well, here it is.

thirty minutes to christmas, and with nothing to keep me occupied i'm starting to feel it.

i've made almond mint fudge, and split it for keeping and sharing. i've made white chocolate cranberry fudge, and split it for keeping and sharing. i've packed up the ingredients for straight chocolate fudge and they're waiting by the door to be taken to X's house tomorrow, where i will teach X to make it after we have dinner.

my office is nearly spotless. (well, there is this one spot, you know how it goes, around the desk area... a biggish spot. but it's a biggish office, and the shelves and sitting area are nice. just this spot left, really. a pile almost. mound of stuff is probably an accurate description.)

my bathroom is lovely. so lovely i want to take a long hot bath in it, but that would lead to uti of doom, and so i have abstained. i even spent an hour sitting in the tub going over the cauking with a toothbrush and some baking soda/vinegar cleaner.

my bedroom is completely rearranged, and therefore, currently clean and tidy. there's this spot in there, though. a little hairy, four-legged spot that refuses to be cleaned up. and so there's always cat hair involved. but aside from that, the bedroom is nice.

my kitchen is even looking pretty slick. in the good way. i bought a little turkey and roasted it. and then picked the meat off and boiled the bones. i added turnips, potatoes, yams, carrots, onions, celery, lots of different squashes, some hot peppers, a tomato, and several handsful of chopped turkey. it was and is and will be delicious. and the kitchen is clean after all that. and after the fudges.

and now there's only thirty minutes left in the day and i've run out of things i can do that won't also be all-night projects. (like, say, making the living room match the other rooms, or designing this drama syllabus.)

here's to a first christmas eve without living, breathing, two-legged company in the place. and to the first christmas morning without family, too, since that's coming up in a few hours.

it's been nice to not have the silly and largely pointless pageant to attend. it's been nice to be able to stay in and not wander around shopping for stuff. it's been nice that i didn't have to pay to board my cats.

but i do miss the cookies with mom, the really loud christmas music while chopping nuts and making bread, the hurried and secretive wrapping of gifts, the walking my brother through the wrapping process again, the long sits after a meal where dad and i just talk. there's a lot of hassle that goes into christmas, but i think i might rather put up with the hassle in order to get the good things.

at the very least, i did get three days at home this season, and a lot of those good things came with it.

merry christmas, everyone.

love and peace

a twist on the usual

i just finished making a batch of fudge. it's a pretty simple recipe, with simple ingredients, and a simple process. the tools required are basic, and can be found in any kitchen... even mine.

guess what part of the recipe took me the longest? if you know me, you'll assume that finding a can-opener was the most labor-intensive task, and usually, you'd be right.

this time, though, you'd be wrong. i found not one but two can-openers on my first try. angel choirs burst forth in shock amazement song and i'll admit that i was myself a bit wowed by this pair of can-openers sitting exactly where they ought to be.

so, what was the hold up? was it stirring together all those ingredients over low heat for an eternity of semi-patience? nope. was it chopping nuts on a cutting board precariously propped up on a sink edge? nope. (in fact, i only thought of making this fudge after my latest kitchen cleaning, which ensured a nice countertop for the cutting board and easy-to-locate can-openers.) so was it pressing the resulting goo into a foil-lined pan? ha-ha, no.

the longest task, the hardest, the most riddled with explitives was the opening of the ******* can!

that's right. i had not one, but two can-openers right there. the can-openers were in plain sight. they were ready. they were willing. they were broken! both of them! yes, that's right. both can-openers failed to do their job.

i inspected each can-opener. the slicey part that moves against the gear part is actually moving about 3/16ths of an inch away from the gear part. that's apparently enough space for a can-opener to cease opening cans.

oddly enough, the little can-opener i keep in the office failed in a similar way when i tried to open a can of salmon for lunch during the last month. i'm finally getting to the point where i can maybe keep track of a can-opener, and now all the can-openers go on strike or something. what is that?

so i'm in the market for a new can-opener. again. still. perpetually. i live in a state of continuous need for a new can-opener.

i even tried to apply some not-so-gentle pressure on the can-openers, but i could not get the slicey part and the gear part to play nice. the can-openers would not even pierce the can unless i angled them just so and applied pressure from the outside. the can in question fell over several times, and i almost lost the contents once.

when the can-opener finally bit into the can, it would run about a half turn of the crank and then veer off into the center part of the can's lid. like that will open the can. so i ended up alternating can-openers (neither was any better than the other, but i held onto some hope), and re-puncturing the can until i got enough of it open to scrape out the contents into the pot.

this is why i need three can-openers in my kitchen. i bet a third one wouldn't have broken. it would have been hiding somewhere instead.

well. the fudge is made. it turned out nicely enough, so apparently the can-opener saga didn't affect it much.

love and peace.

Big Sigh

Well. It's done. Done-done, not "done-but-for-X" done. Grades are tallied and posted. The end-of-semester class-wide email has been sent and everything. I've even read for the journal. A day early. (actually, most grades aren't due until the 15th or something, so that's early, too.)

Whatever will I do with my time? [sadly, I can tick off at least 12 different things I need to be doing with my time, so I guess that doesn't really apply this semester. Oh well.]

L and P

tick tick tick tick tick .... Ding!

And I'm done. I've turned in the last of the last assignments of the last of the last semester of coursework.

I actually had everything revised and slated for specific journals, and the labels made and the SASEs made and all that by around 10 last night. But let's be honest. I've not been sleeping much of late, and before the delicate process of correctly matching 9 envelopes with 9 SASEs with 9 cover letters with 3 copies of 2 essays and 1 copy of another essay that goes with 2 other essays and making sure there are copies of all 4 main essays to be graded....

I went ahead and slept on it. That's not the kind of thing to do when tired. I think Ems watched me do the submission collation dance once when she was still here in Dirt Town... she laughed at me for a while and then decided that I was seriously losing my mind and not being funny about it.

The last thing you want to do is send essay one with a cover letter for essay two that is addressed to a journal you'd meant to send essay three to. I live in horror of such a gaff, and would rather not deal with the reality of it.

In any case, everything is turned in. I am triumphant. Also a bit tired still.

Left to do before the semester can officially be over:

= read for the journal I read for and probably reject lots of budding writers like myself.

= grade my students' paper 3

= grade my students' final exams (to be turned in tomorrow afternoon)

= Renew my gym locker fee

Gosh, that's it, actually.

I mean, I need to clean my office, my apartment, etc., but that's not really the kind of thing I'm talking about.

Today, for lunch, I am eating: slices of ham (from an actual ham I bought for 2.99 a pound since I needed quality fuel to produce quality work this time around), a cut up zucchini, and a baked sweet potato.

Tonight, I'm watching a movie with some friends, eating out, and exchanging gifts.

And tomorrow?

Tomorrow I'll start on that list up above.

Love and Peace and Restfulness.

update - SWEET

okay my 2.6 readers out there, i need to share this spectacular news.

we all just got an email from the prof saying that since s/he goofed up on the numbers, we only need to have three of our four essays revised and ready for submission.

three of them.

not four of them.

i've been busting my ass on this "small town" essay, and i'm about three paragraphs from being happy enough with it, if not thrilled. i've already revised two other essays. the last essay was going to the be big rewrite, where i needed six pages of all new material at least, and the stuff i got to keep would need to be rewritten to match the new theme.

this means that i'm actually only a few paragraphs away from being done with my revisions, and the one i've been the most worried about can wait until later and become, possibly, the germ for my dissertation.

also, since this small town essay deals with food, i can submit it to the food-themed journal i was going to submit the other one to.

if you could see me now, you'd see me dancing around the apartment.

i now only have a tedious materials-gathering evening ahead of me instead of a hair-pulling, evening-and-morning-and-afternoon of revision and materials-gathering. this rocks like very little else has rocked in a long while, and i think that's mostly because i've been sleeping in shifts of roughly 6 hours on, 3 hours off since wednesday and am clearly impaired in the mental area.

[dances like a mad thing and inevitably steps too close to the side and falls into the fire along with the one ring, a la gollum]

to avert the above danger, i will now finish the essay on gingerbread men, small towns, and church.

love and peace.

Is this what the home stretch feels like?

my father has been telling me every time we talk on the phone that i need to buckle down and do this thing. that i cannot afford to think of anything as over until it actually is over.

it's a strategy that i've long employed during finals weeks past, present, and probably future. and it's a wise strategy, naturally. but it just really hasn't worked so well this semester.

see, all throughout the semester, i've had these days when i just didn't feel like working, and so i didn't. and yes, we all have those days from time to time, and i'm not any different. but this semester, there's been in the neighborhood of two of those days each week.

dangerous thinking for a grad student, because as everyone knows, in grad school there are no weekends, no sick leave, no holidays, etc. every break you take is made up for by extra work somewhere along the line.

this leads me to my point. all those breaks? all those days when i didn't do jack shit because i was a hair's breadth from burnout and trying to hold on by letting go?

yeah. that makes finals week hell.

and the problem this time around is that it's the last real finals week. i mean, i'll have teaching deadlines next semester. and i'll have quals which will be hell and a half all on their own. and there will be the regular deadlines on the dissertation to avoid a multi-hundred page finals week of apocolyptic doom at the end of this grad school thing.

but i've written my last seminar paper. and i've revised half of my manuscripts for this last workshop. and i have about three days of work left to do in a day and half, and i'm mentally done. this does not bode well.

currently, i've got two essays i'm revising. the last two. one is about my not-hometown, where they baked that gingerbread man. i'm trying to find it in myself to write about the town and the people when i've been trying to put them behind me. and i'm trying to leave my family out of it. and i'm trying to treat everyone fairly, which is hard, because i don't want to. the self reflection is also showing me a lot of my worse traits, so joy.

the next one on the list is generally better, but needs somewhere in the neighborhood of 6 new pages and a lot of rearranging. it deals with my family's take on special ocassions. namely, that we don't have many. of course, there's the self reflection there, too, which i'm just not in the mood to do. and since i need to cut out about half the essay and rewrite the parts i keep... ugh.

my refrigerator needs an overhaul. i need to go to the store and buy ground beef for spaghetti or i'll be eating ramen until this thing is done. i'm pleased to say i'm not surviving on a diet of clementines and hershey's kisses, but probably the ramen is less nutritious than the citrus/chocolate combo, so i'm not sure i should be pleased.

and, given that i've not left the apt since wednesday and need to buy stamps so i can send my manuscripts with a SASE, i think i'll post this and get myself to a united. i'll buy.... hm. ground beef, orange juice, yogurt, and a loaf of french bread that i hopefully won't eat in huge chunks straight out of the bag (hey, sometimes you just don't have time to slice it, butter it, and bake it in the oven. there's nothing wrong with eating french bread like a giant braided doughnut--and actually, maybe i want one of those, too).

well, there's that. my break time is over. i'll score some real food, cook it up, and get back to it.

love and peace.

This seems familiar...

i seem to recall having neighbors downstairs who yelled at their dogs for barking, sent the dogs outside to bark, yelled at the dogs for not doing their business fast enough, and generally seemed to forget that their dogs were not heated stuff animals.

they moved out a while ago.

my neighbors who share a wall with me in the living room had that cat. the one who never got spayed but was loud enough to attract several toms in the area every month or so. they got an eviction notice for nonpayment, but it really didn't matter because they'd already moved out by the time the note got placed.

well, my new neighbor who shares a wall with me has either recently gotten a dog or is sitting for a friend, or is entertaining friends with a dog. has been for the last few days. he seems to think that screaming at the dog will be more effective than any other volume. he angrily yells at the dog to get the ball, to stop being lazy, to get off its ass, to stay where he commands it to, to get behind the line, to stop laying at his feet.

aside from the fact that i doubt a dog even knows what "get the fuck behind the line and stay there" means, i'm doubting that the volume is doing anything effective. especially since the "good dog" comments are all in the same exact volume and have the same level of "i'm going to beat your face in" sentiment attached if the tone is coming through wall as clearly as the words.

what i am sure of is that this dog needs to be taken away from this man, and there ought to be a fine that people like this need to pay in order to be able to disturb the peace of their neighbors like this. he's been "training" that dog since 6 or so this evening, and he's only now starting to get tired of yelling at the dog. i can hear softer voices in the apartment, so it's not like i'm just making any little noise into a problem. he's very clearly screaming where the others are the normal "you're in an apartment, what do you expect" sort of noise.

and not in the next apartment over, but in one of this complex's downstairs apartments, there is a new dog, a small one, that arrived what i think is probably tuesday. at this point in the semester, all the days are blurring into one large, long day with lots of light and dark patches, so i can't be sure.

this dog is well behaved enough unless one of the five or so other dogs in the complex get near it. then it starts that strangled growl/bark combo that dogs do when you can imagine the teeth in the fur and all the savagery of wolves packed into a rat terrier. there's lots of human yelling, the established dogs get pissed off and start up, and finally the new dog is taken back inside.

at night, around now, actually, this new dog is put outside. the dog spends from about 10 to about 1 am howling mournfully at this injustice, and i can only hope that the dog learns the schedule and accepts it sometime soon.

this all might not be so much of a bad thing if my futon were in a room that didn't share a wall with the abusive psycho next door. it really puts a dent in the amount of quality writing i can get done, and this thing is due tomorrow at an undisclosed time. i'm hoping, naturally, that this time is later than noon. around five would be great.

in other news, i've worked my last official day as an IT worker. i have volunteered to help train a replacement for two weeks at the beginning of next semester, for additional compensation. if, however, the new boss doesn't get his/her act together soon and there isn't a replacement, i really don't care. i'll be working the thrice-damned may seminar also, because in the summer i'll need all the money i can earn. hopefully, i'll be able to teach two summer sessions, though, and there won't be as big a drain on my finances as only being able to work the one session for a handful of peanuts.

and for the end-o-semester workload, well. it's looking like this:

- i need to grade my students' last paper, their extra quiz, and their final which is yet to be turned in

- i need to revise four essays for publication and get all the journals together to submit them to

- i need to finish this stupid POS frustrating fucking paper on the LotR for a class that's vital to my professional development interesting and eye-opening required to get out of here.

these things are all due soon. 11th, 8th, and tomorrow, in reverse order.

i did math. you know it's bad for me to be doing math at this point in a semester. not that i'll get it wrong. i'm actually a lot better at math than i let on. but if i'm figuring my grades and scores at the end of a semester with work left to be done, it's a pretty good indication of the level of effort i'm willing to put into that work.

the short side of the math: this class i loathe... given my past grades and the percentages of each assignment, i can fail this paper with a 40% and still get a B in the class.

i'm still going to produce the best damn paper i'm able to produce in the next 10 hours or so, don't get me wrong. and i've already got about half of it done, sans works cited. but really? i'd rather be working on the essays for monday night. and if i feel like i need a nap around 3 this morning, i'm going to take that nap. because i know i can still fail with a 40 and get an okay grade. so it's going to be good, yes. but not the publishable quality i'm supposed to be doing. that can come later, when i'm actually working to get a scholarly publication.

ah. and there goes the new dog. can't wait till that thing gets a feel for the rules and grows to love its time outside at night.

love and peace, all.