03/11 - 03/17 Back to school, what a week

Oh god I did exactly what I promised I wouldn't do and forgot an entry. 03/04 - 03/10 was my spring break but it was pretty blah. I either worked or procrastinated studying. The only fun thing I did was go to a concert with the only friend who was home at the time, and that made me really happy.

This week was a very interesting one to be sure. It was the beginning of daylight savings, really, warm, and the first week back to school so my body wasn't happy. I didn't get a good night's sleep until Wednesday night because I was either too awake or too hot. And I was having digestive issues all week for some reason. I think that I kept eating too fast or something because I constantly had a stomach ache. The worst day for my stomach was Wednesday when I had to eat a Chick-fil-a sandwich and fries in five minutes or else I was going to be late to my chemistry class. I ate it so fast that I was almost gagging and then having six hours of class that were either stressful or hot didn't help. Then when I got home I was so hungry that I ate too much pasta and that also made me sick. When I woke up the next morning I still had a stomach ache. Then I got ANOTHER stomach ache later that day when I was once again ravenous and ate some pizza too fast. (I promise I eat better than this is portraying, it was just an off week.) This affects of this week were also mental because I didn't do a single piece of homework until Friday.

Thursday was the biggest doozy of them all. In the morning when I was leaving for school I locked myself out of the house without my car keys. I knew that there was no hidden spare and none of our neighbors had one, so I just took the city bus to school. That wasn't that big of deal, but getting home was bad. Very soon after I got off work at 4:30 it began to violently storm. I'm talking high speed winds, and buckets of water and golf-ball sized hail raining down from the sky. It was so bad that we just had to sit at the bus stop for five minutes until the driver could actually see in front of her. Now a new problem faced me: How would I actually get from the bus station to my front door, since the two are about a fifteen minute walk from each other? 

If it was simply raining I would be fine using my umbrella and just getting a little wet, but an umbrella will do little against such large pieces of hail. Luckily, I had told my sister about my predicament earlier that day and she said that she was going to get her girlfriend's mom to pick me up from the station. (She had also been stranded at their house due to the storm.) While the bus was driving to the station there were large patches of flooded street that I was afraid we were going to get stuck in but somehow didn't. My sister's girlfriend's mom was there as promised, and since the streets were too flooded around my house she took me to her's. My parents were freaking out because both of their kids were stranded away from home due to a series of mishaps during a tornado watch. But I was fine in the end :)

I have had lots of development with my backyard nesting situation. About four days after the white-breasted nuthatches began constructing their nest a European starling began destroying it, which made them abandon it. This made me genuinely upset and angry for a good portion of the day and I managed to cheer myself by thinking about how if a starling destroyed it, the site probably wasn't very secure in the first place. It's better for it to be torn up early in the building process than a big black rat snake eat up all the hatchlings. Me and my dad built a bluebird nest box and I hope that at least something native goes in it. A house sparrow started to build in it on Friday but we shut that down real quick by taking out the nest and leaving the nest box door open. I hypothesize that one way the house sparrows outcompete the native birds is by having a nesting season that starts very early, since many of the native birds song birds around here don't begin nesting until at least April. I think that we will leave the door open until then to prevent any more house sparrows or starlings from getting it before the bluebirds. I really hope that the bluebirds take it. In the past few years I have been seeing them more often around my house, so hopefully that means there's more demand for a good nesting site!