Happy Earth Day!

So, even though Earth Day is a decently well-known holiday, it just felt like the holiday to celebrate today. For one, it's always good to try to think about how you impact the environment and what you can do to not make that impact wasteful. I mean, it's 2013, so we are going to affect the government but we shouldn't be impact it on things like lights we don't need on and crazy long showers, etc. To celebrate Earth Day, I went out and bought a basil plant, which I have called Hazel. For a while, I was thinking of the Basil that sounds like "bah-suhl" but I opted for the rhyme.

Okay, so it's just one little basil plant, but it's kind of a first step for me. I didn't have a goldfish growing up and this is the first time that I've really had something that I'm solely responsible for. With that said, I'm totally looking for gardening tips, as long as the gardening tips don't involve an actual garden. Hazel will live its life on the windowsill of my bedroom and will hopefully thrive as time will tell. As for the question of "why basil?", it seemed like the best herb in terms of not being way too tall and being able to be added to many dishes. I remember my sister having a little window herb garden when she lived in an apartment and I like the imagery of cooking something, walking up to a plant to trim off some leaves, and then throwing them right in.

(This is going to be a very random paragraph because I'm throwing assorted sentences together. Go random!) I also celebrated Earth Day by utilizing natural sun more, even though it rained some; then again, it fit with Earth Day. To answer my question from yesterday, I went grocery shopping and found chocolate-covered cashews at HyVee. So, even though it was a day late, I still had some to celebrate. Call me weird, but as I was grocery shopping, I had this thought of "I'm excited for when my job doesn't have a meal plan so I just go and make my own menu and it can be whatever I want". I mean, I can do that to a good degree now since I don't eat on campus excessively, but I still have that lump sum of money to use on campus. Then again, I did put a good portion of my current lump sum today towards treats for the students and donations for soldiers overseas.

I am certainly looking forward to two weeks from now when the students are done with their spring semester classes. This week is "Hell Week" and some students have upwards of three tests this week on top of finals all throughout next week. This of course makes people stressed and a little bit of drama can quickly turn into a squid of anger (aka people yelling and flailing their arms). Of course, it doesn't help when there are multiple sources of drama happening concurrently during a night when I'm with a student at the hospital for four hours. The student is fine but needs some time to re-coup and this was a case where the gut feeling of "get a second set of eyes to look at this" worked out for the best. With that said, I need sleep especially since it's Tuesday tomorrow.

DFTBA. I'll see you Tuesday probably (if not, early Wednesday).