wow, the weeks are seriously FLYING by now! i can’t believe i haven’t updated in so long, but lo and behold.. september is already almost over! at school, i’m already doing scheduling stuff for next quarter. busy, busy, busy.

in the beginning of the quarter, i picked up some good habits. i stopped playing video games, i paid attention in class and didn’t take out my computer to distract me, i studied in advance, i cooked all our meals every day and i went to bed early each night. i started doing horribly in school and after a few bad tests it got kind of depressing. in general, i’m an a student. even when i’m iffy about a test, i’ll probably just get a low a or a high b. occasionally i’ll do worse and sometimes it’ll be like omg, a c!, but in general, i don’t walk up to our grade postings expecting something dismal. well, not this quarter! i’ve grown fearful of the bulletin boards on which our exam grades reside. luckily, after a brief internal struggle during which i evaluated my newfound discontent, i started reverting back to my old habits. i’ve started playing my favorite games again, i’m paying about the same amount of attention in class now as i did last year and of course i get to be lazy a lot more now that mommy’s back home. my grades have slowly crept back up to an acceptable level (strangely enough i can’t seem to do well when i’m actually being “good”) including a perfect score on a test last week. i feel much better now

something that added to my feelings of distress in the earlier weeks of the quarter was how stressed out the class above me seemed. school is getting noticably harder than before now, for my class, and i’m getting the sense that it won’t get better for a long time. so me not doing as well as i should combined with the realization that things won’t let up for another year and a half were enough to drag me down for a while, but i think i’m settling back into myself. we just have to take it a week at a time and do the best we can. i’m going to try to not let grades on individual exams bother me anymore, as long as i’m still staying afloat in the classes. think big picture.

last friday i attended the omega delta initiation banquet. omega delta is one of the two fraternities at our school, and i rejoined it this year. i thought valerie (who is also, coincidentally, my mentee) wouldn’t be joining, but she totally tricked me and showed up there! a lot of my friends who were in the fraternity last year decided not to sign up again this year, which is sad, but hopefully we’ll have some good times and be able to help the first years with some stuff. one of the things omega delta does is hold a mock proficiency at the end of the school year so the first year class members can try out their new mad optometry skillz in a test setting before their real proficiencies. it was really helpful for me last year, and i’m glad i’ll be able to help out someone this year.

jen & john

john & charles being.. you know..

the four of us near the end of the banquet.

val & me

haha i had to put this picture in because look how pouty jen looks..

on saturday, bev, johnny & jack came over to play. what a good day it was. we went to target, the park and DAIRY QUEEN! as usual, jack was all the entertainment we needed..

don't you just wanna squeeze those fatty cheeks?

see how advanced he is, using his straw cup all on his own? aww..

on sunday, we stopped by candace’s house for her commitment ceremony with chris. they’ve been together for over 4 years now, and it was great seeing them again (i don’t see them very often) and the party was fun. sooooo much food! i want some more chicken. haha..

chris, candy, me & charles

after leaving candace’s house early because i had to go home and study for my two tests today, charles and i briefly stopped at the marukai in gardena on our way home because they were having a festival this weekend. it was fun, but toooooo hot! there were a lot of stands with good food, and 5 gyoza were only $1! i’m glad we got to go.. we definitely wouldn’t have gone if it hadn’t just been on the way home from pv. i’ll just share one more picture to keep us laughing til next time..

i was laughing at this sign, and charles just kept saying.. why did they change the pricing so many times?? and then finally it hit him and he was like ooooh.. beaf! haha.

sometimes i get a little homesick. it’s been over half a year now since i left pv and i totally miss it. i have little reason to ever go back. most of my friends don’t live there anymore (even if they do they aren’t often there) and it’s obviously out of the way. it’s an easy place to miss.

charles went driving there with his dad this morning and texted me back some photos. that one was taken off a cliff on pv drive west, the same street our middle school was located off of. nice, right? i miss the peacefulness, the ocean views, the lack of street lights, the inconvenience of the place, the mall, the fog, the breeze, the parks, the trees, the windy roads, the peacocks and of course, my house.

he took that picture out of his car window for me while he was driving. new people live there now and i hope they’re appreciating it for all it is. we lived there for over ten years.. the house i really grew up in. it’s at the end of a short and quiet cul-de-sac that has a nice park with huge trees at the entrance to the road. everybody in pv needs to turn on the heater in the winter months but the house stayed cool for us in the summer. the entire back side of the house is made of floor-to-ceiling windows/sliding doors and it was so beautiful when the light would shine in. i hope their dogs are enjoying our fenced-in yard, immediately beyond which lies what could only be described as a small forest that i loved exploring when i was a kid. there’s an interesting looking pink cherry blossom tree right in the middle of the backyard and a huge maple tree on the side that has the prettiest little leaves that my bunny loved eating. i’ll never forget the feeling of dancing through the house from one end to the other. i guess i feel so attached to it because it was the one house i begged our parents to buy when we were shopping around, and i always claim to have chosen it.

i hope i end up back where i started after i grow up.