Alive

Yes, indeed, I am alive. I'm just busy and distracted, and don't have reliable access to the internet.
I moved into a crap-hole of a house for the month, and immediately Jennica and I regretted not checking out the place better before agreeing to live there. The guys (yes, guys) are nice enough, but during the year it is an off-campus frat party house. So it was in quite a state of disrepair upon our arrival. It took 3 hours of cleaning to get the bathroom to a human-usage level. I'm still kinda wary of it, but at least I don't get dirtier from showering in there. Someone had made Jello shots in the kitchen for a party gone by, and they made them literally all over the kitchen. We were scraping pink stickiness off of every surface. But after the smell of cleaning solutions faded and I got in the swing of my normal busy life where I come home only to eat a Hot Pocket and fall into bed, it's not too bad. There are pirhana in the living room, which makes it all better :)
My "class" is going awesome. It's an internship/observation at rehab centers in the Holland area. I'm in a different place every day or two, seeing almost every aspect of physical and occupational therapies. It's so cool. I've seen cases of some really interesting pathologies, including Alyssa's favorite: condromyalgia patellar. Cool. And I'm even more sure of wanting to do this, and also more sure of what parts of it I would truly like to avoid. Injured dancers would be awesome, 80-year-0ld stroke victims are much harder to deal with. A cool adventure overall, and one that really helps on my way to grad school.
The studio had a show last weekend, and it went smashingly. I got to be stage manager one night, and helped backstage the whole week. It was great to be part of the action like that; I was pretty much solely responsible for having costumes on 3/4 of the dancers. There were a lot of very quick changes, and I was in charge of them. The only real snaffoo was that a zipper busted while I was zipping it, and she had literally 20 seconds to get on stage, and somehow I managed to pin her in and calm her nerves enough that it went off wonderfully. It took a little longer to get her out of that costume, but no one in the audience was any more the wiser. They all danced beautifully, and were a shining light for Jesus in their full-length balletic interpretations of the creation and the book of Revalations.
This weekend I'm up in Cadillac with Mike, visiting his friends and just enjoying being out of Holland. His mother is a great cook, I gain like 5 pounds every time we come up here. It's nice to be able to sleep in and to hear all of the stories of the town and Michael before I knew him. A very good way to spend the holiday. It also gives me time to read over Jennica's big "lifeview" paper for her class, which is very good but also about 25 pages too long. Hopefully with the work I've done on it this weekend we can work it down to a more manageable length for her to turn in.
Alright, I suppose I should go, and let Mike's friend have his computer back. Sorry it's been so long, and this is the least pressing part of the summer. I leave in a week for a visit to my parents in Ukraine (woohoo!!). Maybe it'll be warmer by then...

Done

I am finished with chemistry. Regardless of what grade I get in biochem this semester, my chemistry major is finished. I can now graduate with a degree. Finally.

I took the biochem final today. What a nightmare. It was the ACS national standardized final, written by a board of big chemistry guys and was supposed to reflect the important things we learned throughout the 2-semester course. Well, it sucked. They pulled the most random, trivial, and stupid things out that they possibly could. No big ideas, no overwhelming topics, just nitpicky junk like "match the catabolic intermediate with the coenzyme involved in the reaction." Do you know what that means? It doesn't make sense to me either and I passed the class both semesters. Maybe we'll get points for being in class a lot or something. Stupid big chemistry guys.

Only one final left, then I'm done for the year. Time to start packing my suitcase.

Short Summary

No time for a long post today, so here's the highlights:

Exams this week ~ Survey of Jazz Monday, Biochem Tuesday, Statistics Wednesday
Day at home ~ saw Dad, got money out of the bank, got myself and most of the small Haack clan ill, found out my car was fixed all wrong and is in need of a phone-tag yelling session to get some money back
Packing up my life ~ no matter how much I threw away the last time I moved, I've still got tons of junk to weed out, those little plastic tubs just aren't big enough

That's pretty much it. Lots of studying, coughing, and calling car dealerships with my non-voice. Fun.