Such a Hippy (with edit)

Today has been my hippy college student day.  I woke up with a really severe sore throat.  This is a huge bummer, because I still have a little bit of bronchitis– two sicks at once?  Boo!

But for breakfast I had some delicious green tea, and it made me feel a lot better.  I had another cup a few hours later.  The caffeine buzz got me going enough to really study biochemistry hard.  I was going bzz bzz bzzz like a bee.  The only problem with me and caffeine is that it makes me SUPER JITTERY, especially if I haven’t eaten a lot, which I didn’t for breakfast.

So around three I started getting all jittery and couldn’t really focus on anything.  I was going to take a nap, and then I thought, "well, hey– my shoulder’s been bugging me a bit in the last few days, why don’t I just do some yoga to chillax a bit?"  So I did yoga for about two hours.  It was fantastic.  Also, my back hasn’t hurt at all since the last time that I did yoga (a week ago) so it’s probably really good to keep up the habit.  So far I’ve kept my resolution to do at least an hour of yoga every Sunday.  I can tell that it’s really making a difference in my life.

So I read this article today about how Hershey’s put out this fertilizer called cocoashit or something like that.  It had the word cocoa in it.  Anyway, it was supposed to keep dogs and cats out of your plants.  It worked really well, on 98% of the cats and dogs that were around it.  The other two percent?  Ate it.

Now, we all know that chocolate is bad for dogs and cats (especially dogs), but do you know why?  It’s because of a chemical called theobromine.  Theobromine is pretty similar to caffeine, except that humans are pretty tolerant of it.  Dogs and cats are not.  The fertilizer in question not only used cocoa beans, but used a bunch of the shells as well, which have a really high concentration of theobromine.  Some dog will come along ("mmm, tasty fertilizer"), munch on the fertilizer, and appear fine.  Until, of course, about seventeen hours later when it will have a severe seizure and die pretty much instantly.

So, boo on Hershey’s.

My family went to visit Hana yesterday.  (Wait– back up to tell the story)

So for those of you who don’t know, Hana was my piano teacher from when I was five to when I was eighteen.  She taught our whole family at one point and continues to teach both of my parents.  She is a very close family friend, and probably my mother’s best friend.

She is currently (or was, read on…) putting herself through graduate school to get a degree in piano.  She was very very stressed out for an upcoming recital and severely overpracticed.  She practiced for something like eighteen hours straight, which really damaged her wrist.  Upon visiting the doctor, she found that there were several cysts growing in her bones, caused by some genetic disorder and aggravated by her intense practicing.

Long story short, she had to have this major wrist surgery (with three different bone grafts) and will probably never be able to perform ever again.  Ever.  (A master’s degree requires a certain amount of performing to complete– the department is still deciding if she’ll be allowed to get her degree or not.)

So, anyway, Hana is really upset and in a LOT of pain, and we went to go visit her.  She’s doing alright.  She’s happy that I’ve started playing the piano again, even if only for a few hours a week and on my own time.  (I don’t think I chronicled the saga of my quitting piano in this diary, but it’s really long and frankly, quite awful, so I’ll save that for another time.)

Apparantly Heather (her piano teacher and the reason that I stopped playing) hasn’t even called or e-mailed or said "hi" or anything.  I’ll abstain from calling her dirty names.  Hana has a lot of respect for her.  I do not.

I think Hana will be okay through all of this.  She’s going to have to figure out what to do with herself (she can still teach piano, but she won’t be accompanying anyone on their concertos or anything).  I really hope she can still finish her master’s degree.  That would be a really good thing.  If she can’t, well, she just spent a whole lot of time and money on a degree that she’s not going to get…  (It’s not all bad, though; my parents say that her teaching really improved when she started school again; which is really saying quite a bit: she’s a fantastic teacher.)

On an unrelated note, Katrina will probably not be moving into the apartment that we were planning on getting.  Her parents are vehemently opposed to the idea, and she doesn’t want to piss them off any more than she already has.  (Oi, that’s another long story… basically they think that Ian, her boyfriend, is a demon who’s possesing her and they’re trying to get an excorcism for her.  Somehow this is my fault; something about her seeing me and Bryan interact constantly made her think that sexual deviance was good or fun or… something.  Honestly, I thought this was the stuff of movies and fiction.  I hate finding out when these sorts of things are real.)

Bobby, Bryan’s current roommate, is interested in moving in with us, and we were already planning on asking Mark, so it’s not like we’re out of roommates.  We’re thinking that instead of Katrina, we could invite Alex (the Russian), or, barring Alex, Sam.

I realize that that paragraph was pretty much nothing but names that you don’t know, so I don’t really know why I’m leaving it in there except because I feel like it.  The point of the story is that I’ll probably wind up in a house full of boys.  Which is fine with me, so long as I like all of them (which I do).  I’ve never really gotten why most of my friends are boys–  they just are.  It’s pretty much been that way since early high school.

*shrug*

I’ve run out of things to say for now, so I’ll let y’all go!  Have a fantastic day, everyone!  I’m going to go work on not becoming sick.

Oh, and EDIT:  I finished creating a map for a DnD world about a week and a half ago.  I’ve been meaning to put it on here– I’m pretty proud of it, even though my mountains still look a bit screwy.  Yay computer graphics!