I just had a crazy dream. There were three historic quads, two side by side, one on the end of both. I mean, it wasn't those exact buildings, but it looked like it from the outside. Grace was a dark elf sorceress, I was squire to the Lord Knight (whose identity I knew in the dream, but not now). Anyway, one quad is the humans', one is the dwarves' (the side by side ones) and one was the elves' (the one on the end), though there were many races all mingling. For example, some "Clackers" as I thought of them, or intelligent hook horrors, were selling food on one of the dwarven halls. I can't remember too much about the beginning of the dream, but I remember that the king arrived, and we greeted his retinue, and we were supposed to go off on some quest or other. We went to a certain point to meet the rest of the party, but I needed to go to the bathroom, so I borrowed my Lord's horse (white and unbridled) to go back to the castle equivalent to the human Old Kenyon. Inside was some huge place with lots of elaborate rooms. I had to ask Grace for directions, and I still took a wrong turn and had to backtrack. I finally found it, and for some reason the door labels were in a language I didn't know, one said Ang Mano and the other said Emuil. I went in the Emuil door, and in fact both doors opened into the same room, which was really weird, but as I went in, two girls walked in behind me, laughing, and one said, "so, you found the women's restroom." I was embarassed and went back through the other door, and it was the same room but a different color and no one was there, though there had been several people in the other one. Anyway, for some reason I could still see the people in the other one, but they couldn't see me, so I waited for them to leave. As one of the girls flushed the toilet, she got sprayed by a shower or something, which was really weird. Anyway, I had to take a dump, and then I avoided the shower sprayer thing when I flushed. I had just gone back outside and ridden back to the group when I woke up. The king just shrugged at me since there's nothing you can do when you're waking up, and they proceeded off on the quest without me. blah! Anyway, I gotta get my computer up and running so I can get my resume, which my old college counselor said he'd give to an alumni for me. more blah blah blah. I think it can wait until after lunch.

Well, I just got home from school, a long drive from ohio to texas. I tried to check my email and lo and behold, my email password has already been changed to my "alumni" password, which sucks. So basically I can't check my email until I actually get my computer set up, which won't be until after dinner, and after unpacking. scary. but my plant made it fine; we put it in the back of the van and cushioned it with pillows, and it is now safely home (with a few branches bending because I haven't clipped it in so long) so my cat can eat it. joy of my life. anyway, I have yet to call anyone, girlfriend or otherwise, but I think I might wait until later tonight. I said I'd be in tomorrow, so no one is expecting me yet, and if I call, they'll want me to come over, and blah blah blah I need a shower. So yah, at least we have DSL at home now, instead of taking up the phone lines. Dad got a splitter so all the computers can be online at once, which is also amazingly cool. I just need to get it up. Raph will be in Vermont until Saturday, so I have 5 days to do horrible things to his computer. [grins evilly] Anyway, I have to check on the catfish in the oven.

Final grades: Poetry B, Music Theory B, Math A, Choir A+

Final Cumulative: 3.55 (sweet)

Ok, it's raining really hard tonight. I wonder if the activities tomorrow will be moved? I've gotten soaked three times today: canoing, showering, and running around in the rain, which I need to go back out into very shortly. Oh, it's wonderful to not care about getting wet because I have no job or homework or anything I'm going to.

So I've finished the semester, and I graduate on Saturday. I'm worried about my grades, as always. The good news is that my math final exam was so good that I got an A in the class, though no one got over a 90 for the final grade, so he made the 80s As, the 70s Bs and the 60s Cs. Anyway, the no news yet is that my music theory course is borderline between a B+ and an A-, so we'll see how that goes. My poetry course, however, the two papers are 60% of my final grade, and I got back the first one as I was turning in the second. She couldn't figure out what the topic was. That's always a bad sign, and since the topic for my second paper was even less clear (mainly because I wasn't sure what the paper was trying to say, because it wasn't one of those papers that would submit to my will). It was 7 pages longer than it needed to be, but still. Plus the final is iffy (10% of the final grade) because the quiz part sucked (we had no warning, she moved it from it's normal time to thursday the last day of classes, only telling us the second to last class day), and the take-home section was done after one night of no sleep and during a second night of no sleep. We'll see. All I'm really gunning for is graduating with a cumulative of 3.5, and I've got a pretty good buffer zone for that. I still wouldn't like to get a C in poetry, especially since it'll drop in-major GPA a lot. The subjectivity of English classes is ok, but the inexplicable grading scales always piss me off so much more because they don't reflect what you've learned in the class, only how well you can write about one or two or three topics that specifically interested you. [sighs] Anyway, I just got back from canoing, and showering, and I need to get dressed and stuff to go to dinner with a professor. I'll let you know more about senior week activities as they happen. (I have time to write again, since finals are over).

I just took the humanmetrics Jung test at http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/JTypes1.htm. My results are:

Your Type is
ENTJ
Strength of the preferences %
Extroverted 1
Intuitive 44
Thinking 33
Judging 1

This one was only 72 questions, so I also leave plenty of room for error, but it uses classic yes or no answers, rather than a scale of 1-5, which may seem less accurate, but it isn't confused by error caused by calculating the difference between lots of "4" answers and lots of "5" answers. I mean, if you rarely use 5, but use 1-4 commonly, it will tend to rate you further toward the negative side of things, simply because you don't use the strong affirmitive enough. Yes/No gets rid of this confusion. I suppose I may have slipped into E and J, but I know myself well enough to know that INTP characterizes me more than ENTJ. The 16 types don't take into account borderline cases, but there isn't much they can do. It would have to write a 3x3x3x3 chart, rather than a 2x2x2x2 chart to take into account borderline cases, and 81 different personality types is just incredibly unhelpful to create.

So I took some personality type exams again (it's been a while) at http://similarminds.com/personality_tests.html. My results of a Myers-Briggs + Enneagram test:

Extroverted (E) 54.84% Introverted (I) 45.16%
Intuitive (N) 51.43% Sensing (S) 48.57%
Thinking (T) 70.59% Feeling (F) 29.41%
Judging (J) 60% Perceiving (P) 40%

my old scores from 3 years ago were about 60% Introverted, 70% Intuitive, 55% Thinking and 60% Percieving. I feel this exam didn't have enough questions to be accurate. ENTJ from INTP. who knows? Here is a good site for reading about these personality types:
http://typelogic.com/ at which you will see (if you know me) that I am definately an INTP and not an ENTJ.

On the Enneagram part, however, I feel it was very accurate. (the same questions, mind you):

Type 1 Perfectionism |||||||||| 40%
Type 2 Helpfulness |||||||||||||| 53%
Type 3 Image Awareness |||||||||||||| 56%
Type 4 Sensitivity |||||| 30%
Type 5 Detachment |||||||||||||||| 63%
Type 6 Anxiety |||||||||| 40%
Type 7 Adventurousness |||||||||||||| 60%
Type 8 Aggressiveness |||||||||||||| 56%
Type 9 Calmness |||||||||||||| 60%

type-score-type behavior motivation
5----19----I must be knowledgable and independent to get what I want.
7----18----I must be energetic and entertaining to get what I want.
9----18----I must be peaceful and easy to get along with to get what I want.
3----17----I must be impressive and attractive to get what I want.
8----17----I must be strong and in control to get what I want.

Conscious self	Overall self

Take Free Enneagram Personality Test
personality tests by similarminds.com

hopefully those pictures will work. I have no experience with either the Enneagram test and little with the Big Five test, so I don't know what I "ought" to be. Anyway, my Big Five results are:

Extroverted |||||||||||||||| 64%
Introverted |||||||||| 36%
Friendly |||||||||||||| 56%
Aggressive |||||||||||| 44%
Orderly |||||||||||||||| 62%
Disorderly |||||||||| 38%
Relaxed |||||||||||| 48%
Emotional |||||||||||||| 52%
Openminded |||||||||||||||||| 74%
Closeminded |||||| 26%

These are fairly accurate, at least currently, though the description of them is inaccurate:

Extroversion results were moderately high which suggests you are talkative, optimistic, sociable and affectionate but possibly not very reflective.
Friendliness results were moderately high which suggests you are good natured, trusting, and helpful but possibly too much of a follower
Orderliness results were moderately high which suggests you are organized, reliable, neat, and ambitious but possibly not very spontaneous and fun.
Emotional Stability results were medium which suggests you are moderately worrying, insecure, emotional, and nervous.
Openmindedness results were high which suggests you are very intellectual, curious, imaginative but possibly not very practical.
Overall (of the Big 5 factors), you scored highest on Openmindedness and lowest on Emotional Stability.

The primary danger of these personality tests is that they first require you to actually know yourself well enough to answer the test correctly. 100 or so questions just isn't enough to significantly reduce the error ratio when you have 4 or 5 or 9 axes that those 100 questions apply to. If you are genuinely interested, there are 1000 question tests out there, but you generally have to pay for them. I was lucky to take an extensive Kiersey Myers-Briggs test freshman year of highschool when the sophomores and juniors were taking the PSAT and the seniors were sleeping in, so I had that to refer to when I took further personality tests in later years. It is also possible to just learn the 16 myers-briggs types or 25 Big Five personalities or all the Enneagram possible personalities and be able to judge people based on their observable characteristics. This also can be dangerous because it gives you a false sense of knowing people, when they might be completely different. The enneagram seems good in this regard, because it has a "conscious" personality type and an "unconscious" personality type, which reflects how many people see themselves. Anyway, I've talked too much, but this is my blog, darn it. You're reading it, so you can put up with it.

So today I played a lot of pool instead of watching pointless sitcoms while I was at work. At 11, Grace and I watched a really cool show on the Discovery channel about this guy who was born with no arms. He just learned to use his feet like hands, it's really cool to watch. He grew up in a boarding school for handicapped children. He went through a variety of jobs, including working on his family's farm, janitor, and currently he's a landscaper. He has grandchildren from two wives (he's still with the second one). He met his first wife because he was pulled over for driving 95 of a California highway and the newspaper printed an article about it, she also had no arms. They broke up later for complications involving the death of their second child, a son (their first, a daughter, is alive and whole). He remarried and had several children with his second wife, (she's not his first husband), so between the two of them they have 18 grandchildren. He gained more fame for rescuing an old woman from a burning car; the engine was billowing black smoke, and she was too afraid to move, so he broke through the until-then-unbreakable side window with only his feet and pulled her out to safety. He has, throughout his life, advocated the rights of the handicapped to be treated equally. He can do almost anything a person with arms can do, including use a chainsaw on fallen branches, push a lawnmower, plant a potted plant in the ground (after digging the hole); he can drive, eat, read the newspaper, and fish with his grand-daughters all with only his feet. It was a very nice feel-good story. In fact, it was a good tv day all in all. The simpsons had funny episodes, and on Whose Line Is It Anyway? David Hasselhoff (Baywatch, Knight-rider) made a guest appearance (or should I say, several guest appearances, since he kept leaving the room and then coming back in two games later). He wasn't very funny at all, but he is apparently a really good singer, and he mocked himself, which increased both Grace's and my respect for him. Anyway, despite all our precautions, someone STILL managed to walk away with a set of pool balls. Apparently, someone steals a set so they can play during the night or during the next day, while we're closed. It's happened several times this semester, but more often in the past two weeks. Grace and I were both on guard about it, watching people when they left, but whoever took the balls must have been someone who just walked in and took them, not someone who was playing with them already, because we had gotten them all, but then one set was missing when we were closing the cabinet. [sighs] It sucks because it's frustrating, even though they do leave the pool balls in the game room when they're done. Anyway, I need to sleep, so goodnight. (p.s. I don't think I said in my blog yet, but I won at spider solitaire with all four suits. It required undoing about 30 moves at one point, but I did it, darn it! oh yah, I'm bad, who's bad? I'm bad!)

I love poetry. I just hate studying for quizzes. Especially quizzes that are part of the final but actually take place the week before finals for which you are given 2-day warning. So I procrastinate now and then, usually with spider solitaire, two colors. I think I'm officially a spider-solitaire freak. I started out with one color, and got to the point where I was trying to break 1200 points because I never lost if I played straight (unless the game screwed me over in the final drop). Today, just a little while ago, on two color, I successfully got rid of all four black sets before I got rid of any red sets. Perhaps it's time to move on. [sighs] but four color is so hard. I guess it too will be easy eventually, huh? Just more chance for bad luck. I still fail to see how Grace wins at freecell so much more often than I. She had a 12-win streak once. I never play it that many times in a row, but I think my win rate is much closer to 50% or 60%. I'm a big strategy person, and when I can't figure out a strategy, I actually lose more often than sheer chance would dictate. It's strange that way. I can almost always win minesweeper if I don't have bad beginning guesses because even those situation in which nothing is obvious, I can figure out what would contradict and eliminate those spaces, which usually leaves a single possibility. The main trick to spider solitaire is to take advantage of the fact that you can move things off a same-color stack onto a conflicting-color stack in order to move something that otherwise would not be moveable. It occasionally screws me over at the end when I should have a move but don't because too many conflicts are stacked together, but it wins so often that it's worth it. And using Undo is not just for the end; you can undo at the beginning to help get what you want. I've cleared off 4 columns with still two rows left to be put down.

Anyway, poetry, I have 14 poets that I have to be able to identify and talk about based on a writing sample, just seeing their style! ugh! some are obvious, others will be darn near impossible. All I can do is read a couple poems, read all my notes, and hope for the best. I'm halfway through, but it still sucks. She said it would be fairly simple and easily recognizable stuff, but I'd almost rather have had a final during finals week, even though it's the last day of exams at 8:30 in the morning. Everyone always tries to move those 8:30 exams. Literally, both of my 8:30 exams are trying to be moved. My math class is going to have it thursday evening (we're not supposed to have exams scheduled thursday, but he figures that we can take the exam thursday night and study friday morning, rather that studying thursday night and getting up early for the exam). And my poetry class has this quiz plus some take-home section or something that she'll give us tomorrow. Plus the paper that I have to have done by tuesday because I'm a senior and she needs the time to grade it before grades are due. [sighs] C'est la vie d'etudiant. I'm gonna get back to it now.