The Desert of My Dreams

I really hope that by the end of this semester I will learn how to spell visualization*.

*For the record, I copied and pasted these instances of visualization from the instance that Word spell-checked and corrected for me.

On Friday night, I was listening to two friends who live at the same apartment complex complain about their neighbors. They’ve nicknamed some guy as “salsa man” because he apparently blasts the same two salsa songs every day.

I’ve been listening to one of my playlists that is highly infused with Sarah (me, listen to a lot of Sarah? who knew? not that my collection of Sarah concert t-shirts gave that away or anything) and wondering if my neighbors have nicknamed me “Sarah McLachlan Girl.” The sad part is that lately it has been the same two songs: Trainwreck (Sly & Robbie Mix) and World on Fire (live from Afterglow Live).

I gave a workshop this afternoon about building a portfolio with Dreamweaver and now I’m looking at the evaluations. They’re all good (only five people showed up) but I’m curious about who wrote what. I don’t care about the actual ratings per say . . . I just found some of their comments interesting. I’ve been staring at the sign-in sheet and I think I’ve figured out who said what. I don’t really know why I’m so curious about attributing the comments to each person but I think it is because several of the students are my friends so I really want to make sure that whatever I talked about today fulfilled their needs.

And can I just say that talking for three hours* nonstop is really tiring? I think I’ve gained way more respect for my profs who can lecture for that long and still keep me engaged in the material.

*Actually, I only lectured for two and a half hours because it went faster than I expected.

For my infoviz class, my group is working on a fitness application that uses pedometers to track the number of steps a person takes in a day. The average American walks about 5,000 steps a day and most walking programs recommend walking 10,000 steps a day. My group and I have had our nifty pedometers (thanks to the UM Department of Family Medicine) for about a week now. Most school days, I walk around 7,000 - 8,000 steps a day. Over the weekend, my step counts were dismal (a little over 4,000 steps) due to the fact that I’m just at home working on homework. This morning, I walked over to the IMSB and worked out for a half hour on the elliptical trainer.

17,381 is the number of steps I’ve taken today. According to my pedometer, that’s about 7 miles.

It’s not even a month into the new academic year and I’m already writing a persona/scenario!

I really do enjoy creating my little fake perfect people . . . even when they have problems, they seem like they’re perfect problems (problems that are perfect enough to solve with whatever project concept my group is working on).

My sister gets to travel almost every week for her job and this week she’s in LA. I got a voicemail from her this afternoon: “I’m on Beach Blvd. Just thought I’d call to rub it in.”

Grrr.

It’s freaking humid and raining in Ann Arbor.

Oh Huntington Beach . . . how I miss it. Where are the palm trees when you need them?

I just bought my ticket for Dubai! I’m leaving December 15th and returning January 2nd. I’ve been wanting to checkout Dubai for a while and now that my brother and his family live there, Christmas break seems like an opportune time to do so.

On Tuesday evening, I came home to find that Amazon had sent me Bloom, Sarah’s newest release of remixes. Bloom has made my week; it is simply fabulous. My favorite track right now is the Sly & Robbie mix of Trainwreck.

I should note that the CD has some pretty annoying copyright protection. It took me forever to rip it to mp3s (so that I can actually listen to it on my ipod). I ended up using Audio Maestro to record the songs as mp3s while they played on my computer.

“After three months, I finally have my IRB approval.”

gulp.

It BETTER not take that long.

Or I just won’t graduate anytime soon.

I had a weird dream last night, but one that I can actually remember! I was sitting on a bed in a bedroom that looked like my bedroom in junior high. I don’t think I was in junior high, though. There was a huge fish just swimming around in the air on the opposite side of the room. There was no water in the room but the fish was somehow able to swim in the air. For some reason, I perceived the fish as a pest - much in the same way that I react to spiders or bugs. Since I was on the other side of the room, I don’t think I was scared of the fish. There was one corner of the room that had been sprayed with some sort of bug spray (fish spray?) . . . something along the lines of Raid. I don’t know how that corner got sprayed with Raid. I just know that in the dream, I knew that corner was sprayed with Raid and that the fish would die if it went there. As the fish started swimming towards that corner of the room, I got very excited. When the fish made it to that corner of the room, she fell to the ground and struggled much in the way that fish do when they’re out of the water. She managed to make it out of that corner of the room and then headed towards me. Naturally, I freaked out (and who wouldn’t freak out if a big fish that you’ve been trying to kill swims towards you?). However, the fish came and sat by my side (much like my cat does) and then I started petting her. I think she was purring and she may have been furry. I just remember thinking that she was super sweet and much like my cat. I then felt bad for trying to kill her but was happy to have a big fish as a new pet.

So what the heck does that mean? According to this page, it sounds like whatever things I’m worrying about or may perceive as being negative are in fact likely to bring some positive vibes into my life.