Wednesday, March 9, 2016

Monkeying Around

Pre-Zoo Selfie
This last week I outdid myself. I worked 52 hours, aced a midterm, and finished my zoo project for anthropology. After coming home at the end of it all Sunday I crashed, well until I had to wake up for work the next morning at 3 am. Besides that one of the less stressful days of my week was the day I went to the zoo. I called my brother in law since he's been home with the kids and invited him to come along. My sister decided to invite herself along last minute so the five of us went to go study the monkeys.

I think every anthropology class ever does this project, my sister goes to CSUCI and she did almost the same exact project a couple of semesters though. It's like an universal anthropology standard to study primates. We had to study different aspects including locomotion, social interactions, resting, etc but none of the primates were doing anything. Like we spent three hours watching them sit there and stare at us. Most of the things I was supposed to be studying were unobservable, and it made me feel like I wasn't doing the project correctly. We were supposed to do three 20 minute observations, I started with the gorilla and all I saw was the first 30 minutes was him lazily groom his shoulder for like 5 minutes and the rest was just sitting and occasionally turn him head. The other gorilla was sleeping the entire time so I didn't get much from him either. Fun fact about the gorilla they pee for a reallllllyyyyyy long time. 

Besides my useless observations I had a lot of fun with my nephews looking at the other animals. My nephew Dj, whom I share many pictures of on here, hung out with me the entire time. My stomach gets in the way of everything and I get more tired than usual so it was hard to hold him as much as I usually would. He kept asking me a million questions and had a lot of fun looking at the animals. Spending time with him at the zoo made me excited to get to do those kind of things with my own daughter someday. 

Update: I went in for my 6 month checkup and I have gained no more than the 1.5 pounds I gained in January and the baby is perfect. She kicks all the time but never lets anyone besides me, the cats and sometimes my mom feel her. You can read my last blog post here and until next time!

XOXO

Ashley

P.S. I think I'm done with cats, this little fox was so cute!


Thursday, March 3, 2016

I Chased a Guy

I did something a couple weeks ago, and I don't know whether it's beneficial to me or not but I chased my philosophy teacher across the bridge. I think I scared him because he kept looking back at me with a weird expression on his face but he didn't say anything. But since I have a human inside of me, I wasn't exactly running after him. I was more waddling as fast as I could to keep up with him. This shouldn't come as surprising behavior since I do strange things all the time. I thought I was going to be late for class but I ran into him on the bridge, he was talking to another student and since he probably didn't recognize me since I never speak I wasn't surprised that he ignored me. He's a tall guy so he naturally is quicker than me, I stared at him the entire walk to class because I was so intent on keeping up with him and he looked a bit frightened. I would be frightened too if a tiny pregnant girl was staring at me and waddling behind me for ten minutes. I decided that I had creeped him out enough and went in a different door than him but I still sat in the second row and continued to stare at him (academically speaking) for another hour. Either he thinks I'm stalking him OR he thinks I was trying to ease drop on his academic conversation, which I did.

In honor of leap year
Now this all happened the day before I ended in the hospital, before anyone freaks out I'm okay and my baby is okay. I'm just sore and tired and that's not really anything new. I just had some pressure and pain that I had never experienced before and all the results were inconclusive so they sent me home. They ruled some stuff out and told me to basically get over it unless it gets worse. Academically this put me behind a day and I have since caught up and even managed to ace a psychology test after missing our final lecture on the test material. 

I am not an organized adult, I am generally organized but the whole adult part doesn't really fit in. Something I am learning and will hopefully be good at by the time my daughter is born is balance. Right now my life is nowhere near balanced. I procrastinate homework to catch up on sleep and then try to leave work as quickly as possible at the end of the week to catch up on homework I put off to sleep Mon-Thurs. The most social time I get is hanging out with my mom and of course my cats. 

Everyone needs a cat picture to destress their lives
Generally speaking I think that balance is something all college students deal with, some more than others. And if anyone reads this and has some tips on balancing my life, you can comment and let me know; my pregnancy app says I need to be more open to advice and suggestions so please let me know!! You can read my last blog post here and until next time!

XOXO 

Ashley