This is My Life...

Some people say they’re unlucky or strange things always happen to them, that their life is like Murphy’s Law, but, seriously, mine is! In the 22 years of my life I’ve accumulated lots of great stories because of my luck, the strange things that happen to me, and the dumb things I do, like the time I got pulled over and had my car searched for drugs in Kaufman…in the words of my mom, its just one more life experience. I kind of go through phases where I have particularly bad luck, do embarrassing things, and I think right now is one of those times. I haven’t updated my blog with a regular Edinburgh kind of post in a while, that will be next. These are just a few little things that have happened lately. The first one is a slight repeat, with more detail.

I woke up on Monday morning ready for a busy, sleepless week because I was going to have to write a paper for Comparative Politics by Thursday before leaving for Paris. For some reason, I just decided to look at my Indigenous Peoples of Lowland South America syllabus to see when we were going to have a paper or something due. Well…we DID have a paper due….LAST week! This is my anthropology class that I got into two weeks late, because I was kicked out of my Spanish class. My fourth year anthropology class, in which I’m convinced I’m the only undergraduate student. An anthropology class with graduate students who know about anthropology, and me, who doesn’t know anything about the subject. Well, thankfully after a few seconds of freaking out, I figured out that I could still write the paper, I would just get 25% automatically taken off. So, instead of spending the day working on my politics paper, I would have to write an anthropology paper.

With the commotion of freaking out about my essay, I was almost late to my philosophy of religion class. Class starts at 11:10, it was 10:55, so I grabbed my pea coat off my chair and ran out the door. It takes me more than fifteen minutes to get to class, and even though I’ve been here for awhile now, when I walk really really fast like that, my legs start to get sore and kind of wobbly. I wondered what would happen if I were to just fall over on the sidewalk…I shouldn’t write that…it might actually happen to me! So, I ran into the classroom, only 3 minutes late, not bad, and then saw that there were only two other people there. Oh, yesterday was Sunday…day light savings. I was an hour early to class! But I’ve had worse class related things happen, like when I thought I was really late to class, walked in and found a seat right in the middle of the classroom, while everyone stared. Sat down, got all my books out, and then heard the bell ring, and watched everyone walk out of the classroom, because I had just walked into and sat through the last two minutes of their class period, not mine. But, anyway, since I was an hour early, I decided to go to find a computer and start figuring out what to do for my essay. I went to Appleton tower, where they have a little cafe area and a bunch of computers. I sat down at a computer and threw my backpack and pea coat down on the table. I looked down at my pea coat and thought, hmm…that’s strange, why does the inside of my pea coat look like a towel? Thats odd. Then I looked down at it again...it looks like a towel because it IS a towel! I had left my pink towel resting on my chair, and then put my pea coat over it. In the hurry of being late for class I just grabbed the pea coat and accidently, the towel and ran out the door! This is my life…

Growing up around the equator most of my life, and now being in Texas I have never experienced fall or winter before. I was just reading about the weather in Edinburgh on a travel website and it said the windy rainy weather is perfect for sitting in cozy pubs and little cafes, which may be true…but I have to walk from my flat in the ghastly weather to get to any of these places! For a few days here in Edinburgh I thought I was going to be blown away! And this was about the time my flatmate, Sammy, her sister and a couple other friends and I all decided to go to the zoo. We decided this on a Monday or Tuesday and thought, ok, we’ll go on Saturday. I was looking forward to it all week, because I love going to the zoo! Any zoo! Unless it’s a really cramped, sad zoo. Well, the week ended up being extremely windy and pretty miserable. But since the weather is kind of always like that, we walked down to Princes St. got on the bus and rode to the zoo. There weren’t very many people there, not surprising, but when we got there, the nice lady at the door said the zoo had been closed! Just our luck, we went all the way there and it was closed…so we looked around the gift shop and took a picture with the giant fuzzy penguin. We did end up going to Dynamic Earth, a really big science museum, it was fun…but I’d still like to go to the zoo. I bet by now most of the animal’s area about to start hibernating.

Also, during this extremely period I went to my Swahili club meeting, we meet on the 11th floor of David Hume Tower. There were signed in the building that said “evacuate in case of high winds.” How are we supposed to know what “high winds” are? When the building is falling over? Someone said it was because the building was poorly constructed, so something could happen to it in high winds. Someone else said the building had asbestos, and the wind could get it all stirred up in the air. I’m not sure which one I prefer to believe. Especially considering that people said the library also has asbestos, and that’s the reason its always so warm in the library, because they can’t have any kind of air ventilation blowing asbestos around the building.
This isn’t a picture or asbestos, but its mold that’s been growing above our shower, I don’t think it’s that harmful, but someone did finally come to scrape it off and paint over it last week.

My first year in college I only lived 40 minutes away from home, so I always went home to do my laundry. Since being at Baylor I’ve done laundry in the really nice residence halls, where its free, and during the summer when there is no one else you have to wait on to finish or who might steal your laundry. Well, now I’m kind of reliving freshmen year, we have a laundry room here, that uses tokens, that you have to go buy from the main office, which is not at all close. The washing machines are tiny, like everything else, and maybe they’re trying to save energy with the dryers because they don’t actually dry things. Last week I needed to do all my laundry, and this is what my room ended up looking like….they do have this really good invention, a clothes drying rack, haha, maybe I should invest in one of those…no…I’ll probably only do laundry two more time before I leave, Febreeze is a wonderful invention as well.

I had a philosophy paper due last Monday, a week after getting back from Paris. I didn’t really work on it during the week, it was the week of the elections and Guy Fox day, and just hanging out with friends. But I’ve written many a paper in less than 48 hours so, when I started researching on Friday I was pretty proud of myself. I was trying to make up for completely messing up on my anthropology paper. So, I researched online Friday, and went to the library on Saturday. I go to the library and started searching for my philosophy books, only to find out that they were in three different libraries spread out around the city. So, I thought, most of the books are at the Philosophy library, so I’ll start there. You have to have a special code to get into the building on weekends, which apparently I have, but it wouldn’t let me in. I could see people inside sitting around talking, looking at me weird…but no one would come let me in….thanks guys, I know I look like a real scary kind of person who would try to vandalize the philosophy library. So, from there I walked all the way to the New College, only to find out it is closed on weekends. How was I supposed to know that everything in the university closes on weekends? A university with thousands and thousands of students who are writing papers and researching, closes it’s buildings and libraries on the weekend? So I went back to the main library to get some books from the Special collection, oh wait, the special collection is closed to. So, I ended up getting books from the main library that weren’t really exactly what I wanted or needed, but at least I was going to hand my paper in on time, not five days late.

So, these are just a few little things that have been happening. :-) But besides the bad weather and my usual strange luck...life is good and I'm still enjoying Scotland! Thanksgiving is in a couple weeks, this will be my third Thanksgiving to be away from my family, but it should be good. I think I'm actually going to be celebrating twice! Now the trick will be trying to find all the ingredients for Sweet Potato Crunch and Watergate Salad! After Thanksgiving I go to London! oh, and I'll be trying to write essays over the next couple weeks too!