Almost Christmas!

It's almost Christmas! This semester is FINALLY over. It has been so long. Even just this past week has been long. I've been exhausted. I can't talk too much on here about school, but let's just say that I'm really glad this semester is done and that this time next year I'll be doing something else with my life. Graduate school can really grind a person down. But I'm on vacation for the next two weeks! So I'm going to visit my family and spend as much time as I can just relaxing.
Of course I can't make a post without plants! Look at this awesome present my best friends Mike and Tessa got me!

It's a teeny baby Mammillaria cactus and you can wear it as a necklace!!! How cute is that? I'll probably transplant him into a little tiny pot in the next month or two so he has space to get huge! What an awesome present!
So happy Christmas everyone! I hope you all have a fabulous holiday!

Plant box!

I recently received a box of plants from a very kind member of All Things Plants in return for me paying the postage. I had asked for Mother of Thousands and received it and several extras just because!

 Here is Mother of Thousands. I have several small plants in this pot. 

This is the Mexican Hat variety of Mother of Thousands. They're little right now and so cute.  

 Callisia fragrans, also known as the Basket Plant. These guys make nice hanging baskets so they'll get moved to one eventually. 

 Golden Sedum, a succulent. 

 Baby Mexican Hat Mother of Thousands. They are so adorable!!!!

 Aloe juvenna babies. Also adorable. So many cute plants in this box!

I was so excited about this one in particular, and it was a total surprise. It's Jovibarba "Sundancer" variety. It's similar to sempervivum and is a hardy succulent, and it's gorgeous!!! I've wanted one as soon as I read about them for the first time. 

I love plant trading so much! Right now I don't have a lot to give, but there are many generous people willing to trade seeds and plants for the cost of postage or a SASE. Once I have plants to give, I'll be doing the same thing. The online gardening world is full of wonderful people who just want to spread the plants they love to whoever wants them. 

Busy weekend: Des Moines Farmer's Market and Iowa State Fair

I had an extremely busy weekend! I went to hang out with my friends Mike and Tessa. We spent some time hanging out with other friends, but we also went to the Des Moines Farmer's Market and the Iowa State Fair.
It was my first time at the farmer's market. It's huge! The Des Moines Farmer's Market takes up several blocks of downtown Des Moines and is on every Saturday. There are lots of vendors there that sell produce, plants, cooked food, jewelry, clothes, etc. Pretty much anything you can think of is sold there. Some of the vendors are also certified organic if that's your thing. I had a great time. I ate breakfast at the Indian Delights stand, where I got samosas that were homemade. I bought a ridiculous amount of kale, fresh blueberries, some heirloom tomatoes, two pairs of earrings, a necklace, and a Mimosa plant. It was a great first time there and I'd love to go back.
I'd been to the Iowa State Fair once before, so we skipped the animals and all of the stuff in the buildings this time. We met up with Mike's daughter while we were there, so instead we went to the midway and went on a couple of rides. We went on the giant ferris wheel and the bumper boats. It was a lot of fun; I giggled like an idiot on the bumper boats. I hadn't been on any amusement park rides in ages so that was cool. We all split a red velvet funnel cake which was delicious and Mike tried the bacon wrapped corn dog. It was the first weekend of the fair so it was extremely busy, but it was still fun.

April

Well, I kind of dropped the ball here during the month of April and haven't kept up to date. It's been a pretty busy month so maybe I have an excuse. I was going to upload a bunch of photos of my newest plants but the photo uploader is being a butt so I don't know when I'll be able to do that. Not cool! Anyway, most of April has been pretty crazy. I finally have made progress in lab-significant progress. Finally I have results from all of the crap I've been struggling with for the past five months! I swear I could have kissed the spectrophotometer today when I got my data. Anyway, I'm starting to feel better because I'm not stuck. I grumble a lot about grad school, and there are general things I wish could change, but now at least I feel like I'm moving forward and making progress toward my degree. The timing of this is doubly good because I have to submit a poster next Friday for a big meeting on May 15-16. So now I feel great because I have new data to show.
My weekends have been equally busy for the past month! It's been a Tessa party pretty much. The first weekend I spent helping Tessa pick her wedding dress, which was pretty cool. I really like the one she chose. I was happy and a little surprised that I didn't feel super jealous, which is good. It means that I'm generally more chill about when the whole marriage thing will happen for me :) The next weekend was our last Des Moines Symphony for the season. It was Carmina Burana and it was really cool. They printed all of the translated lyrics in the program, and I was surprised to find that most of them are dirty songs about sex, drinking, or gambling! It was hilarious. And then the weekend after that was the Glow Run! We did it as a 5K walk, which was fine with me because I'm not in running shape right now. It was really cool because we all had glow in the dark stuff on and there were black lights set up along the route to make it even more glowy! So this weekend is my only April weekend where I'm at home the whole time. I'm okay with that. I'm just planning on getting flowers and potting them so that it's nice and springy around my house.

Newest plants from Seed!

Last weekend, Tessa and I went to Seed. It's an awesome little store in the East Village in Des Moines. They have plants, seeds, pots, and all kinds of gardening supplies. I bought plants!!!

 This is an Echeveria. It's a kind of succulent. I'm not sure which species of Echeveria it is but it's pretty cool.

 This is an Astrophytum myriostigma. It's a cactus, but there's no spines. It feels almost like a baseball.

 This is a Tillandsia, not sure which species. It's curly and sits in a little ball.

This is another Tillandsia. It's pretty big too. Right now it sits in an old candle holder.

October is almost over!

I feel like time is going by so quickly! How is it almost November already? It's not even like I've had lots and lots going on. Most of the month I've been just working and studying. It's been pretty productive. I should have some data soon from some of my experiments and that will be exciting. This past weekend was jam-packed with stuff! On Friday I went with my friends Tessa and Mike to AJ's on East Court for a Halloween party/drinking time. It was a lot of fun! I went as Dr. McCoy from Star Trek and got to wave a phaser around and be cranky. I didn't drink too much because the next morning I ran my first 5K!! It was the Susan G. Komen 5K, which isn't super competitive and has lots of people in it, and there are runners and walkers. I had to walk more than I wanted, but I finished which was the most important thing to me. I finished in 46:07, which is slow as hell, but I finished! I'm looking forward to getting healthier and more in shape so that the next time I run a 5K I have a better time! During the afternoon I helped Tessa decorate for a Halloween party. We made cupcakes that were delicious! Then in the evening we went to the Des Moines Symphony Orchestra. Our seats were actually pretty good for being eighteen bucks. They played the Sorcerer's Apprentice first, then something else I can't remember the name of lol, and then the Symphonie Fantastique by Berlioz. It was awesome and it was the first time I've been to a live orchestra so that was cool. We have three more shows to go to so I'm looking forward to that!
The only bad thing that happened was that on Saturday my dad texted me and told me that our doggie, Mischief, had died. She was almost 13 and had been declining for a while, so it wasn't a surprise, but it was sad anyway. I was hoping she would make it until Christmas so that I could see her again. I hadn't seen her since last December. So it will be kind of weird to come home this Christmas because there will only be two cats, when last year there were three cats and a dog.

Iowa State Fair

 A couple of weekends ago, I went to the Iowa State Fair for the first time with Mike and Tessa! I had only been to the Michigan State Fair once when I was a kid, and all I remember is riding a roller coaster and getting free strawberry milk. So I was pretty much a state fair virgin. It was a lot of fun! So here are some pictures.

 This is a reconstruction of the first church built in Dubuque, IA. It cost $250 back in 1834? 18-something anyway. I am being devout in front of the sign.

 And here I am in an old-timey telephone booth. Sadly the other half of the telephone wasn't in there so I couldn't pretend to be calling someone. There's a telephone museum at the fair that is actually pretty cool.

 Chocolate dipped bacon on a stick. It was very good, but very drippy so that's why mine is in the tray.

 Mike and I next to the third biggest pumpkin entered in the fair. I honestly have no idea how they get this big! Other than magic, that is.

 This is in the State Fair museum. It's the exact same cookie cutter that my family has, and that I insist on using every Christmas. It's a gingerbread man in a tuc.

 We took the chair lift thing across the grounds at one point, which was cool because my feet hurt. It was neat to be able to see the grounds from the air.

 Mike and I in the old-timey one room schoolhouse. We failed pretty hard at the assignments on the blackboard. For the record, I'm pretty sure I was never that excited to go to real school. I sure am not now.

Tessa and I making biodiesel, LOL. It's extra funny since I work in biorenewable chemicals.

Tubing!

Dan and I went tubing on the Skunk River! It was a lot of fun. We started up near Ada Hayden Heritage Park. We got out near Carr Park because it turned out that where we thought we would get out was on  a different fork of the river. Oops. We had to walk to that spot and I have a million blisters now on my feet, but the tubing part was a lot of fun. There weren't a lot of people on the river, and the water temperature was really nice. Some parts of the river were too shallow and we had to get up and wade, but for the most part we could float. I saw a bald eagle fly over the river, which was super cool, and Dan spotted a deer looking at us from the riverbank. There were lots of cool little birds around and we even saw a freshwater mussel while we were wading at one point. It was really neat, and it was so quiet. We were floating through places in Ames, but from the river you couldn't tell where you were. It was like we were in a completely different world. I had so much fun (even with the walking barefoot for more than a mile and getting blisters lol) and it was my first time tubing so that was doubly fun. Next time we know where the best place is to get out so we won't have the same issue again. And Dan was really sweet and brought over epsom salts and rubbing alcohol for me so I could lance some of these blisters and get them healing. Overall, it was really fun.

Nice Weekend

I actually had a pretty good weekend, which is refreshing after the stress of final exams and the general stress of switching programs. On Friday, Dan and I went down to Saylorville Lake. I had never been there before and he had only been there once, so it was new for both of us. It was really hot out and I was sweating like crazy, but otherwise it was a lot of fun. We went down to the spillway, where they release all the water into the river. It was really open and the water was really gushing out like crazy. There were two guys there fishing with bows, which I had never seen before. They had caught a couple of big carp so I guess it works as a fishing technique. Anyway, Dan and I walked along the river, and to some of the parts of the lake further back, and then we drove around to the boat launch area so we could walk out on the rock pier in the big part of the lake. It was really cool and it made me feel at home, being out on this rock outcrop in this big lake. It was really nice. Afterwards we went to Buffalo Wild Wings. I'm not a big wing person, but Dan likes them, and I had a cheeseburger which was actually really good. Then we went back to my place and watched a Godzilla movie. I had a great day and my only wish is that I could see Dan every single day, because I love being with him.
Saturday was a laid-back day for me, just hanging out, watching Ghost Adventures and playing video games. Today I went down to Mike and Tessa's for Mike's 40th birthday party. It was great to see them again because I hadn't seen them since February, which is way too long. Since Tessa is done with school and I'm essentially working full time this summer, hopefully we'll be able to hang out together some more. And I was happy to see the kitties Satine and D'Artagnan, because they are adorable kitties.
I just finished grocery shopping and I think I'm just in time because the weather is looking like it will storm again. It stormed like crazy this morning, so much that water actually leaked in one of my windows. It wasn't a lot, but it surprised me because it had never happened before. I'm going to relax for the rest of the day, and try to be calm about starting my rotation tomorrow. I start tomorrow at 10am, hopefully everything goes really well!

Good Weekend

I had a really good weekend! On Friday I went to Urbandale to hang out with my friends Mike and Tessa. We went to El Bait Shop to eat and meet with their friend Brandon. The food was really good. They had so many beer choices that it was hard to pick one! Then we saw Underworld: Awakening. I had an issue with laughing inappropriately whenever there was a scene with gratuitous violence, but I don't think I annoyed anyone around me, so it was all good. Then we went back to their house and drank wine and watched Hell Girl, which is pretty much our weird tradition now whenever I come over.
Then on Saturday our friend Jenn came down and we went to Prairieland Herbs! I love Prairieland Herbs so much. They make the best stuff. I spent way too much money but it was well worth it. Then we went to Jordan Creek and bought some clothes. I got a really pretty purple dress. It was a pain to find the right dress because most of them fit until they got to just below my shoulder blade, and then the zipper wouldn't zip. I was getting really frustrated but then I found the one I bought and it worked out. Jenn had to go home after that, so Tessa and I had dinner at TGIFriday's. Then I went back home.
It was a great weekend. I really enjoyed spending time with my friends. It was especially nice because the week was pretty rough, so being able to relax was awesome.

New Year Party!

Yesterday I went out with my friends Mike and Tessa to the Des Moines Social Club Bash! So here's a bunch of pictures because it's been a long time since I've posted pictures.

 Me!

 That's a drag queen. Yep.

 The lounge and people.

 

The balloons that were dropped at midnight!