hour just to get out of the lot alone) or if they were offended by his message. It's insane to imagine the second option bc so many of his songs are so political and about like, the ravages of colonialism lol like ???? what did you expect him to say?

The concert was fun. I finished my summer class in August and managed to pull off an A even with my miserable midterm grade lol. Idk what else has happened since then which is why it's not smart to take 2 and a half months away from posting here. Started my fall semester, phonetics and computational linguistics & I'm really liking both! The semester is rocketing past, I already had a midterm last week. I did the math and I think I'm graduating in the spring!! THANK GOD.

Speaking of math though, I got an update on the public service loan forgiveness thing I applied for a while ago! I've made 89/120 qualifying payments & I'm set up to have like 30k of loans forgiven in 2027! I'll keep working at this freakin job until then, that's only 2 more years! I feel like I'd be an idiot not to.

We went to see Terrifier 3 at Row House this past weekend. It was good, gory and nasty of course but still good and entertaining. I liked 2 better, overall, but it was still a fun time.
Then last night we went to a bad movie bingo event at a social hall and bar & it was also good! Not the movie, of course, but it was a fun event too. I had a yummy apple cider mimosa that was delicious. About 20 minutes into the movie the guy dropped the laptop playing it and broke it lmao it was tragic. There was a long scramble of them trying to fix it & I felt so bad. I was like I just know in my heart this guy is the sweatiest he's ever been. We declared among us that we would give up and leave at 9:15 & wouldn't you know he got it up and running at exactly 9:15. We stayed and it was fun (I won a tshirt!) but we were all also a little like "yay......." when it got up and running lol. we all just like going and being at home ok.......

Today was my last class meeting!!!!! It was a surprise announcement, since we still are in session next week technically. But he's giving us Tuesday off to work on our last homework assignment and Thursday is our final exam (online, at home, open book). Tomorrow is my last lab and then I'm FREE! For three-ish weeks. My last assignment is very close to being done, there's one more element I can't quite get working. I'm hoping in lab tomorrow I can get help from my TA with it.
I'm irritated I filled out an OMET for my professor but not for my TA - his is a separate job and should also stand under review. I had a lot to say about how his teaching style could be worked on and improved. For one thing, read the assignments and understand them before the moment you are in front of us. He was constantly telling up wrong things and correcting us for things that were not part of the assignments as written. Second, telling students "oh this part is so easy" is not encouragement and especially not when we're struggling. Hearing where we're struggling and following it up with "this part is so easy" doesn't help, it just makes it sound like what we're struggling with is easy, and we're dumb to struggle with it.

Anyway though! Tonight I'm going to prep for dnd this Saturday (we're getting so close to done with Curse of Strahd, which makes the rewriting I was doing of the sessions on here even harder lol). I'm excited to finish but nervous. I need to make sure the final battle is worth all the build up. I'm still inexperienced in regards to that, and I just want everyone to feel satisfied in the end. They're going to the Amber Temple next which is also a ramp up in combat, so if I can make that compelling I'll feel good. I just think that like..... the book as written is often not very good, and so I'm doing the best I can with what I was given.
Ideally I get my homework finished entirely tonight so I don't have to get help from my TA, JUST have to run it by him and get final approval.

After that, Elden Ring. i finished Horizon Zero Dawn and described it as the world's okayest game. It was fine. It was fun to play. It was pretty. It didn't make me like.... feel much. It didn't inspire an emotion in me lmao. The big twists I saw coming miles ahead.... but it was ok.
Elden Ring is.... an obsession. Full blown. There's no part of me that ever expected I would like a game of this style. I basically always wrote them off bc it didn't even look fun and people who played them just liked to suffer. But it's SO good. It's so pretty, I can see the creators' visions of finding beauty in the grotesque. The fighting is challenging but it's not punishing. It's fun. Finally getting past a boss is so rewarding. Exploring is so fun. I love it. I can't get enough. My eyes open in the morning and I think about how i want to play Elden Ring.

Big week next week! Hozier concert monday night. I took off Tuesday to recover & took off Weds and Thurs as well for my exam.

oh I finally replaced my falling apart brown boots. the replacements are okay, but not nearly as cute. I'm upset.

Having some serious frustrations and it's putting me in a cranky, defeated sort of place. I don't even know WHY which I think only adds to the frustration making it worse.

I worked on my homework, python coding stuff making a program produce a word count using dictionaries, something I learned about the existence and basics of 12 hours ago total. I just feel like I can't do it on my own and if I can't do it on my own why am I bothering to study it? I found the answer I needed to work out what I need to do, doubted it, only half did it and it didn't work. I asked Tony for help & it was the right answer after all & I just didn't implement it correctly.
I know it's just... this is something I learned about the existence of THIS morning and of course I wouldn't understand the full capabilities and functions of it in order to do my homework tonight but I couldn't help like throw a fit about it. I just need to be kinder and gentler to myself and understand it's not easy. Hold myself to the standards I would hold someone else.

I'm frustrated about my midterm grade, work, the fact I'm getting this degree and I don't know what my job goals are once I'm done. I guess it's that same unmoored feeling you get when you're about to graduate high school and undergrad where you don't know what's next.

Anyway I fell in a big slump tonight and idk. I guess I'm kind of still there. Maybe after a good night's sleep it'll pass. I'll get up tomorrow and have a good breakfast. I don't want to go to my lab at all, my TA makes me insane, but whatever. I'll go. I think just having 0 break from school since last summer is really..... wearing me down a little.

Going home this weekend & also feeling mixed about it. Not that I don't want to, it's just a pain to pack the cat up and she hates being at the parents' house so bad. We're going up into the mountains though for a cookout, hang out by the water etc. I'll feel bad leaving the cat alone all day, but she'll survive. Sunday we'll be swimming & I think that'll be nice and refreshing. I hope!

Writing this helped clear my mind a little bit :) I'll be fine

I love this apartment I've lived in since 2018 very much. It's cute, spacious, and all things considered still reasonably priced for the area. The only thing about it is NO AIR CONDITIONING. Summer is miserable. I'm just sweaty all the time. We have window ACs for the bedrooms at night and a standing unit that by limits of plugs and windows has to be in the dining room pointing toward us. It works to at least cut down on the humidity, but barely cools down the house at any kind of significance. Can't even sit with my legs crossed cause my knees get sweaty, my headphones at my computer make my ears and head sweaty, everything is freakin sweaty.

Our long weekend has come to an end :(((((( back to working 2x a week and class 3x a week :((((( Even the fall semester won't bring relief. I love how I'm acting like I'm doing sooooo much when from 2016-2020 fully I worked 5x a week 8:30-5 with very little exception lmao. Now I have to go on campus 8:30-4:30 twice a week & the other days this summer it's like, two hours. But it IS HARD and I WILL COMPLAIN thank you very much. It's my god given right to complain and who am I to turn away from that.

Anyway I did not beat HZD like I planned to, the DLC was a lot bigger than I expected, but I'm getting close.
Worked on my crochet skirt I've been putting together periodically for.... a while now lol. It's for Ren Faire & I really hope to be able to wear it this year. I'm almost to the point now where I would be stopping if I were making it mini skirt length, but I'm not so..... still a lot to go



It's looking pretty good I think! The pineapple pattern is pretty clear and the size of them is gradually increasing. The next steps are a bigger hook and bigger pineapples. I think it'll be pretty once it's all done with.

Also bought this cat bed pattern this weekend & ordered a green/teal/blue gradient yarn to make it with. It calls for a bulky yarn which only came in an amount that I think can make like, 2 of these beds easily though, so fennec might be getting more than one. We'll see! I want to finish the sweater I left off on as well & start the next. It's nice to have something to skip to when I get sick of this skirt again

Back to work tomorrow :( I'm not looking forward to it. With only doing that one day last week I did my best, but I'm not looking forward to the impatient emails I'll have about the stuff I didn't get around to.

Oh yeah! We played dnd this weekend too, two weekends in a row if you can believe it! We're getting very close to being done with Curse of Strahd. Something I never ever thought would happen. It's getting late though, so I'll write about that later

Since I took off Mon & Tues from work for my midterm, originally we still had to work on Friday since the university was open. I was kind of looking forward to it almost, a quiet day where most of our staff took a vacation day & no one reasonable would be logged in working (the physicists are not often reasonable, though) would have given me plenty of time to catch up on everything I missed. And there was A LOT just from two days away.
Instead, enough staff called off I guess that the university just decided to close doors Friday too. So I had a one-day work week and get two four-day weekends in a row. There's gonna be a lot to catch up on Monday but man..... some nice long weekends back to back? I'll survive.

Been a quiet day, the best kind of day. Finally got around today to something I've been needing and wanting to do for months now, going through part of my closet. I had a little covid weight gain over the years of lockdown and working from home (plus the whole thing of turning 30 in that time and ditching the metabolism of my 20s). On top of that, after a couple of years working from home and wearing comfy lounge clothes exclusively, a lot of the stuff in my closet just isn't my style anymore.
We got together a trash bag of stuff to donate already! There's still more to look through, but it's good progress. Finally from there I can go onward to getting some replacement clothes. Or, ideally, learning to sew clothes and not have to bother with the dressing rooms again.

Got my new glasses! They look good. It's weird having crisp perfect vision again. I hadn't even realized how outdated my prescription had become over time, it was such a gradual change. Strange to get rid of my old frames, I had them for 8 years and they feel like me. It's like trading out my nose few a new one or something, they're just part of my face!

Trying to finish Horizon Zero Dawn over this long weekend, I'm very close to done. It hasn't impacted me much, like as a game in general. The world is so beautiful I could look at it forever, but the game itself, eh? It's not bad, by a long shot. It's just like, fine. Excited to check something else off my list for 2024 though!

I've had the "post an entry" page on dw for like, a month now. basically since the exact moment I finished writing about fan expo bc I wanted to write about other things going one.

I've just been SO BUSY it's hard to even take a moment to sit down and like, think my thoughts and then put them into words. Summer semester has been going well, though I'm broke as shit because of it. I'm gonna have to borrow money from my parents again for the fall semester, I'm sure of it :( No added debt to my already substantial debt is nice but.... man. rip to me standing a chance to save like, any money.
In a similar line of thought, though, I was able to apply for a public service loan forgiveness federal program bc of working at a publich university. 120 "qualifying payments" and then total forgiveness. I'm still in review... so I'm not sure what qualifying payments really count as. Does the repayment pause from covid not count? Idk... ideally it counts and then I'll be only 2 or 3 years away from that? Which means I'll have been working at Pitt for ten years???? Insane, I never would have imagined it.

Anyway I'm in an undergrad summer class, but luckily there's one other grad student in there, and she's from my program so we already had some familiarity. We've gotten closer in this class & have worked together here and there. We're learning Python & programming & man, it's a lot of information and a really fast pace. I'm doing okay though! Luckily Tony already knows Python pretty will and I've had him around holding my hand during my very tough homework assignments lmao.
My TA is NOT great, he is obviously good at Python but he is not a teacher type. Not encouraging, not very helpful, doesn't listen to questions when they're asked... idk he's frustrating. It's been a great motivator for getting my assignments up and working before lab hours on Friday. They're used for fine tuning weekly assignments, so if you have it up and running you just have to show him & you can leave.

Other than that it's been a usual summer. Too hot. I want to live in a house with air conditioning so badly lmao. I love this apartment. It's the nicest place I've lived on my own and that's why I put up with the rent raising yearly since 2018, but man. HOT.
Donovan is in town from Oklahoma, it's so crazy that I've hardly seen him in a whole year and he's a full 11 year old obnoxious pre-teen. I went home several weeks ago and omg, that's a whole other story. But anyway I went home then and prepped a dnd oneshot to play with him and my parents together & it was fun! He was invested, he did the work, he wasn't deep in the roleplay but he asked the NPCs questions and was invested in the plot and the puzzles. He was sooooo into the combat and doing cool attacks and stuff. He's already asking to do another one before he leaves.
Last weekend he stayed at the apartment with me Friday to Sunday & it was good! He's a little shithead but not like, an awful person. My dad has been so cranky about him being at their house all summer bc he's such an uptight weird freak. Swear he never used to be like that, but he's so..... god. If he's like this now I hate to think on how he'll be as a proper old man. Anyway like yes he's annoying lol he's 11, you just have to be like "anyway, enough of that" and he generally just moved on. Anyway we went shopping around Pittsburgh. He loooooved Kawaii Gifts & everything we found in there. We watched Kiki's Delivery service that night and he was so enchanted, it was so cute. When I told him it was 35 years old he was like WHAT!!!! BUT IT LOOKS SO GOOD STILL. I sent him a list of all the other ghibli movies to watch, so I hope he does.

Anyway. That weekend I went home for our dnd weekend I did a bad bad bad bad friend job. I forgot the date and missed my good friend Shannon's bachelorette party :( I felt so bad, like doodoo trash tier friend. I've been friends with her since starting college in 09 & we've never grown apart. & her fiance is great! I went to her pole dance class showcase the next week though & bought her drinks after to at least try to make up for it. She seemed fine anyway, I called her to apologize the day of & let her know my mistake.

We played strahd dnd this weekend for the first time in almost 3 months! 22 session so far, level 8, I think we'll get to maybe 30 sessions. They ran into some combat today & we stopped short since it'll be a high level, difficult fight, probably a bit long. Excited to get back to it!

WHEW, that's the major stuff. My midterm is this Tuesday but it's all multiple choice and T/F, no writing code. At home test, open book. Every question from the chapters in our book, so as long as I have all the answers to those, I'm golden. He warned us the program notes how often we change tabs but lol it won't know if I'm looking between my laptop and desktop. I took off work monday and tuesday to """"""study""""""" but I have all the answers noted down so I'm just gonna chill instead. I need the time off after the business of fiscal year end. and I can't stand those people lmao i need a break.

god bless it's been a long long time since I've come here for a post. No good reason, either! The end of the semester was a little busy, but not so much that I couldn't pop in for a quick update. My head is finally clear enough now though to do it, so I won't dwell!

No final grade yet for my class, but I think I did pretty well overall! I feel good about the final project I turned in, and I think I did pretty good on my last exam too. We'll see! I get a two week break now and then I have to go right back to it for my summer undergrad class. Something computing for the humanities where I'll be studying Python which is valuable! Hopefully I'll click with it & I can take it with me to some future job.

Speaking of which, I found out my employer is eligible for the public service loan forgiveness program - ten years of eligible student loan repayments (which if you're on an income based program and you owe $0, paying $0 still counts as eligible). I signed up & have to wait for them to approve me and actually calculate how many eligible payments I've made so far. But! I've been at this job 7 years.... if all I have to do to be debt free is finish off 3 more? Hell yeah I'll do it! Hopefully they review my application soon enough.

We've made some good dnd progress. I think we're probably going to be finishing up this campaign in October maybe? If I've estimated correctly. Well, also depending on how often we can play. Two of us are moving states, this summer is busy with travel and I'm still going to be in classes and stuff. I'm guessing 8-10 more sessions, closer to 8 now I think.

This coming week is Fan Expo Philly! I did NOT finish my prey costume, but I'm going to work to finish it for next year instead. Instead we're doing scoops, twin peaks, and nerdy prudes must die. I don't think we'll be necessarily recognizable but that's alright! It'll still be really good. I'll try to remember to get pictures and share them when we get back. that's all for now!

i forgot some stuff in my big update!

Sarah and I have a policy that if something unavoidable ruins a weekend day we take off sick to make up for the loss. This weekend she had a weird swollen eye with a rash on it & we weren't sure if it was shingles or an allergic reaction, but we couldn't figure out what it would be a reaction to. So we took a trip to medexpress which was a whole hours long event on its own & the dr there agreed... 99% allergic reaction but a 1% chance it's shingles, so she's treating both. It's looking better already, but it was a crazy day, so we both took off today.
My boss responded to my email I sent last night about it that today was supposed to be our group staff lunch since it's spring break this week & I did forget that which is unfortunate, but! my weekend was lost! I also just looked it up and the whole university has Friday off so I could have not faked it but...... whatever, I wanted it. I don't have to justify myself lol.

( more work stuff )

Our ants are back again, same place as before. Bathroom and the joining walls in Sarah's room and by Tony's desk. I don't know what kind of ants take root in a bathroom of all places, but it's so frustrating. This is 3? 4 years in a row? They're under the floorboards so we never really see an active trail to track down origins or anything & we're on the 4th floor so trying to find where they're coming in from outside is pretty much impossible. Terro traps are up just like last year but who knows how well they'll work again. I'd love to go hog wild and use borax but not with Fennec around & at risk.
I've had worse ant invasions (2016) where they were on and in and around everything including my bed, so this isn't that bad in the grand scheme. They're not in or even near the kitchen thankfully. I'll just keep cleaning and doing my best to mitigate I guess. I just hate the bug stress dreams though.

I did my taxes! State & Federal at least & both were accepted pretty quickly. This is the earliest I think I've ever done them & it's all thanks to last year where I waited until the last possible minute & ended up writing two major final papers and doing my taxes at the same time. Not an experience I'm rushing to replicate. It's a relief to have it out of the way. Weirdly I owe money on State but I'm getting a surprisingly ok return on federal.

Last thing! We had a lovely Fool's Spring last week, and then yesterday looked like this:

Fool's Spring is the first step to true spring though I guess, so it was nice while it lasted