Catchy Name Needed

I just took the final. I hadn't really studied as much as I intended to, but I made a 99, so oh well. My average for the whole class was 98.5.

I started to put "sorta" after the "Done!" in the title, because I can't really take any time off to celebrate - I took too darn long getting through this thing. Now I need to go through the rest of Anatomy fast, and never mind if I don't make an A because it's not actually required anyway. (If I hadn't already paid for it I'd be tempted to skip it entirely.)

Here is how I study. This class I'm taking now is "online" - mostly meaning that the tests are online and you do all your studying out of the book. So I've had to adjust the way I finally learned to study in college, which was to take notes as fast as I could write in class (I had a whole system of abbreviations, as I recall, although I couldn't tell you what they were any more) and then I would come home and REwrite them in understandable English - preferably soon after class before I forgot what all the abbreviations meant. As time went on I decided that the writing and rewriting process was where my brain learned things best, so that became a definite part of my routine - at least when I had time to do all of that. So what I'm doing now for medical terminology is pretty similar, except just that there is no initial lecture to take notes on, I just have to take notes out of the book, lots of them. Lots as in, I've filled up two (smallish) notebooks already and am starting on #3. Then I take all the definitions that I've copied down and put them into an Excel spreadsheet - can you get any geekier? - it has four or five tabs - words, roots, prefixes, suffixes, and terms (meaning technical terms and abbreviations and other stuff that doesn't fit well elsewhere). I will have a nice little mini-medical dictionary when I'm done. The rest of the notes I've been putting into OneNote when I get around to it. That doesn't seem as helpful as the definitions part, though.

The chapter on the lungs has turned out to be easier, much easier than the last one, which makes sense since they did say that last test was the hardest one. The chapter on blood had a lot of concepts that were pretty much new to me, like many types of blood cells, not just red and white but broken down into a whole bunch of subcategories, like granular and agranular leukocytes, eosinophils, basophils, neutrophils. It was quite a lot of stuff to take in. The lungs are easier because everybody's had some kind of lung disease in their life - colds, flu, vaccines for pertussis and diphtheria - and the flu - TB tests - and then there's bronchitis, pneumonia, asthma.... you may not have had all of those but you know people who have! And you see those drug commercials on TV all the time for drugs for Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease - aka COPD - and asthma and some of these others, too. Respiratory diseases are just much more a part of people's normal lives than some of this other stuff, much as we may wish they weren't.

So am I the only person in the universe (or, well, the geekier part of the universe, anyway) who hasn't read the Watchmen graphic novel and thus doesn't really care about what they changed? I'm really starting to wonder.

I spent the afternoon at Starbuck's studying, and it was a much more productive afternoon than most of mine have been lately. As many people have noted ahead of me, it's way too easy to get distracted at home. I am going to have to drag my butt out of the house much more often, because one of these days I'm actually going to have to get a job, whether I manage to get certified before then or not. So I seriously need to get cracking on the studying.

I took a jewelry class this week. I only got one pair of earrings (out of four) actually finished in the class, because I was sort of slow getting the hang of the technique, but I finally did, more or less, and I can now actually make wrapped loops. Which is something I've been meaning to learn for ages. So yay me. (I did finish a really pretty kyanite bracelet unrelated to the class, only it's too long so I'm going to end up redoing it. I will try to remember to take some pictures of that sooner or later. These are the pretty beads, though, because I doubt that many of you know offhand what kyanite looks like!)

(Except Elise, of course, assuming she reads my journal, which I have no idea about, either way.) Which brings me to informing you that elisem   is having a sale. Shiny stuff!! She's already got some really good markdowns up there and she hadn't even gotten to the new stuff, last I looked. I should probably refrain from looking again at all, lest I find something that calls to me. (Fat chance, on that refraining thing. I should know better than even to suggest that. Like I have a bone of self-control in my body.)

I'm sure we will go see Watchmen at some point this weekend, unless something else interesting pops up or somebody manages to convince us that it is Teh Evil, or something. I know I'm not going to run out and see Last House on the Left.


And... speaking of self-control or the lack thereof, you guys are lucky I haven't had an Ambien yet, or the odds are good that this would end up being a seriously-TMI post about my sex life, rather than just the random bits and pieces. But I haven't, so I will behave. I'm trying not to embarass myself unduly.