I Want A Barf Bucket Or At Least a 700 nm Filter For My Glasses

I tend not to remember most holidays until they hit me right in the nose or the eyes. Valentine's Day was no exception -- it took me a while to realize why there was so much abuse of pink, white, and red as well as rather tasteless images of hearts and almost-naked winged babies (eeewww!!!) I can live with the red and white, having gone to a high school whose school colors were just that. Plus red and white are a pretty good combination for fletching colors if I want to find my arrows again. For some reason, I get really nauseous when I see all the Valentine's Day stuff all over the place, including around the nice little forest corridors I like to hide in when I get fed up with being around too many people and being indoors for too long but can't quite leave campus because of some academic commitment or another. When I saw all that tasteless stuff all over campus, there were three possible courses of action that ran through my mind: 1) run into the bathroom to purge the ickiness out of my system before proceeding 2) bolt into my office 3) hide in my apartment. I ended up with taking the 3rd one -- the 1st one wasn't going to make me any more productive, the 2nd one was tempting until I realized that my office-mates were enthusiastic about it and I'd get very little work done because I have an office-mate who's struggling with Python programming and linear algebra, so I opted to just hide at home to get work done. Plus I figure my office-mates won't exactly enjoy the conditions that help to write: blasting music, frequent pacing, and acting a lot like Gollum/Smeagol.

And when I got a bit too saturated from work, I spent a bit of quality time with my trusty Chek-Mate recurve at Gator Bowmen. I'm back to working on my thesis proposal with several papers on evapotranspiration and carbon flux modelling, a few papers on artifical neural networks, and several pieces of scratch paper to sketch my conceptual model with. And my Chek-Mate is sitting next to me. I love shooting my compound and I can shoot extremely well with it, but the Chek-Mate is my non-academic love! I'll take a good, reliable bow any day over a human... In fact here's a top 10 list of why a bow is better than a human, in no particular order:

-- Bows are perfectly content watching me study or write proposals
-- They're extremely honest about me (ie, if my form is off, it WILL tell me!)
-- They don't call me during class and wonder why I don't ever pick up the phone
-- They understand the concept of "do not disturb"
-- It's much easier to really get to know the bow really well (ie, no need to go on lengthy dates that interfere with studying when a good test-shoot will suffice)
-- Bows share my taste in the kind of place I want to live in (ie, not in a *.* big city)
-- Bows don't have random baggage to give me grief
-- Bows transport very well
-- Bows don't try to get me to go to annoying/useless social functions
-- Bows don't try to interfere with my ambitions by wanting to start a family with me