Bit of Ivory

Well– so far, so good. I’m currently sitting at a public computer that I had to wait in line for along with all the other underprivileged masses who don’t have laptops because Ginny still has not been restored to me. *le sigh* They ordered the parts for her and got them in, but they got the wrong hinges and so had to re-order those. Best Buy jerks.

Anyway, I got down to campus with 15 minutes to go before my first class started, only to find that all the spots in the G-zone (graduate) parking were full, half of them with cars that did not have a G parking sticker. So I had to park in Y-zone (undergrad) parking, depsite the fact that I paid an extra $20 for the privilege to park closer to campus. If life was just, they’d all get exorbitant parking tickets. As it is, they’ll probably let it slide. Parking jerks. Anyway, I managed to get a relatively close spot (there’s a certain lot that most undergrads don’t know about), and made it to class on time.

Class will be– difficult. But interesting. Funny thing is, it’s actually an undergrad class. Advanced critical theory. I didn’t take it as an undergrad, since literature wasn’t my emphasis, so I had to take it as a condition of my acceptance. We’ll be looking at Marxist criticism, feminist criticism, and either psychoanalytic criticism or post-colonial studies. The teacher is leaning toward post-colonial. Here’s hoping it wins. I’m not so much into psychoanalytic. Anyway, there’s a lot of reading, and the midterms will be a bear (he gives you from 7-14 questions in advance, you prepare all of them, take a single 8 1/2 by 11 sheet of paper of notes, and write an essay on 2-3 of them. Lots of work. But I’m sure I’ll learn a lot, which is a good thing.

One of the girls in the class was my next-door neighbor in the dorms my freshman year. She’s taking it as a non-degree seeking grad student to beef up her resume to get into grad school elsewhere. Class got out early so we had a nice catch-up chat as we walked aimlessly around campus, where we happened to run into her roommate that year (and therefore my other next-door neighbor), who I also happened to go to high school with. She’s in her final year of nursing school. I also ran into Daniel Tanner, who’s an ickle freshie from my neighborhood. Rather ironic that I would run into so many peole (especially two from back when I was a freshman in 1998), when I was thinking just this morning that most of my friends have graduated and that I wouldn’t see many people I know. Never say that on BYU campus, i guess.

My next class is the required Intro to Grad Studies class. It doesn’t start till 5. I hope we get out early tonight– I don’t feel like sitting in class for 2 hours today.

Then tommorrow is Tolkien and Friends in Text and Film (WHOOOOT!!!), and 18th-century British poetry (meh).

In the meantime, I think I’m going to take advantage of my new graduate student library circulation privilges, and get Kim and The Game. Whoot!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, Jen!!!!

Happy, happy birthday to my bestest friend for *gasp* eleven years now! Congratulations, you are now a prime number!

In other news, I start grad school tomorrow. Am scared.

Ginny’s work is estimated to cost about $300, almost $200 of which are parts and Best Buy is willing to pay for. We should know how long it will take today. Still have not talked to Scott.

I went over to Kate’s house yesterday to paint my new room! It’s a nice yellow– bright, but not too bright. I like it a lot. We just did the edging yesterday, and we’ll roll and put a second coat on the edging tonight. With Stake Conference this weekend, I’m not sure exactly how much I’ll get moved in, though. Especially considering that I haven’t packed. Like, at all. I might be sleeping at home for the first week of school. We’ll see.

Am tired. Am sick of work. Can’t wait for school to start.

Well, it took all day yesterday, but Dad finally got to talk to someone at the repair facility– not Scott, the regional manager, but someone lower down. Ginny arrived on Friday morning, and was being put on a technician’s desk today, first priority. From a preliminary inspection, her hard disk and everything seem to be okay still. They’re going to have to order in parts to fix her, though, which will probably take at least a week. Dad said they’re not going to charge for parts, but might still charge us for labor. I find this completely unacceptable, considering that we have been lied to, she was sent to the wrong place not once but twice, then almost consigned to oblivion in a product return bin in Washington state, and has been gone for nearly two months. We bought 4 laptops from them. They *should* be paying for the whole thing, and giving us a $200 gift card to boot. Idiots. Dad said he read them the Riot Act yesterday. I hope he does the same if they try to charge us for anything.

Last night for Family Home Evening we went up to the Church Museum of History and Art. They’ve got two excellent displays up now– one commemorating the Mormon Tabernacle Choir’s 75th year of continuous broadcasting, the other a display of Elder Boyd K. Packer’s art. Elder Packer is a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, and his art is merely a hobby. But what a hobby. Paintings, carvings, sketches, murals– amazing. His scale carvings of birds are particularly wonderful. You can see a preview of some of the peices here. If you live in the Salt Lake area and haven’t seen it yet, hie yourself over before September 13. It’s free and oh so worth it.

That was a nice vacation. Kinda tiring, but nice. It was fun to spend time with the fam, go to classes, learn a bit, and best of all, NOT WORK. Was tough to drag myself in today, but I did it. Oh, well. One more week of full time, then it’s school and part-time hours. I can handle one more week. Hopefully they’ll have my replacement soon, so I can train him/her before I go down to part-time.

My family was able to meet my brother’s girlfriend last night. We made an apple pie and she came over to watch the Olympics. So far, I approve. She’s cute and nice and likes Toyotas. She likes HP, although I have not yet ascertained her shipping preferences. She has also never seen What’s Up, Doc?, a situation which must be rectified soon.

Still no word on Ginny. Dad was going to try calling again today. At this point, it seems highly unlikely that I’ll get her back in time for school. GRRRR. *hates Best Buy with the burning passion of a thousand fiery suns* I need to know what’s happening with her, though, because depending on what her status is, I might be buying a new hard drive and Windows XP for Harry.

Speaking of school, I bought my textbooks today, online. Saved $45. I should get them by the time school starts, hopefully. If not, I can always buy them at the bookstore, handle them carefully, then return them when my other copies arrive. In any case, textbooks are costing me about $110. Not too shabby, I think. And that’s including a new all-in-one version of The Lord of the Rings that I might have been able to do without, but decided not to. Was only $14, anyway.

In other good news on the money front, my tuition is going to be significantly less than I was expecting. When I was accepted, they sent a paper that we were supposed to fill out and return by April 1 to recieve a $1000 tuition credit. Well, I sent it in, and I got the credit. But it’s not just $1000, it’s $1200. Which means my tuition for this semester will be all of $870. If I manage to make enough money during the school year to pay for my rent and living expenses (which I should), I’ll still have enough in the bank to pay my tutition for winter semester, too. Then a summer of full-time (I hope), and I should make enough to pay tuition next year, too. Which could mean getting through my masters without having to take out a single student loan. *crosses fingers*

Yesterday was my last day of teaching my Primary class. Considering how apprehensive I was about teaching a bunch of 8 year olds, my reaction was kind of comical. Tears were shed. I wrote a personal note to each of the kids, telling them how much I love them and bearing my testimony. I hope that, if they don’t remember anything else about me, they’ll remember those two things– that I loved them, and I believed in what I was teaching. I don’t remember any specific lessons from my Primary days, but I do remember the teachers who cared about me, and the feelings I got while listening to them. I plan to return for the baptisms of my remaining kids. And I have the little notes they wrote me, and this picture that one of my girls, Camille, drew of my family. Am feeling rather sad about going to a singles ward, where there are no adorable Primary kids. *sniff* On the other hand, there are no single guys in my ward, either. So there are definitely compensations.

Finished the Laurie R. King books, up to Justice Hall. I don’t want to buy The Game, since I now own all the rest in paperback, so I will check it out from the library instead. And then I join the rest of you in eagerly awaiting The Locked Room. Need to finish it before Monday, though, since I don’t know how much time I’ll have for outside reading– or at least new reading– once school starts. When I’m in school, I still read outside of classes, but not usually stuff I haven’t read before, because I tend to get hooked and ignore my homework. If I stick to stuff I’m familiar with, it’s much easier to put down. Thus my 200 readings of Pride and Prejudice.

But barely. My family is doing Education Week down at BYU for our family vacation this year, so I only have enough time to check my e-mail at night– that is, if I want to see any of the Olympics at all. I’m borrowing my sister’s laptop (named Lord Peter, her desktop is called Wimsey) to type this up so I can watch the end of the men’s gymnastics final. In the meantime, I’m exhausted, although walking around BYU campus all day with a backpack is an excellent warmup for when grad school starts in a week and a half :O. It’s good stuff though. Have gotten lots of great spiritual and doctrinal insights.

Nothing on Ginny yet. Le sigh.

I’ve now finished O Jerusalem and A Letter of Mary. Glad I didn’t take your advice tp skip the latter, Teri, or I would have missed the cameo of one Lord Peter Death Bredon Wimsey. And a Tolkien mention. Am ashamed to say that I didn’t recognize poor Lord Peter for who he was until the monocle appeared. Holmes would be positively ashamed of me. As would Lord Peter, come to think of it.

Now, must sleep. We’re leaving at 10 to 8 tomorrow, and I’m dying of exhaustion already.

I love that woman.

If you haven’t seen it already, you must go to JKR.com and read the transcript from the Edinburgh Book Festival. It’s in then “news” area. Lots of wonderful stuff. Aberforth! Scar! Petunia! Snape! Portraits! Sirius! Dudley! Thestrals! Wheee!!!

And when you’re done with that, take the portkey to the Do Not Disturb door. Yes, the sign is gone again, and we have a small blurb from HBP!! I have no idea who it’s describing, but I CAN’T WAIT to find out. (For instructions on how to get to the excerpt once you open the door, go to TLC.)

In other news, I had a pretty good weekend. Lots of sleeping, lots of reading. Did a few chores. Slept a lot. Am incredibly tired today, though. Odd, that.

R.J. Anderson, at least, will be pleased to know that the vast majority of the reading I did this weekend was Laurie R. King. I’d spent 10.5 hours in front of a computer on Thursday and didn’t really feel like spending any more time in front of one, and my sisters were watching Law and Order, which I’m thoroughly sick of, so after work I went to Barnes and Noble in search of something good to read. I’d wanted to buy Memory by Lois McMaster Bujold, but I’d already read it. I wanted something new, but not fantasy– I feel like I’m getting into a bit of a speculative fiction rut. But you can’t just go pick up any old book off the shelf and expect to enjoy it. So I tried to think of books that my friends had recommended, and the King books came up first in my mind, probably because RJA posted about her recently. So I picked up The Beekeeper’s Apprentice (and Memory, too). I didn’t start reading it that night, though, because I still had to go to work tomorrow and I had a feeling I’d get too interested in it and be up all night. So I didn’t actually start it until Friday night. I finished it about 9:30 on Saturday night– just enough time to get to Barnes and Noble before it closed and pick up the next one. I ended up getting both A Monstrous Regiment of Women and O Jerusalem. Read the former over the course of Sunday. Will start the latter tonight.

So congratulations, RJA. You’ve got me hooked.

We’ve worked hard all week, and everything we have left to do is dependent on other people coming through on their end, so things aren’t quite so rushed this morning. It looks like we’ll make our deadline, which is a lovely thing.

This means that I am at leisure to tell you the sad, sad story of Ginny, my faithful laptop. You will remember that she broke on the first of July, and we took her in for repairs on July 7. They were supposed to ship it to the VPR Matrix repair facility, who would then contact us with how much it would cost to fix her. The estimate was supposed to take about two weeks.

Well, two weeks later, we hadn’t heard from them, so Dad called Best Buy. They had sent her to the wrong place, which had sent her back to the store. One wonders how long she’d been there and when they were going to do something about it. Anyway, after apologizing, they said they were shipping her to the correct place the next day.

Feeling a bit anxious, I made Dad call a few days later just to confirm that she’d gotten there. After being bounced around between employees, he finally got someone who said they’d call the facility. They called back a bit later to say yes, they’d received her, and we’d be hearing from them in a few days.

We didn’t. More than two weeks later, now, I made Dad call again last night. No one at the store could find our anything about her. They even had trouble finding a record of having shipped her. Dad finally managed to get the number of a higher-up guy out of them. Scott turned out to be some kind of a regional manager. At first he couldn’t find anything either. He did a bit of exclaiming (“Why did they send it there?”), and had to spend a bit of time looking around. Finally he told Dad that he’d call him back. It took an hour, but he found Ginny.

She was sitting in a product return bin in a Best Buy store in Washington state.

I’m simply furious. The employees at Best Buy were not only incompetent, they *lied* to us. I doubt she ever made it to the repair facility.

Luckily, Scott is pretty mad, too. He said that if he hadn’t gone looking for her, Ginny might have been lost forever. He’s having Ginny shipped directly to him, to see what shape she’s in. He also told Dad that our local Best Buy store should replace her outright, with a brand-new computer. In any case, we certainly shouldn’t be charged for her repair.

I don’t know what will happen, though. At the moment, all I’m hoping is that among her adventures, Ginny didn’t come too close to any powerful magnets that erased her hard drive. I backed most stuff up, but there were a few things that I thought were saved in one file but that actually weren’t, and that I’d sorely miss.

Scott was going to call again at the end of today to give us an update. I’ll keep you posted, too.

In other news, though, there’s a great interview over on TLC of Edmund Kern, who wrote a book called The Wisdom of Harry Potter: What our favorite hero teaches us about moral choices. I ordered the book from Amazon today. Go. Read. Good stuff. (And most skillfully done by the wonderful .)

Also, I’ve gotten one of my coworkers and her two kids hooked on the Vorkosigan saga, and said coworker gave me the most adorable crocheted beret today.

To let you all know I’m still alive. Just working hard. Overtime makes me tired.

There are compensations, however. A coworker has been bringing in good food to keep our energy levels up all week. Today, for instance, she brought in danishes for the morning, then crackers, French bread, hummus, cheddar, pepper jack, brie, and grapes in the afternoon. Along with almond M&Ms and Red Vines. MMmmmmm.

The week’s almost over. Yay

Well, my weekend was pretty good. I did a whole lot of nothing especially fun. Watched Monk on Friday night. And. . .that’s about it. Cleaned my room. It’s now only a half-disaster area. I’ve got lots of things to put away but no where to put them yet, so I’m going through my closets and throwing out stuff that I don’t really need but have been keeping around for sentimental reasons. Like, letters from people I barely knew from various girls camps. Invitations to 4.0 luncheons from my senior year of high school. Etc.

I had a few weepy moments. For instance, my great grandmother used to give all the great-grandchildren a $2 bill for Christmas. The past few years I’ve kept them rather than spending them, just in case she wasn’t around the next time. When I got a new one from her, I’d spend the old one.

I found 2 $2 bills in cleaning. I don’t know which one is the most recent. I’m keeping them both. I’ll never get another one now.

I also found two birthday cards– one signed “Grandma and Grandpa By”. Then this year’s, signed just “Grandma By.”

I kept them both.

It’s funny. I’ll go a long time without thinking of my grandfather, but then something will remind me and it all hits me again, just like when he was dying. Saturday, cleaning my room, was one of those times.

Anyway, I threw out a whole bunch of high school stuff that just wouldn’t scrapbook well and that I haven’t looked at or thought of in years. I kept a lot of small things, though– tickets to school dances, a report card. Just enough to remind me, but not so much that my room is overflowing with high school deletrius. I also threw out a bunch of notebooks filled with notes from college classes I didn’t really enjoy anyway, and stuff like that. I still have a few shelves to go, and then I need to clean out my clothes for the third time this year. There’s a lot of stuff in there that’s too small for me now, but is still in good shape, and will be good for when I finally lose the weight I’ve been saying I’ll lose all year. I need to store it somewhere OTHER than my closet, because I currently don’t have room for the clothes I actually *do* wear.

And of course, all of this cleaning is in preparation for moving out at the end of the month. *sigh*

In other news, I don’t know how much I’m going to be online this week. We’ve got a major push going on, which will require overtime– how much I’m not sure, but I’ll certainly have a few later evenings than normal. Time and a half is good, though. Very good. There’s this thing called tuition, you see. *sigh*