List update 070514

Recent list items: #73, #86, #9, #13 (most recent mile: 6:58), #100 (I bought a cookbook), #94.

Thus far, I've completed 13 items, and we're 134 days into the list. Therefore, it turns out that I'm just barely on track. Whoo!

OK, this post has no substance. I'm having a hard time thinking about the moment. I blame the gorgeous weather.

Random annoyance

I am still alive, just massively slackerly on the blog. For much of the past month, I can claim as an excuse the stats class that did its best to eat my life, in which I somehow managed a 4.0 despite not really caring about my grade nor feeling like I had mastered the subject matter. I guess old habits die hard. Every time I've taken a course pass/fail, I've ended up with one of the (if not always the overall) highest grades in the class. This class I wasn't taking pass/fail officially, but in my mental state for the term, a 3.0 was all I cared about. However, I do have an explanation: I only take classes pass/fail when I think they are complex and confusing. And I don't do well at not understanding things, so I tend to freak out and actually put in effort when I don't get what's going on. Therefore, it's not that the pass/fail grading scheme is causal to my doing well, but rather that there's a strong correlation between classes which intimidate me enough to take pass/fail, and courses in which I'll be scared into putting in substantial effort.

As for the random annoyance, I had two negative controls from yesterday's work. Same growth media in the two different types of containers I used. One of them was contaminated today; the other was not. And the one that was contaminated having to be restarted throws off my schedule for about a week, while the other one (had it been contaminated) would have had virtually no impact on my schedule. Grr.