Eruantale

School has been keeping me busy for the past few weeks. You can all look forward to a hilarious modern rendition of Macbeth to be posted mid-march.

Right now, my most recent project is a public service announcement about antibiotic resistance. Check out the mini website I created for the project and brush up on some facts about the misuse of antibiotics.

The irritating buzzing of your cell phone wakes you up at 6:30am, and you briefly become conscious enough to wonder why you were so optimistic when you set your alarm last night right. Then you reset it to 7:00am and go back to sleep. When next it buzzes, you leap out of bed and grab some clothes from the stack you have yet to put away. With no time to pack lunch, you throw your books in your bag, skip breakfast, and scramble out the door, figuring you can just buy lunch at school.

When lunchtime rolls around, you order some greasy, overpriced and oversized selection at the café. You have no cash, because you forgot to go to the bank, so you just put it on the debit card. Halfway through your hamburger, you realize that there may be a pop quiz in Biology today, so you whip out your notes and textbook and attempt to speed read an entire chapter in the thirty minutes before your class.

This is what studying looks like.

While waiting for the bus to come after all of your classes are finished, you boot up your laptop and hit YouTube with your friends. Even if you’ve already seen every one of the videos in How It Should Have Ended’s channel, you still laugh hysterically every time you see Gollum. On the bus, you stick your headphones in your ears and try not to make eye contact with any creepy people.

By the time you get home, the monster burger is no longer enough to keep you going, so you open the fridge up and stare at its contents for several minutes before moving on to the pantry. You go back and forth between the two until you finally decide on a bag of chips to accompany your study time, since it’s fast and easy.

You bring out your laptop again with the intent of writing an essay that is due tomorrow morning, but eventually your research brings you to Wikipedia. Then you spend three hours looking up theories about UVB-76 and the Voynich Manuscript on Google, until you remember you were actually writing a paper about the Great Barrier Reef. You crank it out in 1.5 hours so that you won’t miss your favorite show, after which you decide to watch three old episodes of Chuck recorded on your DVR.

At one o’clock in the morning, you brush your teeth and set your alarm for 6:30am with ambitions of exercising tomorrow. Or today. You don’t really care about the difference. (more…)

This recipe is great for a cold day, or for when your attempts to work with melted chocolate are unsuccessful and you want to be resourceful with the mess you have made.

1. Melt one cup or six ounces of semi-sweet chocolate
2. Combine two cups milk with one cup cream and bring to a boil
3. Whisk milk and cream until frothy
4. Mix in melted chocolate
5. Serve hot with your favorite cocoa topping

Serves four—or five if you use small cups.

It’s impossible to browse the web without being bombarded by fishy looking ads that offer free stuff for doing practically nothing. Most of these deals never pay up, but I’ve discovered one that does—and I have proof for the curious.

Swagbucks is a search engine that gives you points or “bucks” that you can redeem for prizes. There are various other methods to earning bucks, including making online purchases through associate websites. Matthew and I bought our airline tickets to Florida through Hotwire and earned over 70 bucks for our purchase.

Swagbucks is really easy to use. It’s set as my default search engine in Firefox, and I randomly earn points for my day to day searches. I usually earn one or two bucks a day. It doesn’t sound like much, but it starts to add up. On Fridays, you have the chance to earn up to 500 bucks in one search.

You can use your points to buy hundreds of different prizes. I have been using it sporadically for about three months and I’ve accumulated enough points to buy a few $5 Amazon gift cards. That doesn’t amount to a lot of extra money, but hey—it was free, and it took no effort to earn, so I’m not complaining. It’s nice to know that when I next order from Amazon I can take a few bucks off!

If you’re interested, try it out. It’s totally legit, and it will save you a little money.