Saturday, June 11, 2011

I Can Relate to This



This totally cracks me up . . . because it's sooo true! One time I peed like 4 times in two hours . . . so weird.

I wanna talk about Math...




So, Math. I've always loved Math. It was probably my best subject growing up. I took Calculus my senior year, but didn't pass the AP test due to a severe case of senioritis. So then, at BYU I took Math 119 to earn the college credit. And that was it. My math days were over. I do remember though that there were a lot of returned missionaries in my class. All of them were trying to get into the business school. I was 18 years old, and cruising in this class since I had learned everything in high school. Then I would watch my fellow classmates struggle and look to me for answers, which I thought was strange because they were a lot older than me. But, they had also not looked at a single math problem for potentialy 4 to 5 years depending on their situation. So this brings me to my point: Sean is one of those guys. 5 years later, he's taking a math class, but it's not just a review of stuff he learned in high school, he's expected to remember everything from high school and then build upon it. The difficulty of taking math in high school and spending an entire school year on 12 chapters pales in comparison to trying to do it in 6 weeks or even an entire semester. To make it worse, I'm not very useful. I took calculus and did great in the class, but now I look at a slightly more complicated algebra problem and stare at it blankly with no ideas as to how to solve it. The last two weeks I've tried to help him more to help him feel like he's not totally on his own in this battle, and my skills have gotten better, but I'm still running into problems that go something like this in my head, " Wait, do I add or multiply these exponents? How exactly do I get rid of this square root? and Is this allowed? or did I just make that rule up?" I've also realized that Sean and I also have different ways of making sense of the problems we solve. So he'll try to explain things to me, and I to him, and both of us feel like the other just said something in a different language. But in the end, we'll often come up with the same answer to a problem. haha.


I remember at BYU that the general education requirement titled "Languages of Learning" had two options for fulfillment. #1: take Calc or Stats or #2 take a 205 level of a foriegn language. I was always so lost as to why math and languages would fulfill the same requirement. What the heck do they have to do with eachother? Now, I've made the connection . . . Once you've stopped studying them they basically leave your brain as quick as they arrived. I would know, I've studied quite a bit of both and I'm pretty sure my ability to remember Spanish is about as good as my ability to remember math. Or maybe I should say that my ability to remember Spanish is about as bad as my ability to remember math. Either way, they're both deep down in there somehwere. :)

Thursday, June 9, 2011

TGIF

This has been quite a strange week. It all started Sunday with an odd occurance involving our swamp cooler. We tried to start running it to cool things off, but it was blowing out hot air instead. Sean asked a neighbor if he knew much about them, and we realized that there was a cover over the swamp cooler on the roof that Sean would have to take off. In the process of getting on the roof Sean burned his hand on the tar/shingles, it blistered immediately, and then tore off all the skin. The burn is on his right hand and covers about three inches of his palm. It's nasty. After realizing we were not capable of handling this type of injury we went to the Urgent Care where they numbed it, cleaned it, and cut off all the skin. So that whole chunk of his hand is just open flesh that even still, 4 days later, has blood on the surface. Not good. So he's been unable to work--since working at Texas Roadhouse requires a more dependable use of his hands than most jobs. But luckily, tonight was his first night working with his bandaged hand. After we got back from the Urgent Care we realized that as the swamp cooler had been running, it had started to leak. There were drips of water coming from the ceiling in our bedroom. We shut everything off and didn't really have time to worry too much about it because we were on our way to my parents house to stay for the week because Melissa is in California and my dad had to go out of town. The next morning when we got back down to Orem, Sean got a hold of our landlord, who had someone come inspect everything. The verdict: water damage. They took out the whole ceiling in our bedroom, and will now be replacing it because it was drenched with water. Lovely. I was just kind of ignoring the whole situation because I was at work and worried about taking care of everyone at my parents house, but also of Sean considering he was taking pain killer for his hand. And I don't even want to talk about what the upstairs looks like right now. Everything in our bedroom is basically strewn between one side of our room, the bathroom, the hallway and the guest bedroom. It's psycho. If I thought our stuff was getting disorganized before, now I really have my work cut out for my once this ceiling gets fixed.
Anyways, so then Tuesday my mom had to be admitted to the hospital because she had a fever that they realized was also being caused by an infection. She had not been doing very well Monday, and Tuesday and Wednesday were also rough days, but finally today after some antibiotics and good rest she has perked up even just slightly and seems to be feeling a little bit better. Chemotheraphy seems to take quite a toll on her body. Watching her deal with cancer and also watching doctors try to treat it makes me realize how much information about the human body and diseases is unknown. I wish there was just a quick fix to everything. Some kind of miracle vitamin or something. But I guess there's not. It's a lot more complicated than that.
We're trying to keep our heads above water over here. I'm just glad it's finally the end of the week so I can get everything cleaned up and feel more prepared for a week of work next week. Yay us! :)