Fifth week of school already… and my 22nd entry to one of the coolest blog hops, which is all about sharing the things you are grateful for. Honestly, last week I didn’t do much besides study and write, so this time my TToT feels a bit bland…

You can find all the other participants or choose to participate yourself at the link-up.

Ten Thing of Thankful #22

First – Six Sentence Crowd

This is one of those blog hops that has kept me writing, and one of the hops I missed the most during my hiatus.

Honestly, reading and writing aren't even the best part of it… I love this community so much! Thank you, Denise, for providing the weekly challenge with a prompt word, and the link-up.

When I don't have the creative juice to participate by writing the next poem or fictional tale, I will contribute by talking about my life as a student.

Second – Six Sentence Café & Bistro

I have been a walk-on character for a while now. I was invited by Clark one day, and I did not even notice it at first, as it happened through a comment asking for my e-mail on one of the entries from Chris Hall, who honestly writes such cool stuff!

My story this week was a continuation of one by one of the Sixers, Misky. I am so grateful for her including my character in her story in such a cool way that I had instant ideas for my own story.

Thank you!

Third – dVerse Poets

I have never been in a poets' pub or a community for poets before in my life because I always felt that I didn't fit in… The coolest part of this one is that everyone is different and good in their own way… and they give really cool prompts too!

I am sorry that I have only been linking up my old work for now at their Open Link Night, mainly because I have no time to construct new poems at the moment.

"the Beginning" and "Flammable" are the ones I had up this month.

Fourth – My brother got accepted to school

I am so happy, truly. He has been working at one place since he was 15… they were summer jobs at first, and after graduation he stayed, not wanting to instantly go further.

Luckily, he figured out what he wants to do with his life and went back to school at the age of 20 now…

He is going to be a car mechanic… how weird, considering I was 20 when I studied to be a car painter, lol. But he has been entertaining this idea for 2 years and now finally had the courage, am so proud of him for trying, hopefully it is the right course for him.

Fifth – Got a good grade

This morning I checked my homework for the Databases course, the one where I was a bit hesitant about one piece in the ER model, as I did not know which way would be better to solve it…

Anyway, I got max points. YAY.

The course is cool because we will build our own thing. I chose (as a music nerd) to create something to keep track of my vinyls/CDs collection which keeps growing...

Sixth – Had an idea at 4 a.m. to fix my homework before the teacher checked again

I have not used Windows in a while, right… I feel like a 70-year-old holding an Android phone for the first time, lol. I can't find shit, even if I have experience from my last school with Windows servers from like 6 years ago… bah!

Anyway, the homework had a part which said: set this wallpaper for all users on this machine.

Me thinking it meant all domain users (idiot)… and then thinking about the photo the teacher sent me about the wallpaper not applying, from which I could not figure out which user he was logged in as (PowerShell in elevated mode), and then I was like…

Wait.

He may mean local users too.

And I was like… oh crap.

So then I sent my homework fix while my boyfriend was sleeping behind me like a baby, lol.

I have never been more embarrased in my whole life...

Seventh - My Laptop.

I only do work on here now, even if I have a huge arse gaming rig at home which I now only use for gaming…

I love this portable thing. We got it used for 650 euros (a year ago?), and I just opened it up, cleaned it, replaced the Liquid Metal with PTM, and added better thermal putty/pads where it made more sense to use those.

I also added an extra stick of memory, as it came with single-channel 16 gigs of DDR5…

And it works like a charm. It is so light, keyboard is super nice to type on, the screen is great, my eyes never water (I do have some settings on for that too)… and I honestly can't imagine life without her anymore, lol. I don't think I could function without this touchpad and all the gestures I have mapped on here… and if I need to login to my game, it is capable enough… though I truly dislike gaming on a laptop so I don't (the screen is tiny).

Specs :
OS: Fedora Linux 44 (KDE Plasma Desktop Edition) x86_64
Host: ROG Zephyrus G15 GA503RW_GA503RW (1.0)
Kernel: Linux 7.2.7-200.fc44.x86_64
Display (BOE0A55): 2560x1440 @ 1.25x in 16", 240 Hz [Built-in]
Desktop Environment: KDE Plasma 6.7.5
Window Manager: KWin (Wayland)
CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 6900HS (16) @ 3.30 GHz
GPU 1: NVIDIA Geforce RTX 3070 Ti Laptop GPU [Discrete]
GPU 2: AMD Radeon 680M [Integrated]
Memory: 8.36 GiB / 30.58 GiB (27%)

Swap: 0 B / 8.00 GiB (0%)
Disk (/): 322.75 GiB / 951.28 GiB (34%) - btrfs

The funny thing is I bought an expensive Keychron low-profile/ultra-slim 75% keyboard before this laptop for my big PC to type better lol… but now I game better so it's a win-win (I have tiny-tiny racoon fingers, unless am typing on a phone, then the fingers are fat... lol).

Eight – Visited Viljandi

It still feels like home. My boyfriend’s parents remained there when we moved, and we drove down on Sunday to visit them. We had a great time, and I’m happy we got to see his mum too this time… usually she is at work whenever I manage to get my butt down to Viljandi nowadays.

We also went out to eat afterwards and did a bit of shopping.

Ninth - Music.

Am listening to this: Endless Twilight of Codependent Love by Sólstafir.

Tenth – The fact I can study for some courses without going to school

The lectures are even recorded, and I can watch them later if I want. For some courses, I really like this approach because it means I don’t have to travel as much…

I can get a lot more done at home too. I wake up at eight from Monday to Thursday, drink coffee, and start doing university stuff… and because of that I can already go home by Thursday evening, then sleep in and do my homework at 3 a.m. if I want to, lol… while chugging on beer or wine (maybe that is why I read all and think ahh yea... domain users)...

Honestly, I only have one mandatory lab where I have to be present. Everything else, I just go if I feel like it, because I do actually like going to school… I just also really like having the option not to, especially if I am stuck doing something, because once I start going through the material for a course, I cannot get away from my laptop before I am done, lol…

I love this. I love this so much because I love having to manage my own time. I always thought I was good at it — at work it seemed so — but during the first semester I did fuck up with one course a bit…

I think it is nice how university actually makes you think about scheduling, but at the same time, you can kind of build that schedule yourself around the deadlines.

We also have many course mates who successfully work full time alongside school, with a few hiccups perhaps… but well, for me, university comes first currently.

I have worked my whole life. Time to study and turn my life around now, so maybe I can do it again after 20 years lol... Luckily, IT itself can be quite broad and perhaps... not as boring as being a shift manager or something...