Except for still being crazy, crazy busy. Even with this whole week off from school (whoot!) I’m still scrambling to find enough time to get stuff done. So, that’s why I haven’ t been posting. Of course, it doesn’t help that I keep getting distracted by adorable babies. Anna turned 4 months old yesterday, is now able to roll over from her back to her stomach, and has the cutest little personality. here’s a link to a video I took of her a month ago (on her 3 month birthday, actually). It’s short, so go take a look and die of the cuteness.

I haven’t been able to see Thomas as much as I’d like, since he lives in Provo and we’re in Murray. I have dropped by after my classes are done, but 20 minutes twice a week is not enough! He’s such an adorable little boy. I still haven’t had time to upload the pics I took of him on his birthday to the web. In an effort to reduce the space I’m taking up on my laptop’s harddrive, I’ve migrated my pictures to my desktop. This is a good idea in theory, but it practice it isn’t so great, because I spend so little time on my desktop. I’ll try to do it after Thanksgiving. In the meantime, here’s a pic of him that my brother-in-law took. Look at how tiny his mouth is! It’s so cute!

In the meantime, I’m going to try and get some work done.

So here I am, trying to make up for all that. What’s been happening?

I had a lovely holiday. Got lots of of good presents, including a new watch and a wool pea coat. Good times with family, too. Christmas Eve was spent at my grandmother’s house, where a good time was had by all, despite the large hole left by the death of my grandfather and great grandmother. Usually the festivities at Grandma By’s encompass both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, but in an effort to make things easier on grandma, we squeezed them all into Christmas Eve, which left us scratching our heads over what to do on Christmas itself. We’ve never spent a Christmas at home before, ever. But with my brother getting married, it was a good time for us to start new Christmas traditions. My brother’s fianc???e stayed the night on Christmas Eve (since she didn’t go home to Buffalo for Christmas), we slept in until 9:00 before we opened presents, had our traditional Christmas pancake breakfast, and then headed over to my Grandma & Grandpa Johnson’s for lunch. After a nice visit and some yummy food, we came back home, where Grandma By paid us a visit (she visited all the familes, starting down south in Mapleton and working her way up), and then spent the rest of the night playing board games (Ticket to Ride is *so* fun, and my team won at Cranium! TWICE! :O) and watching Christmas movies. Mom had bought a roast for Christmas dinner, but first we weren’t hungry enough and then we decided it just wasn’t Christmas-y enough, since we have roasts for Sunday dinner a lot. After throwing around a few possibilities, we ended up–get this– getting Chinese takeout. Fa ra ra ra ra.

Since then it’s been a whirl of wedding stuff. We hit after-Christmas sales to pick up snowflake-themed decorations on Monday, and to get Amanda’s wedding dress (which is GORGEOUS), and started printing out labels for the invitations, which were ready this morning. Ben and Amanda are at this moment sitting in the Cincinnati airport on a layover on their way to Buffalo for New Years, so Ben can meet his future in-laws once before the wedding. We’ve got a price list of the flowers (purple lisianthus will be available! YAY!) and things are starting to come together. But there is still so much to do, and school starts on Tuesday.

We did take time out yesterday to go see Finding Neverland, which I highly recommend. I admit to shedding a few tears at the end. It makes me even more excited about Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, not just because of Johnny Depp, but also because the young boy who played Peter is going to be playing Charlie. He was excellent.

I’d better get back to stuffing envelopes.

resents under tree. Riddles. Greeting card.

HUGE ANNOUNCEMENT.

CAN’T TYPE.

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I SURVIVED.

Now, to survive next semester. . .

I wish I could skive off everything over break, but unfortunately, it’s not in the cards. I need to work as much as possible, because I need to pay for tuition and a heckuvalot of books next semester. Oh, and then there’s my credit card payment that’s due at the same time. And rent. I have enough in my bank account to pay for tuition itself, but just barely. Luckily, I’m getting a decent paycheck this week, and will be able to work 32 hours next week and at least a couple of days at least between Christmas and New Years, and my parents owe me $300, so I should be able to cover everything if I’m careful, and put all of Christmas on my credit card.

Oy. I wish money didn’t exist.

I between working, I also need to help as much as possbile with the wedding. It’s less than a month from now! o.O. I’m going with my future sister-in-law to help pick out the cake today, in fact. So that’ll be fun.

Tonight’s the Johnson family Christmas party, so I get presents! Presents are always good.

Oh, and today’s Dilbert? Priceless. And extremely appropriate, in my case.

Back to scratching out a meager living in a frustrating working environment. . .

Look at Google’s cache for the text-only of the welcome note.

Now look at the current page.

See the difference?

Stumped?

Old note:

This is where I can tell you the truth about rumours or news stories, where I can share the extra information I haven’t put in the books, where I can give you hints and clues about what’s going to happen to Harry next, and where I can announce I’ve finished book six… and no, that’s not going to happen very soon.

New note:

This is where I can tell you the truth about rumours or news stories, where I can share the extra information I haven’t put in the books, where I can give you hints and clues about what’s going to happen to Harry next, and where I can announce I’ve finished book seven… and no, that’s not going to happen very soon.

SQUEEE!!!!!!!!!

Amazingly.

Yup, folks, I have just pulled my first official all-nighter. This is counting HP releases, incidentally, since after OotP I went to sleep at 7:30 and got up at 11:00, and the Midterm of Doom, because I got about 3 hours of sleep then. I’m quite proud of myself, as I did it on minimal caffeine (I had a small glass of Diet Pepsi round about 2:30 am). One small snafu, however. I had finally finished up and taken my shower. It was 6:50. I had to leave by 7:15 to make it to the final on time. Takes about 15 minutes to dry hair and get out door. So, I did what I’ve done almost every morning for the past 11 years– I went back to bed for a bit. Just to close my eyes for 5 minutes.

When I woke up, it was 7:30. (I do not count this short nap as negating my first all-nighter. If it was a 2-hour nap, maybe. But 35 minutes doesn’t count.)

So yeah, I ended up leaving here about the time I had planned on rolling into the (mostly empty!) graduate parking lot.

*headdesk*

Luckily, even though Professor Muhlestein gives Scary Exams of Doom, he is actually pretty fair, so when I walked in half an hour late looking absolutely panic-stricken, he asked the class if it was okay with them if I got a little bit of extra time to do my exam since I got there late (so I ended up with the same amount of time as they’d gotten, not that I got more than they did). Luckily, they all said “sure” (“You’d do the same for us,” was one of my classmates comments, and it’s true, I would), so I managed to finish the test relatively panic free (although my typo ratio was waaaay up the first few minutes as I tried to keep my hands from shaking :P). So I made it through feminist critiques on the literary canon, Chodorow’s theories of early childhood gender development, and Gilligan’s model for how women make moral choices pretty well, I think. Although that remains to be seen.

I’m back home now. Taking a nap would be useless, as naps always make me groggier. My original plan was to go into work after taking the test, on the assumption that I would have had a decent night’s sleep before and therefore could study for my other final after my work Christmas party tonight. Now, I’ve got a change of plans. I’m going to study *now*, so when I get home from said party I can go straight to bed and get a nice, at-least-12-hour sleep. When I feel I’ve crammed enough 18th-century literature into my head, I’ll stop and get something for the gift exchange (I’m thinking a pound of See’s chocolates would be good) and maybe some Vanilla Coke, go to work, and then go straight to the Christmas party *from* work. A good plan, I think.

So, studying. Bye.

ext time I volunteer to put together a group project, shoot me, k?

It doesn’t end up working too well when people don’t send you the stuff in time to do a good job. I mean, I gave them the weekend. I figured I’d be nice, let them get it to me by Monday (since I was unlikely to do anything on it until then) and that would be enough. It’s an upper-division class, I figured people would be more responsible than they were last time I was in charge of editing together a paper (which was my Freshman year–I’ve put together other projects, but nothing that had to be cohesive).

RONG.

The first part came Monday night around 9:00. It was well written, but contained no source references and made no attempt to connect the information on slavery in the 18th century to the issue at hand (which is a novel called The History of the Life and Adventures of Mr. Anderson by Edward Kimber, which no one has ever heard of).

Next came information on Anglo-French relations in the first half of the 18th century, at about 10:30 Monday night. Except that the student, in his own words: “I basically just typed what was most relevent to the history on it and the time period we’re working with. They are basically verbatim out of the books, as to not distort what really happened (if I paraphrased, it would be a dissaster). So, feel free to put in your own words to flow with the rest of the group paper.” Ah. So, I’m supposed to take your research and paraphrase it myself. Uh-huh. I thought that was your job. So I get into it and discover: it’s all about the French and Indian War (Seven Years War) of 1754-1763. Except that the book was published in 1754, and is set in the early 18th century, between Queen Anne’s War (The War of the Spanish Succession) from 1702-1713 and King George’s War (The War of the Austrian Succession) from 1744-1748. Right. So now, I get to do the research he should have done, so that our paper actually covers something relevant. Also, the sources he quoted? He gave me titles, but nothing else. No author, no page numbers, nothing. Great. I basically ignored all his stuff.

Tuesday morning comes, and I get the third part of the project. This part is beautiful: proofread, correctly typeset, complete with Works Cited page and parenthetical references, and makes the effort to connect the information (on the ‘man of feeling’ character type in the mid-to-late 18th century) to the novel, everything. Yay.

But I still need one more piece.

And it doesn’t come.

So I send a reminder e-mail.

Nothing.

Then, at 6:30, I get an e-mail from the person who hasn’t sent me anything resending the slavery part for another student, saying that the other student wasn’t sure if it came through, and, oh, she’ll send her part as soon as possible.

Which turned out to be at 10:15 last night.

The paper was due at 12:00 today. And I had an 8:00 AM chiropractor’s appointment, and a 10:00 AM class.

GAH.

And when I opened it, it was good and well-written, but repeated a lot of stuff I’d already talked about (since I tried to get as much done as possible while waiting), so I had to basically re-write everything I’d done.

Never. Again.

At least it’s out of my hands now.

In other news, my back is much better, I have a total of ONE class left in the semester, I am going to VEG as much as possible tonight, and Jen and I have a bout of good, hard playing scheduled for Saturday. The semester is almost over

Now, considering that I am not really a gigantic Snape fan, and am definitely not a big Labryinth fan, but even I am enjoying this lovely HP/Labryinth crossover fic. As you can imagine, Snape and Jareth don’t exactly get along.

So. Go. Read. Review. She’ll appreciate it.

P.S.– Thanks for all the good wishes. I’ve taken it easy today, and kept it on ice and heat alternatively, and done some stretches, and it feels kinda better. My brother’s fiance is going to take a look at it soon– she’s a physical therapist. Nice to have one in the family.