Taxes done, etc.

Happy Contributing to the General Welfare Day, everyone, also known as "this is the filing deadline for federal and state tax, ewwwww." I've been paying estimated tax, and somewhere around December realized that given the stock market losses, I'd probably owe less than I'd estimated originally. And I was right. Large refund will be coming - apparently pretty much everything I paid in, I'm getting back. Woot.

In other news, I had a sort of date thing Saturday - met a guy for coffee, he's actually near my age and funnily enough lives around the corner from my place in Cambridge; not much of a spark there but I think we were both a bit nervous - anyway, dinner Friday.

Assuming I can get my mind off school, that should be sort of fun.

There's another midterm coming up next week for bio, and I have lab with accompanying quiz for molecular on Thursday, which is making me stiff with worry right at the moment because I am still not understanding as completely as I'd like to what the hell is going on. Got my paper on Japanese peasant land tax back; yay, me, 92 out of 100. And I hear the whole class bombed the midterm, not just me; in comparison to the average of 50, my 67 looks a lot better. It's all a little more exciting than I'd like, but what the hell.

Bio lab last night was BRIEF, thank god, and fun--I guess I'm at the "cool bench," we're overcrowded and everyone seems to like working together and being silly with each other so even though there's room at, oh, the table across the room, we all still stay put. Me, L, two really wonderful Russian women, B, and Y. B's got the same name as The Guy and looks a bit like him, too, which continues to be slightly weird but he's also not an asshole, so it's mostly fun. Somehow or other we were talking about drinking last night, I think in the context of what kind of stuff would *really* kill the zebrafish embryos we were looking at.

Anyway, BECAUSE we got out of lab absurdly early, I had time to futz, and finally got Stata working on my computer! Yay! Yay! Yay! It's a really good thing. It is a statistical software package, and I need it for my biostatistics course, and now that I have it working on my very own machine I can play with it and it's really fun to play with and it works and is magic and amazing and, well. I am just a teeny bit excited about it. Because it will make my homework about a zillion times less time-consuming. Oh, it's wonderful.

And even though I have lab again Thursday I don't have lecture Wednesday, so I get to go to knitting, and I am tickled pink and all sorts of other colors. Whoo hoo! So see you, whoever shows up! Whee!