Dinner This Friday

This Friday my grandfather is taking me out to a sushi restaurant in DC and I cannot wait. This will be the fifth time he has taken me out to eat so far this fall semester and I love these outings. It’s a great break from school, always a fun adventure and of course a great meal. He always finds the greatest places based on what type of food I am in the mood for. For example this time when I said I was in the mood for sushi he actually got in touch with the Japanese embassy in DC and asked them where the best place for sushi was in DC. My Grandfather has all these really strange connections and gets invited to different dinners at a number of different embassies all the time. He told me that a few weeks ago he had dinner at the French embassy and it was an elaborate 8 course meal where you couldn’t even let your wine glass get half empty before someone was there to fill it up again. Yes my grandfather is always involved in something within Washington, he goes to see speakers at the Smithsonian and the National Galleries almost every week. I think its his way to escape from my grandmother who is unfortunately dying and is hurting many people around her physically and emotionally. She barks at my grandfather for most of the day because she refuses any outside help and refuses to move into a nursing home. Yet many of the things she demands my grandfather is too old to complete. I really feel bad for him.

This week

So I am officially here for one more week yet it is going to be a brutal week. I am trying to knock things on my ‘to-do” list off one by one but it is going extremely slow. One of my top priorities is finishing my English paper. I am slightly disappointed that it ‘has’ to be 8-10 pages because I feel that I have proven my argument in seven pages. Always in high school when someone asked the teacher how long a paper should be, the teacher would always respond with “however long it takes you to prove your point”. There was hardly ever a ‘set’ number of pages that a paper had to be. My Physics professor once told us that many times you an write a more compelling argument in 500 words not fives pages. He said that often times you try to over prove your point and do not get to your point in a decisive manor. I would have to agree with this, if I was given a choice whether to read a fifty page book or a page article on a certain subject I will almost always go for the page article. They will get to the point in a more concise manor and will not ramble for pages and pages. I wish the University of Maryland would reconsider putting page restraints on papers in the English 101 program and teach us how to write great papers in however long it takes.

Registered

I finally got to register for classes and I am pleased to say that I managed to get out of Friday classes next semester. I am taking a bunch of different classes which all count for a different number of credits. I am taking a one credit class which is a follow up class to this semesters intro to business management. The one credit class is on business ethics, which should be interesting. I am also taking a 4 credit economics class, which should be my only ‘bear’ of a subject. I am taking a 3 credit science class on oceanic weather patterns and finally I am taking an intro geography class. My Wednesdays and Thursdays are pretty rough with 4 classes each day but it is worth it because I am off on Fridays now. It will be so nice to have a three-day weekend every weekend. If I want to go home, I can leave on Thursday afternoon and spend 4 full nights at home, which I love. It is interesting though because my brother scheduled for no classes on Mondays for 4 semesters in a row now. He says that he doesn’t mind Friday classes because everyone is ready for the weekend but he HATES Mondays. I would rather have my reward at the end of a hard week, not the beginning of one. But that is my brother for you, something’s I will just never understand.

Schedule

I still don’t get to register for spring classes for another eight days and I am very worried that nothing will be open. I am one of the last people to register because I only came into the university with three credits which puts me almost dead last. I have to take this follow up course for my business management class next semester and they told me that I have to make sure I am with the same group of students. Well I was checking online and my current business management class has 39 people and next semester the follow up class only has 37 seats. I hope I am not dead last and can get into this follow up class because it is a vital course for the core classes in the business school. Yet anyway I am looking at taking a business calculus class, a economics class, a class on weather for my lab science requirement and finally a geography class. Should be interesting if I can get into all of them. Ideally I would love to schedule them so I don’t have class on Friday but it is not looking good at this point in time. I might have to wait until I get an earlier registration time for me to plan my schedule around not having classes on Fridays. I think tomorrow I will look on Testudo and see how I can puzzle my schedule together for next semester and who knows? Maybe ill luck out and be able to fit together a schedule with no classes on Fridays.

My Grandmother

So on Thanksgiving Day I went to see my grandparents. All was going well until my Grandmother mentally collapsed an hour in. It was quite sad to see someone who once had so much energy fall apart after one hour out of bed. Her downfall only started about a year and a half ago and now she has lost the motivation to do almost everything. The worst thing about it is she refuses to go into a nursing home and she refuses to receive any help. Most days she sits on her bed and watches history channel without even eating a single meals all day. And it is not like she is a baby and you can tell her when she needs to eat and when she needs to move into a nursing home. Unless we can declare her incapable of caring for herself in front of a judge we cannot do anything about it. At least about five months ago she gave up driving on her own free will. It was a hard step for her because she loved to drive but in her condition she was going to kill herself or someone else. It is very sad that this thanksgiving might be the last time I ever get to see my grandmother, must be even harder on my mother because that is her mother who is about to pass away.

Turkey

Thanksgiving break was great, just what I needed. I loved seeing my brother and my parents and best of all I got to cook my own meals. I didn’t have to deal with diner food for a whole week, it was great. Thanksgiving day we cooked a great turkey and I made my famous mashed potatoes, people that eat them don’t want to know what exactly I put in them. Usually I use a quarter pint of heavy cream and a stick of butter and then use the electric mixer to blend it all together. They are so delicious. My brother makes some crazy sandwiches the day after Thanksgiving with all the leftovers. Usually he takes three pieces of bread and between the first two he puts turkey and stuffing and between the second and third piece of bread he puts mashed potatoes and gravy and then toasts the whole sandwich in the oven. It is quite a sight to see him devour this sandwich. I have to admit though by this point I am sick of turkey and will be glad not to see it again for another year. Some families eat turkey again for Christmas dinner; I could not imagine doing that. My family usually gets a nice piece of tenderloin for Christmas dinner. Unfortunately we usually have Christmas dinner at my Aunt and Uncle’s house and my Uncle usually overcooks the meats and then butchers it when it comes time to serve. Oh well, you can’t win in every circumstance.