robglazebrook.com

Hey, all. Long time, no me, eh? I’ve been keeping myself really busy doing all the things that don’t really need doing. For instance, I’ve spent probably 16 hours in the last three days cleaning our apartment. Now, it isn’t that our apartment didn’t need a good scrubbing, cause it did. I found a colony of dust bunnies under the bed that had started crafting simple stone tools, and there was a giant hairball in the bathroom that had begun to form itself in my image (which also reminded me to shave). I destroyed both, as I am an equal-opportunity vengeful god. That isn’t the point. The point is, school starts up again in a few hours, and I haven’t done any homework in over a week. Nada. None. I have a short story rewrite due at noon tomorrow that I haven’t even begun to think about.

So how do I approach this problem? By updating my website, of course. :) Makes perfect sense, in a Robbie sort of way. I may even get the creative juices flowing by watching a DVD or something. I’ve already loaded the three dirty dishes left in the apartment into the dishwasher, so I’m running out of options on the cleaning front. If I can’t pick a movie, I may have to resort to sorting our junk mail according to size, color and rhetorical situation.

Eww. That sounded eerily like homework.

Welp, I just came back from taking the GRE General exam, and boy are my synapses tired. I’m bathing them in caffeine in an attempt to wake them from their stupor.

The annoying thing about the GRE is, now that it’s computerized, the questions grow successively more difficult as the test progresses. If you answer a tough question correctly, the computer gives you a tougher one. While this makes for a very accurate analysis of one’s abilities, it also means that one’s stress level grows continually through the three-hour ordeal. It’s a mixed bag.

That having been said, I ended up doing alright. Better than I had on my practice tests, at least. My unofficial scores (because I’m sure at least ~someone~ is curious) are:

Verbal: 630
Quantitative: 770

In other words, I did acceptably well on the verbal portion (above average for those in my field, though nothing exceptional) and annoyingly well on the quantitative part. I mean, what good does that quantitative score do me? *mutter*

I have roughly a two-week wait before I hear how I did on the analytical, since it’s comprised of two essays and those have to be assessed. I think I did alright on both of them. Probably a 5 out of 6 or so. I organized the persuasive one pretty nicely, but my points weren’t as convincing as they could have been. My points were excellent on the analysis one, but I wasn’t happy with the organization. And, of course, my feeble little vocabulary marred them both. *g*

So! That’s that, and now it’s over and done with. Which is sorta a nice feeling, now that I think about it. :)

1. Last week I saw a guy jogging through campus wearing a pair of shorts, a sweater, and a hat with a propeller on top. I laughed aloud. I mean, who the hell wears shorts in Iowa in November?!

2. Funniest headline I’ve seen in the last 24 hours (via Fark):
Arrest warrant issued for Wacko Jacko. Officials on the lookout for a noseless white woman wearing a surgical mask, one glove

3. Funny excerpt from LoTR: The Two Towers: Breadbox Edition (found via Amanda):

LEGOLAS
We lost our friends. Have you seen them?

EOMER
We probably killed them.

GIMLI
But they look nothing like orcs.

EOMER
Yeah, well. It was dark. Have some horses.

The entire thing is pretty hilarious, so check it out. :)

4. Maggie made me promise today that if I ever became a tech writer, I’d make things easy for girls who don’t understand computers to get. I suggested I could write Hello Kitty’s Guide to the Internet.

5. My English 413 professor knows a lot of interesting people. She shared an email with us today from a friend of hers as an example of the odd types of questions we can expect to receive in the workplace. Her friend? The President (Chief Justice? I don’t remember for sure) of the Supreme Court of Israel.

I was paid an entire paperclip to run this ad. :)

The Soc Club is gathering donations of toys and children’s winter clothing items for Seasons of Giving. Seasons of Giving is one of the programs sponsored by the Volunteer Center of Story County.

We are gathering donations of new toys, and new hats, gloves, coats, mittens, etc. in children’s sizes. We are turning in our donations on December 5. We ask that all donations be made by 5:00 on Thursday, December 4.

You can find out more about the Volunteer Center and the Seasons of Giving program by following this link.

Thank you for your support!

Now, obviously, if you’re nowhere near the ISU campus, dropping things off might be a bit of a problem. But I assure you: any mittens, Barbies, Hello Kitty gear or other toys that I don’t want for Christmas that are mailed to me within the next couple of weeks will find their way into the box.

I’m going to assume, however, that if anything from any of my wishlists makes it to my house before Christmas, that it was fully intended to be Rob’s for the hoarding.

I just spent the last couple of hours taking a GRE practice test. The results were neither exceptional nor horrible. They were decidedly meh.

I ended up with a verbal score of 620 and a quantitative score of 700, which shows yet again that I’m ~still~, after four years as an English major, better at basic math than I am at basic language. *g*

The annoying part is, I can easily raise my math score by studying. Unless I memorize significant portions of the dictionary, my verbal score isn’t going anywhere. And Dictionary.com’s Word of the Day email doesn’t do me much good when I don’t open it.

So. At least I have an idea now. The average score for people seeking MA’s in English, according to the GRE software, is around a 540 Verbal and a 520 Quantitative. So I’m above the average on verbal, but not by much. I should buy a bigger vocabulary on eBay or something.