Fancy Fairy

My friend and Nbio classmate Lara has some pretty remarkable talents. She's an aerialist who started and runs her own business (check out the video tab on the website to see a sample of her work), and also performs with another company she helped start up (Circus Contraption is really popular in Seattle, and although I've not seen any of their full performances, I've heard they're fabulous). The Aerialistas perform a free show every year at Seattle Center's Winterfest. The first time we went to see them, the theme was of the ethereal woodland fairy variety and ever since then Zoya has desperately wanted to be one of them. She was 3 at the time, and when we came home from the performance, everything that even resembled a rope was something she tried to climb and perform on. After we came home from this year's performance, she discovered that one of the posts on her bed served as an adequate substitute for ropes. She now makes up and performs various "fairy tricks" for us (I think she's up to 21 of them - all different poses). I think when she's a little older I'll have to enroll her in Lara's school! Here are a couple of pictures:

~o~o....G-I-D-D-Y....o~o~

To begin, I've been going to school to get my undergrad degree since April 2001. If my mental math still serves me, and I hope it does since I need it to get my last physics class off my back, that would be 7 years. (I'm not actually counting the fact that I really started my higher education career in the fall of 1992, because if I did it would be more like 15 1/2 years and that's just embarrassing! But I digress.) So 7 years to do what many (most?) people do in 4 or 5. Now granted, most of that time I was going part-time while I played mommy in my other life, and I did take a couple of quarters off to do important things like give birth, but still...7 years. And I have to register that I am really, REALLY sick (and tired) of being in school. Nonetheless, I have been diligently and more recently grudgingly taking my classes one at a time, trying to get through so I could finish. Up until yesterday, I thought that was going to take 3 more quarters and 13 more credits.

And then I talked to Tom. Turns out my trusty adviser had left a couple of transfer classes out of my degree progress report since I transfered to the UW. With the corrections he made yesterday, I have only ONE organic chem class (3 credits) and ONE undergrad research stint (2 credits) left to graduate.

♪ a a a a a a a a a h h h h h h h h h h h!

That's the sound of the angels singing! So, provided that I can make it through O-chem (I took the first two classes in the series 4 years ago, so it might be a challenge), I will GRADUATE in JUNE!!!

Funny that one of the things I'm looking forward to most when that happens is that I can change my blogger profile to read, "Neurobiology GRADUATE" instead of whatever it says now.

Ode to Fifth Grade Band

I don't think this needs any commentary :)