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Thursday, April 15, 2010

school

See, this is why this blog is dying. I'm done with my tasks for the day, and I have something I want to write about, but I'm so tired I can barely stay awake. So this will be short (I hear you cheering).

And here's another reason it's dying: What I'm about to write, you already know if you see me on Facebook or Twitter, which just about everyone who's ever read this does. This keeps me from writing here, which stinks because six months from now everything I write today at either of those two sites will be, for all intents and purposes, buried forever (even though it will be archived at the Library of Congress which freaks me out more than a little), but this post will still be here, with nobody actually reading it ever, but, you know, here. In case I need it.

Oh Lord I have issues. Moving on to the ACTUAL SUBJECT OF THIS POST which is school. My school. Which I don't think I've actually written anything about here this semester at all.

I am about 3/4 done with a very strange semester, because I am taking one class which I wildly and ardently adore (trigonometry), and one I can barely stand to think about (sociology). So while I'm wishing the semester could last a few years so that I could keep solving trigonometric equations until I had my fill of them if that were possible, I'm also wishing that I could put myself on fast-forward for the next seven weeks so as to end the SOC-01 nightmare before the last few drops of joy have been sucked from my academic existence.

Meanwhile, my 4.0 is in no danger as far as I can tell, and I've registered for chemistry and finally after several semesters of disappointment, the much-longed-for ONLINE PHYSICAL EDUCATION class. I need two units of PE, which would, under ordinary circumstances, mean two semesters of a three-day-a-week class at the college which would entail changing out of my clothes and communal showering and other horrors, but which can be completed in the safety and comfort of my own home thanks to the wonders of the Internet. I'm not sure how exactly, but by golly if the good Lord is willing I will be finding out in August.

Also, I'm contemplating changing out the chemistry for Spanish, so as to have a break from the two trips per week to the valley, and to give my free-child-care providers a break as well. They are champs and I couldn't do this without them and I feel terrible being so beholden to them even though they swear they enjoy having my kids with them on a regular basis. And even though I don't need Spanish to graduate, seeing as how this is California, I'll need to know some Spanish anyway if I'm ever going to be employed outside the home (how do you say, "Where does it hurt?"), and like a snobby (and boy-crazy, but that's a long story for another time) dork, I took French in high school instead. French was fun and all, but its real-life applications in this part of the world are mostly limited to reading century-old British novels and seeing if I can translate the foreign-language instructions for products that are also marketed in Canada. But poor chemistry has already been shafted once, in favor of the beloved and awesome trigonometry class, and part of me doesn't want to keep putting off the core science classes that will move me forward toward the nursing program, even though realistically I won't be applying for at least two or three years anyway, until the kids are old enough to be left home on their own or enrolled in classes at the college.

Oh yeah hi this was going to be short, wasn't it. Oops. It's a good thing it's such scintillating stuff or you'd probably have clicked away by now. Hello? hello?

Monday, September 28, 2009

The Day In Tweets: in which I am humbled.

OK, I'm going to try the daily posting of tweets thing. Without further ado*:

• A&P work done. I read half a chapter without taking notes. Feels a little scary, like I should be in hiding from the Studying Secret Police. about 7 hours ago from web

I got a 9/10 on the quiz. I cannot allow this to lull me into a false sense of security about the exam I will be taking this week, though, and I am studying like a maniac. Except when I'm , um, blogging. Or tweeting. Or reading other people's blogs or tweets, or playing Lexulous, or hanging out at Facebook, or eating leftover birthday cake, or idly fantasizing about diving into a giant pool filled with cold tingly diet Coke.

• I have to take a quiz by 4:00 on the entire skeleton. In a week's worth of studying, have now learned... the skull. I am dead meat. about 10 hours ago from web

This was poor planning on my part. In fairness, the skull and the stuff that came before it (bone cells, bone anatomy, bone repair, etc.) made up about half the chapter BUT STILL. Side note: I LOVE this class so, so much. It's right up there with linguistic nerdiness on my list of Favorite Kinds of Stuff to Learn (what, you don't keep track of this too?), but I'm very glad that I don't study in public because it'd look a little odd for me to be sitting, say, on a commuter train, instead of on my couch, feeling my zygomatic arches or pronating and supinating my hand or contemplatively wiggling the condyloid joints in my metacarpals. And you know I would do it.

• I am publicly confessing that I was wrong about what monkey bars are called & my husband was right. (Good thing he can't see this at work.) about 13 hours ago from web

I wasn't very vehement about it, but in my mind "monkey bars" was a generic term for any kind of jungle-gym bars setup (at my elementary school we used to have a set that was vaguely rocket-shaped), and the bars that C likes to do, the ones that are like a ladder lying horizontally and you go hand-over-hand across them, I've always called "horizontal bars." T maintained that horizontal bars were for gymnasts and that C likes monkey bars. He was right and I was wrong and just look at me posting this where he can see it now! Aren't I a good wife?

*I occasionally contemplate closing this blog and moving to blogger where I will have a free blog titled "Further Ado" or maybe "With Further Ado", because really, I am ALL ABOUT further ado. And now the word "ado" looks like a non-word that I've just made up. My work here is done.

Wednesday, February 04, 2009

How To Feel Fourteen Again

Not, of course, that you'd want to. Sixteen? I can see wanting to feel sixteen, although you couldn't induce me personally to go back and actually be sixteen for any amount of money. Ten? Ditto. But fourteen, that's right there along with twelve and thirteen in the Miserably Awkward and Uncomfortable range. No thank you.

But if by any chance you ever did want to feel fourteen, there's a simple remedy that only costs $60 plus materials: take an algebra class. The algebra itself isn't what does it. Algebra is pristine and pure and beautiful; algebra is order from chaos and music without sound; algebra, in short, is ageless. Successfully working a page of algebra problems makes me feel like I've just helped to create a fresh, clean universe where it's always springtime. No, it's that sentence:

"I have to do my algebra homework."*

Ding! I feel in my soul that my bangs are soaring three inches above the top of my head, and that if I look down I'll find I'm wearing too-tight rolled-up cutoffs and white canvas (knockoff) Keds without socks or shoelaces. Not to mention the painful crush on the bespectacled, skinny, soft-spoken boy with an era-appropriate mullet and braces who barely knows I'm alive.

Oh, please, make it stop. I'm going to have to come up with alternate terminology; there's no way around it.

*(Not that I actually uttered this phrase very often at that age, unless it was approximately twenty minutes before the start of my 6th-period algebra class.)

In all seriousness, I am as glad about studying algebra this semester as I thought I'd be. You may remember from last semester, when I was up to my eyes in psychobabble, that I held an algebra class out before myself as a reward for surviving the term without needing to be institutionalized. It worked; you'll note the conspicuous absence of a straitjacket, in spite of the number of papers I had to write for that Godforsaken communications class. So now I traipse off down to the valley every Monday night to sit for three hours in a surprisingly diverse class taught by a youthful blonde high-school algebra teacher who looks startlingly like one of my bridesmaids and who speaks with an Eastern European accent that I'm sure her young male students find extremely alluring. It's a very happy time.

I'm also taking a class in California history that I don't need, but it's taught up here by an instructor I enjoy on a night when everyone else was busy anyway so I signed up. Last week we were asked to tell what topics we were thinking of for the papers we'll turn in later in the semester, and fully half the class is apparently planning to write seven to ten pages about the Gold Rush. I pity the instructor. I personally am going to add spice to the mix by writing about the Hetch Hetchy water system. I KNOW. You can't WAIT to read that one, and I'll bet the poor beleaguered teacher can't either. (I had it narrowed down to that or the life of James Lick, but in the end I decided against doing a biographical paper, even though the research trips would have been AWESOME.)

Friday, October 03, 2008

yes again! an entry consisting of many small snippets on various topics! I am SO ORIGINAL OMIGOSH.

I have spent the past five days studying madly and feverishly for a Human Development exam. (The teacher has us scheduled to take an exam every three weeks. Fun times!) The first one took me by surprise with its brain-bending difficulty, so I was determined to be more prepared this time, and I made myself a very nerdy fill-in-the-blank study guide based on my notes and then studied it until my eyes nearly bugged out. (You would never, ever have caught me doing this in high school. In fact, I had no real concept of studying for tests back then, and I don't think I ever actually did it. However, that was before I lost those neuron pathways in my old age, not to mention the synaptic pruning that's been going on for all these years. Gee, what do you think these Human Dev. chapters were about? You'll never guess.) At any rate, I think the studying paid off, or else the instructor had pity on us and made this test a whole heck of a lot easier, because I just took the exam and I feel pretty good about it. Now I have to study equally madly and feverishly (and nerdishly) for the Communications exam I have to take by Tuesday. The fun never ends. Until mid-December, that is, when I (hallelujah) gleefully sell my current textbooks, and put this semester behind me with much rejoicing.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

We went to the library book sale today and spent more than we meant to. But it's on books, and books really matter, so that's OK, right? right? I mean, that's an investment, right? (I can't even remember offhand what I bought. A handful of children's books, I think, and maybe a book of plays, or did I put that back? And the kids got... lots of stuff too. But rest assured it's all very important and well worth blowing the budget a little bit.)

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

So. Politics. Anyone have any life-changing moments during the debate? Didn't think so. I think both parties did fine. I also think it was extremely boring. Next time let's have some mud-wrestling, please. Or at least a few contentious issues. Or, barring that, a serious gaffe along the lines of telling a guy in a wheelchair to stand up so that people can look at him, or discussing FDR getting on TV when the stock market crashed in 1929. Bring on the funny if you're not going to bring any passion, please. (And while I'm at it, can I please request that we ban the word "maverick" from any further public political discussion? There are synonyms you can use if you need to. Thank you. Oh, and Sarah? I still want to be your pinky-swear new best friend, and the accent is cute, and the lack of political polish is refreshing if a little scary, but please do remember that the word CLEAR is inside the world NUCLEAR. See it? Right... there. After the "nu". HOW HARD IS THIS, PEOPLE.)

I'm too sick of the subject to do any real justice to the whole not-a-bailout-but-really-it-is thing. (But watch me keep talking about it anyway.) I think it's time to let the economy correct, but that's not Politically Expedient and also it could be kind of disastrous, so whatever, bail us out to the tune of $2,500 per person if you really want to. Just stop placing all the blame on Republicans, please. We weren't the ones forcing banks to lend to people who really shouldn't have had mortgages. (Wait. That's RACIST, as Rachel Lucas would say. Nevermind. Carry on.) There are plenty of causes for this mess, but don't we all have a great time assuming that our side has no responsibility and the other side has all of it? Isn't it just inspiring? Aren't human beings awesome? Election years just make you glad to be alive, don't they?

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

O-K. Moving on.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

C had her birthday on Tuesday. She is now nine years old, oh my gosh. (I so remember being nine. I was just like her, only without the good hair.) I just realized that I missed doing the traditional birthday post. Did I skip LT's this year too? I think I might have. I AM A BAD MOTHER. I'm very sorry, kids. A good mother would never do this; in fact, she would bore the entire Internet with intimate details of your development over every month of your lives, something I'm sure you'd relish reading later on as well. Maybe for your children, I'll do that. No? You don't think? Oh, OK.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

WHAT book was it where the mother was constantly teasing her kids about what a Good Mother would do? Oh, yes. Izzy, Willy-Nilly. Please read this now. This means you. Thank you. (You must admit it's more polite than my usual style. I'm trying.)

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

It is raining -- the first real rain since May. (Three minutes of tiny sprinkles last Monday do not count.) I am SO SO HAPPY about this, especially since we went ahead and moved C's birthday party from tomorrow to Sunday so now we don't have to worry about the beautiful, wonderful rain keeping all sixteen of us indoors for the entire afternoon. I am, however, supposed to bury a treasure tomorrow and construct a map course for the kids to follow to find it, so I'm hoping that I get some gaps between the "afternoon showers" after the "rain in the morning" that we have been promised. Either way, THANK YOU, GOD AND NWS. KISSES.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

And thatisall. Goodnight. I'm going to go get into comfy jammies, lie in my bed with the window open, listen to the rain falling in our little woods, and read Wives and Daughters until I can't keep my eyes open anymore. Feel free to envy me at any time. I can take it.

Friday, April 11, 2008

stupid ***** class.

I am not one of those inexplicable people who NEED TO RUN. Know what I mean? The ones who just feel that their day isn't right unless they've got out there in whatever kind of nasty or nice weather and pounded the dirt with their shoes for eleventy gazillion miles. I might wish I was one of those people from time to time, in much the same way as I used to wish I could be anorexic when I was in high school. (Thank you, popular culture's conception of the acceptable female form. Thanks so much.) But instead, here is a list of things that I feel I simply MUST do every day or lose part of myself:

1. Read.
   
2. Eat.
   
3. Check my email.
   

I'm going to be brutally honest and not put "pray" on there, even though it should be, because that's more of an external-reminder-needed kind of thing. Ditto "study", "read the Bible", etc.

So. I have no internal motivation to seek any kind of exercise, which is maybe why I have struggled with my weight in some degree or another for my entire life, if you include being ordinary-shaped in high school and wearing a size ten and thinking I was SO SO FAT as "struggling with my weight". But now I have a pretty hefty external motivator, in the shape of a really expensive textbook and a college class, both of whose goals are basically to teach me to feel bad about the way I feed myself and my family, and to encourage me to do better, and oh yeah, to exercise. Often. Often and sweatily. Which is why, today, I (drumroll please)....

jog/walked for two and a quarter miles.

You must understand that other than an occasional brisk walk, frequent easy strolls (which, contrary to my comfortable self-delusions, do not count), and a very brief encounter with a perky British woman named Petra in a Reebok aerobics video who kept telling me I was doing great and to remember to move those ahms, I have not engaged in substantial exercise since I was required to do so. In high school. Three pregnancies, three thousand bowls of ice cream, and nearly half a lifetime [choke] ago. So the fact that I voluntarily chose to begin the famous Couch to 5K Running Plan, with no Mrs. F or Miss H standing over me threatening a bad grade if I gave up, is a testimony to the efficacy of NUTR-10 as a motivator. I am frankly unsure if I will ever make it to the 5K end; at this point I'm just enormously proud of myself for having left the Couch. Once, so far. If I never mention this again, you'll know why. (Where is Mrs. F when you need her?)

Monday, December 24, 2007

very quick little tidbits

Guess what I did today? I used the table saw to cut trim! For three whole rooms! (Good thing most of the mistakes I made were of the trim-too-long variety. Ahem. At least there were no mistakes that involved, say, copious quantities of blood.)

And (drumroll please) all of the floor, window, and door trim in the bedrooms is DONE. Donedonedone!! That leaves ceiling moulding, which is not a high priority and which we will probably do one room at a time as we can afford to buy good stuff, rather than trying to put back the cheap stuff that was there before.

Aaand this Friday we are emptying a storage unit (one of two), and then Saturday we are LAYING THE FLOORS YES YES YAY.

Also, I still have not found out my grades because the college's grade-checking site won't let me in to see them. What kind of Communist conspiracy is this??

We are all ready for Christmas and even excited. Dinner is on the table so I must not elaborate.

Thursday, November 15, 2007

tying up a few loose ends

loose end the first:
The texbook was in the classroom. The instructor didn't bat an eyelash or even smirk (that I could see, anyway) when I asked about it. As Mr./Ms. Anonymous Commenter noted a couple of days ago, surely the guy knows me by now.

loose end the second:
Claire's ear is healing up. I am not at all certain that the thing was a keloid, simply because it has shrunk so much and keloids are supposed to be more or less permanent. I think it is/was a boil. But what do I know? Anyway, it's responding favorably to antibiotics and very careful earring hygiene, so I'm not worried.

loose end the third:
In case anyone's wondering, we're still buying The House. We just get to pay penalties for the extension of the escrow. The selling agency has courteously agreed to pay the penalties for which it is at fault (failure to get all the necessary signatures as fast as they should have); we pay the rest. Only buying a house (or, I suppose, having unimaginable-to-me wealth, or maybe serious remodeling, or having a dreadful disease... oh, shut up, Rachel) can put you in a mindset where you find out that you are going to have to pay $600-ish extra for something, and you just shrug and move on. So. Sometime between Thanksgiving and the end of the month, we should close, and then we start making repairs and doing a little bit of remodeling, and then we hope to move in before Christmas. It all feels very unreal to me at present, frankly. Watch this space for a possibly-asterisk-laden freakout once the layer of surreality wears off.

Sunday, November 04, 2007

warning: politics. RUN AWAY, RUN AWAY!

In response to yesterday's post, Karen (hi Karen! nice to meet you) asked me the following question:

Maybe you've addressed this before and I've forgotten, but what is it about those two books that's annoying you so much? I've read the second one, and I'm curious to hear what you're thinking.

The books, to save you going back and clicking on the links, are The Working Poor: Invisible in America by David Shipler and Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By In America by Barbara Ehrenreich. They annoyed me for mostly different reasons, although some of the overarching Big Deal reasons were the same.

Karen specifically mentioned Nickel and Dimed, which details the results of an experiment the author conducted wherein she shed her upper-class lifestyle for three separate one-month periods to see if she could make ends meet at the minimum wage. She treated this as if it was a Giant And Very Important Journalistic Endeavor. (Think Nelly Bly doing Ten Days In A Madhouse, only with more angst and less creativity.) The main problem I have with the book, aside from the author's obvious political slant (not as obvious as Shipler's in The Working Poor, though) was the fact that there is absolutely no way she could learn anything significant about the lives of the working poor in ninety-divided-by-three days spent pretending she was one of them.

Also, the little she did learn, she managed to learn in spite of the fact that while she had resources most poor people lack (namely, start-up costs), she didn't take advantage of the resources that they do have. Most working poor people have friends and families and significant others, or at least churches or social workers, or, for crying out loud, roommates to help them; she did not even attempt to take advantage of any such assistance, and so her results were skewed. In virtually any field of endeavour, there's room to move up from the entry level for those who make enough of an effort at it; of course this could not be a factor in such a brief experiment. The poor have loves and grumbles and joys and sorrows just like she does in her upscale condominium in Key West; she wrote about the poor in a manner that claimed to be empowering (see! they are real live people! They have real needs and wants!), and which might have been so on the surface, but which in actual fact was almost unbearably condescending (how can they possibly think they are happy living like this? omg, look at me aspiring to be trailer trash!). In doing her Dian-Fossey-among-the-gorillas bit, she learned about the habits and activities of minimum-wage earners, to an extent, but there is no way she learned what it is like to actually be poor any more than Fossey learned what it was like to actually be a gorilla, or Nelly Bly learned what it was like to be insane. Ehrenreich admits this, but then she spends the rest of the book acting like she's telling us what it's like to actually be poor. Ehrenreich purported to tell people about life at the minimum wage, but as a person who has lived the lifestyle at which she was only pretending, I can authoritatively state that she had only the very faintest idea what she was talking about.

So why even bother? Well, I will admit that maybe to other people like herself -- people who have maybe never considered that the person who waits on their tables or cleans their houses has actual feelings -- this book has value. Also, I have to confess that the woman can write well and she's very, very funny when she wants to be. Still and all, the Economist's Bible it's not, and you can perhaps see why it made me a wee bit angry.

As for the Shipler book, in some ways it was much better than Ehrenreich's; in others it was much worse. His research was far and away more complete and compelling than hers; while she was playing waitress and dashing back to her trailer to taptaptap away about it on her laptop, he was interviewing dozens of "the working poor" (I am so, so tired of this phrase), some of whom had succeeded in moving beyond minimum wage, and some of whom had not. The result was actually quite interesting to read overall, although there were more than a few times when I wanted to throw the book against the wall. For much of the book (with some substantial exceptions), his obvious socialist slant was restrained to some purposeful decision-making in the way the research was presented, and pepperings of commentary here and there; there were times when I would actually have deemed it politically balanced.

However, he opens and closes with two of the most thinly veiled socialist rants I have seen since my own writings as a soulful, oh-so-compassionate, completely misguided teenager. His solutions to the problem of working poverty are: raise the minimum wage really high (of course), pay higher-paid employees less to compensate (that'd do wonders for people's motivation to excel, no?), "restructure the hierarchy of wealth to alleviate the hardship down below" (p. 286), socialize healthcare (another of course), subsidize housing, mobilize poor voters (because, of course, the point of voting is to help better your own situation, as everyone knows), and, oh yeah, develop job-skills training and vocational education (the only two of his solutions with which I agree). To many people, obviously, this list presents no problem at all (after all, look who's running away with the Democratic presidential race). To me, however -- well, you asked why I found the book annoying, and that's the answer. I just don't agree with the guy's solutions, or his priorities, or his conception of the role of government in American life contrasted with the importance of individual responsibility, or even his overall values as far as I can tell. And yet I have had to eat, sleep, and breathe his book (me exaggerate?) for weeks on end. Picture your average Prius-driving, Clinton-voting neohippie in a class built around the essays of George Will.

And now that I've alienated/bored/shocked you all with my utter and complete lack of soulful compassion, I'm going to bed to read. This much-beloved time change is working its usual unreasonable havoc on my sense of time, and I feel like it must be at least 1:00 AM by now.

Saturday, November 03, 2007

A random, listy kind of I-don't-really-have-anything-specific-to-say kind of post

Things that fill my days:

• teaching the kids.
  
• washing clothes, hanging laundry on the line, bringing it in, folding it, putting it away*
  
• assisting in the Great Family-Wide Autumnal Wood-Gathering effort, which is monumental and seemingly unending and absolutely wears me out, meaning I'm a total wimp, because my dad, who is twenty-two years older than me with a painful case of MS and who knows what all other ills and discomforts, is the driving force behind it and we scurry to keep up with him.
  
• cooking for six, but only a few days a week.*
  
• going for long walks when I can, usually with one or more of the kids.
  
• my own studying and schoolwork.
  
• a varied and tiresome list of home-purchase busywork, like lining up homeowner's insurance and keeping on top of the substantial paperwork required by the lender, all of which would be less annoying if we didn't have the axe suspended over our heads, ready to drop at the close of business hours Monday, rendering all of this absolutely pointless.
  
• driving back and forth to town (seventeen miles/thirty minutes) and the chapel for Boy Scouts, school, Bible study, Awana, groceries, and who knows what all else.
  
• reading. You can't stop me reading, no matter how busy I get.
  

*actually, my housework-load has never been lighter. Dad cleans the living room, he and Mom and I split the cooking, Mom and I do the laundry, and that just leaves my room for me to tidy, pretty much. And generally I just shut that door and shrug.

Things that have annoyed me (aside from the obvious):

• this book and this one too. Only SIX MORE WEEKS of that abysmal class and then I am going to fully shoot those books full of holes. You think I'm joking, but I'm not.
  
• My jaw. Hello, jaw, you are only thirty-two years old; you are not supposed to be worn out and be all clicky and so so painful. Maybe I have reached my lifetime quota for talking, and will have to spend the rest of my days in frustrated silence (shut up, I hear you cheering) with my teeth wired together, living on milkshakes. (hey, there's some consolation).
  
• This afternoon, I stopped off downtown to buy something at a store and there was Christmas music, loud, terrible Christmas music blaring from speakers hidden in the awnings that run along the businesses on the main drag in town. Come on, people, if you're going to start the commercialization of the whole thing so nauseatingly early, at least give us some Chanticleer or Mannheim Steamroller or London Philharmonic or something, not the Christmas version of what commonly passes for country music these days. Please. I am begging.

Things that have my nerdy synapses firing double-time and all gleeful-like:

• The Language Log. It simultaneously makes me feel linguistically satisfied and very, very stupid.
  
• in a similar vein, RACHEL WANTS FOR CHRISTMAS SO MUCH. (don't buy it, though, because I have alerted T already in an email with more exclamation points than I am generally inclined to use.)
  
• My Barnes and Noble membership. Because now, of course, I have to buy books, or else the membership will have been a total waste. Also, I have found that bn.com has wishlists just like Amazon except it's all books, all the time, which, yay. Remember when Amazon was just books? Ah, the good old days.
  
• Also, yay for the time change! I am completely in favor of getting an extra hour to stay up late and read. Thank you, William Willett!
  

Thursday, October 25, 2007

I am too tired to think of a title.

I haven't lost anything substantial in two weeks! That's good news, right? Except that now I totally jinxed myself and who knows what I'll lose tomorrow. Probably my mind.

Also, I stayed up late in spite of a nasty miserable head cold in order to register for next semester's classes, thinking that Friday was the 27th. (Because online registration is fun, OK? No, there's no danger that the classes will fill up. Yes, I have until January to register. Just realize that I'm a nerd and move on.) Except when I looked down at the handy-dandy little date display at the bottom of my monitor I realized (as you doubtless already have) that I had made a mistake and tortured my poor sickly self for nothing. Oops.

In spite of the fact that I'm apparently a total airhead who can't remember what day it is, I am doing OK in school. Music Appreciation is an absolute blast, and I manage to keep myself from being TOO annoying without having to shut up completely. And the English class is going better than I thought. So far I am surprised at how good my grades have been; the entire grade is based on writing papers and essays, which I hate. I'm especially surprised at how lenient the instructor was when he graded my in-class essay, which had to be done in ink, as in, without a word processor, in the process of which I learned two things: 1) My handwriting is abysmal and 2) I rely a bit too heavily on revision and I need to learn to organize my thoughts more thoroughly before I start writing, or else I end up starting over after writing for about forty-five of the allotted 150 minutes, and then turning in a paper that looks like it was written by a Rhesus monkey anyway.

There is actual house news! The house is in escrow (am I the only person on the planet who says that all confidently but in actuality has only a very foggy and incomplete idea of what it means? Probably.). We are making plans for the renovations and repairs we will be doing, and I THINK maybe we can squeeze Pergo floors into the budget, which makes me a happy happy person. There will be painting to do in every single room including both bathrooms (augh), and there will also be a complete replacement of the ceiling in the living room and kitchen, but at least I will have those lovely floors to look forward to. Maybe. I hope. I think escrow closes in mid-November (hi, I'm so on top of things that I have no clear idea of exactly when I take possession of a house), but we won't be moving in right away thanks to all of this exciting stuff that we have get to do first.

I am thinking of a nice creamy, sunshiny yellow and white with lightish, warm-toned hardwoody floors. What does everyone else think? Please comment.

Some people have asked for pictures of the house. Here are a few. Sort of.

It's just a single-story fixer-upper rectangle of a house, nothing to write a magazine article about or anything, but it's ours. Or will be soon. We hope.

There's a little woodsy area below and beside the house. This is the kids' favorite tree. Someone at some point built a treehouse in it, but it's no longer usable; they have plans to build their own. Unfortunately, a lot of this old live oak is dead, so it'll have to be cut away.

I stitched together a panorama of the view from the front yard, and added silly notes; it's here.

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