Patrick and I agreed today that we have it good right now. We've got plenty of food (just went grocery shopping and came back with tons of fresh fruit and vegetables), a nice place to live, time to relax, and each other's company. This is great...I'm sad it has to end so soon. It was my choice to go to MIT though...I'm still not regretting it; if I'd chosen Stanford, I would have always wondered what MIT would have been like.

That fat lizard that tried to come in this morning is still out in front of our apartment. It's just sitting there, watching the door. I think it's one of these lizards. It's nice that it prevents lyme disease, but I wish it would stop watching us!

You know, I'm pretty sure it's a female. She's been digging a burrow outside the door in the dirt, and she doesn't have the blue belly markings that males do. Damn, I bet she's pregnant and looking for a place to put her eggs (they lay their eggs in early July and they hatch in mid-August). We don't have to worry about the lizard babies because we'll be gone by the time they hatch, but I'm worried the mom is going to run in our apartment any time she gets a chance. Oh well...

We had some lizard drama this morning. Okay, so I had the drama, and Patrick laughed hysterically at me. See, this morning I made pancakes, and I went outside to throw the leftovers away, but just as I opened the door, a lizard ran toward it. I closed it, but the lizard ran up onto the inside of the screen door and wouldn't move. So then I opened the screen door, but then the lizard squeezed under our regular door, but it couldn't get all the way under because there's a metal strip underneath. So I couldn't go inside because the lizard would come in with me. We finally got him to go away, but it was a harrowing experience.

We also had a lizard sneak in yesterday afternoon when our regular door was open. There's a gap at the bottom of the screen door big enough for a lizard to slip under (you can see it in the picture), and he just ran on into our living room and looked confused. That first guy didn't give us any trouble; he just ran right back out with only a little prompting. The lizard today though, he was stubborn. He didn't want to go anywhere.

Lizards freak me out because they can move so fast, and I'm always afraid they'll run right up my leg and bite my eyes out or something. Patrick isn't afraid of them, but to humor me, he covered up the gap under the screen door with a duct tape flap. Hopefully the lizards aren't smart enough to get around it. Ugh...

That's one of the pictures I took yesterday. It's the koi pond in Hixon Court at Mudd. There are more (pop ups): jacaranda trees and Sprague library, koi coming to check me out, and pretty flowers and more koi. Even though people complain about the blocky architecture, Mudd has lots of pretty things too. It's too bad all the green landscaping has to be maintained a lot because we're in Southern California where it's dry.

The statue in the middle of the pond is known as the Venus de Mudd (ha ha). People like to say that the woman and the gargoyles on the fountain represent the ratio of men to women at Mudd (used to be 4:1, but it's gotten much better--or worse, depending on who you are--recently). I like the statue because she's all curvy, but the gargoyles still drool over her.

I'm doing laundry, but there's a big bug (probably a cricket) in the laundry room. At first I thought it was dead, but then when I came back, it was gone, so it must have been alive. Ugh...

Uh oh...freaking out about grad school again. I don't want to make new friends! What if I'm not smart enough? Actually, I probably have the capacity to do well, but not the knowledge that other people are coming in with, being a chemist and not a materials scientist. I know, I shouldn't worry about it, but it's such a big change. Hopefully I'll read this entry in a few months and will laugh at how I was worried about nothing. Still scared though...at least Patrick understands. We're both afraid of change :)

I made chocolate chip-toffee cookies tonight (the recipe was on the back of the toffee chip bag). They're very good, but I feel guilty for eating them. How silly is that? I sent a few upstairs (to the OG suite annex) and we're going to work out tomorrow afternoon, so that makes up for the yummy cookies. Jeez, I should really learn to be content with my choices once I've made them. But no, I have trouble being completely content with life. Huh...

I took pictures today; maybe I'll share them tomorrow.