good evening, and welcome to the show

several things going on around here that simply have to be blogged to all ends.

the party at DQ prof's house is over. i tried and [dis]liked a new chip dip, ate jalapeno cranberry nut bread, and sang hymns around a circle. quite unlike any other party i've been to, hands down.

the dip. was tasty, but too odd for me to really get into. black beans, lime, cilantro, green onion. smooth and deepest brown, with grey and green flecks. pasty, but watery. good, but not good.

the spicy tangy sweet bread also good.

the creamy, milky, artichokey, with an unnamed ingredient dip went untried. i already branched. there's only so far i'm willing to go. you know?

the singing. well, as it turns out, the only vocal people there were all kinds of denominations, and a guitar was present. and a hymnal of the baptist persuasion. so we listened to play and song. then we listened to play and duet. then i joined in, and we three sang a few songs. truly, fun but bizarre, all things considered.

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next on the list of stuff to share is a combo old and new news. last wed, a friend made a turkey. she's a couple weeks early, i know. i told her this. but anyway, she's a white meat kinda girl, and knows from last year around this time that i'm a dark meat and soup-from-carcass kinda girl. so she brought a half-picked turkey up to campus and i received joyously about 16 pounds of dark meat and bones. enough turkey to have my own thanksgiving right here before heading home for an encore.

let me tell you, she can cook a turkey. not a dry scrap on that bird. so i picked it clean, stored the soup starter, and waited for the opportune moment, as ol' jack likes to say.

enter the new news. right now, my apt smells SO good. we've got onions, potatoes, carrots, celery, garlic, bay leaves, and a ton of turky scraps boiling away on the stovetop. it's only been an hour, and when i tasted it, it was already stock. i'm letting it go another two hours, to get even more flavor out of it. the cats are sitting in the kitchen looking up at the stove and rubbing against the cabinets. it's kind of cute. chicken stock smells good. turkey stock is divine.

i don't have the ingredients for a really good soup yet. shopping later this weekend, probably right after church, to get those things and all the other listed items. then it's soup sunday, with a special portable portion for the turkey gifter. the least i can do, yes?

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item three: hatched butterflies. tomorrow night, there's this reading thing. it's only at a coffee shop, and it's small scale in all ways. there's really nothing all that special about it all, and the only people there are uber supportive english folk and coerced undergrads. so there's nothing to be afraid of.

i've read in front of people before. i defended my thesis. explained it, read part of it, fielded spur-of-the-moment questions of doom. that was much harder than this will be, right?

i was asked to read at this at the beginning of the semester, and said yeah. thanks, and all that. and i'm kind of looking forward to it. it'll be fun. i've never read the things i've got lined up, and they're kind of out of the normal field of stuff. but that's just fine.

there was a required bio paragraph i had to write. it's already embarassing to me, and no one's read it yet. but that's also fine. just jitters. once i'm up there, i'll go into smokey voice mode, where everything is hypnotic and lyric. cause that's the type of stuff i'm reading.

i've narrowed it down to two pieces i really, really want to read, and a third for 'if there's time'. one is a member of folklore given flesh and voice. kind of sexy, kind of sad. the other is high fantasy of the you can't read just one type. i'll have to explain it first, i bet.

on a similar note, the thesis. the library picked it up finally, and so it'll probably be bound up all pretty in whatever color i chose [i forgot! is that bad?] sometime in or around december. it might be ready for me to take home for christmas. that's kind of exciting, because i've wanted my family to read it and maybe give me feedback.

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there's a chance i stumbled across a good-ish topic for the nabokov final project. if so, this would be a relief, because i've been breaking my brain to try and formulate one.

i also need to come up with something for the scriptures class. no idea. the ones i thought of in the beginning of the semester just aren't worthwhile. i'll come up with a handful more and set up a meeting with prof.

i already know what i'm doing for translations, and it was enthusiastically endorsed. in fact, next week, i give a presentation over it for the class. good: i get this oral report over with, and formulate my specific ideas on the subject in advace of my writing later this month. bad: i don't actually have those specific ideas yet, so this will be a busy weekend for more reasons than the reading, shopping, and soup-making.

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due to a flurry of activity on my part, i have completed my grading for the semester. yes. the whole thing. something like a month+ in advance of the end. this is v good news. it enables me to devote those last weeks to my own papers, and not be sidetracked by students' papers. it aleviates last week stress over deadlines. it frees me from the way-way long drafts that come up near the end.

on a similar note, i'm working ahead in my IT job as well. with a bit of luck and fridays up at campus, i could score a lot of time for papers in december. this is good, because i'm so very being on ideas for those papers in two of my three classes. so all that time will be absolutely crucial.

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and that's all. but be sure to tune in next time for more of Rehkmira's Life Updates!

love and peace