Boo!

Exam week was not all I had hoped for here. I played not a single game with our students. Instead of going through 11 bags of popcorn in the circus style popcorn machine like we did last semester, we went through 4 (and most of that batch is sitting there, stale, in the machine. It was a week of long meetings, tons of snow, and alternating extremes of maddeningly boring spells mixed with serious job responsibilities. Eek! The college closes down on Wednesday for the holiday break, and I seem to be the only one here for these first two days of the week. The rest of my department is full time staff, and they have each accumulated copious amounts of vacation time. I, part time peon that I am, accumulate none. Two long, boring days are in store for me.

On a different note, I reread Irving Stone's The Agony and the Ecstasy in the last several months (it's long and I'm busy!). It's my third time reading the fictional biography of Michelangelo. I found new things during this reading and was able to correct things I just plain remembered wrong, and I discovered that I still enjoy it and find it to be insightfully and engrossingly written. It's well worth reading every 7 or 8 years!

On the other hand, I started (and am about half way finished) with another novel. I had lent a book to a student of mine, and she returned the favor. I'm now reading The Last Templar, by Raymond Khoury. I wish I could say that I'm enjoying it. I'm enjoying having something to read, but the novel is so poorly and awkwardly written, it's actually a bit painful. I try to console myself with the idea that "at least it's an interesting story," but I'm just kidding myself. It's predictable in that I'm not surprised by anything that I think I'm supposed to be surprised by. But I'll keep reading it because I tend to finish books I start and because, even though I'm reading it half braindead, I still don't have to go back and reread the parts I was totally braindead while reading. I'm not expecting greatness in the second half, but I suppose anything is possible.

I know I'm just fooling myself again.

Exam week

I love exam week here at Aquinas!

Food, games, and talking--that's about all I do during our exam week hours. We are a "Stress Free Zone" for students this week, which happens to mean that my job is virtually stress free as well! My 8 hour Monday has felt more like 2. Wonderful!
If only I didn't have those essays to grade for my class!

Holiday Shopping Trip

I volunteered last night for the GR Jaycee's Holiday Shopping Tour and brought a big group of students from my department at Aquinas (and then assembled into a bigger group with students from GVSU and GRCC). The Jaycees take underprivileged kids shopping for Christmas gifts for their families, and then the children meet Santa and get a present for themselves. I was a personal shopper last year and did it again this year. This is bit problematic for me because this involves shopping... with children.
I'd heard that there were going to be local celebrities helping out yesterday, but I didn't really think much of it. But I saw Mary Ellen Murphey, a DJ; Antoinette, a spokesperson who I see on tv who promotes GRCC; Gerry Barnaby, a tv news guy; and John Gonzalez, a reporter for the Grand Rapids Press. I was paired up with someone to shop with because, for a little while, there were more volunteers than kids. My partner was Dr. Bernard Taylor, superintendent for Grand Rapids Public Schools, a fairly influencial fellow. It was really cool to see television and radio personalities, but when I talked to my students about these people, they had no idea who I was talking about. I suddenly realized how long I've lived in Grand Rapids and how damn old I am. I'm all excited about seeing and meeting local celebrities--this is not what many people, especially college students, give a crap about.
However, I'm still damn impressed.

plow service

We decided to hire a plow service for our driveway, in this first winter in our house. It's hard enough to do all of the other crap around the house for the first time, we really didn't feel like buying a snow blower and then having to snow blow every day or every other day. We'd be playing a lot of rock, paper, scissors to see who had to go out in freezing temps to do it. Okay, that comment is not fair to Jon--I'd want to help out, but I doubt he'd ever make me do it.
Back to my complaint--yes, how could I complain about it, you ask? The plow guy will come at, like, 2:00 a.m. A lot of snow can fall between 2 a.m. and 7 a.m. when Jon leaves for work. And a lot more can fall between 8 a.m. when I leave for work and when we get home in the afternoon. Our driveway still has a crapload of snow on it! It's snowed all of 3 or 4 times this winter, and I'm already wondering why we didn't just bite the bullet and buy a dang snow blower!

New favorite site:

http://icanhascheezburger.com/

For example:

work weekend

"On tap for next weekend: trimming back about a dozen lilacs, rototilling my future garden area(s), painting windows, raking leaves, killing (more) weeds, spreading grass seed, moving a crab apple tree, spreading mulch." That's what I wanted to get done. Ha.

Friday was beautiful!!! Saturday, work day, was awful. Rain and sleet, mud and grime. We hired two guys Jon works with, had his friend Matt and Matt's dad over, had my hard working husband, and ... me. Thankfully I had raked the front yard Friday afternoon, when the weather was lovely, but since we didn't have any yard waste bags, they just sat in piles on the front lawn getting wet Saturday morning. There was no way in hell I was going to try to tackle the back yard. It took me 45 minutes just to rake the front!

So what did we get done? Basically nothing on my list. I did have some help bagging the leaves and I spread grass seed in the front and back yard--in the sleety wetness--right before my back gave out. I knew it was going to happen, I just didn't know when. Jon and company did crazy stuff in the back yard. They moved a whole bunch of really big concrete blocks and rocks to our ever expanding "random rocks, blocks, and landscaping paraphernalia" region in the backyard. Also, there were these railroad ties being used as rudimentary landscape timbers that were removed and chopped up into burnable pieces for our fire pit. There was also a set of bars installed by the original owners to use for hanging clothes lines--cemented into the ground starting at about 18"-24" and ending at least 2' below that! These things were installed to stay! But they needed to come out so that we can move the shed from its present inconvenient location to right behind the garage (where the railroad ties and laundry poles were). Now we have even more DIRT lying around from where everything was dug up! Well, with the appearance of the snow this morning, I can maintain a blissful ignorance about the appalling state of my back yard. Yay snow?

winterizing

This being the first year we've owned a house, we're trying to figure out all that we have to do to winterize--and get help doing it. Our yard is a disaster--that backyard anyway. There are huge patches of dirt all over the place from where we've had "extra" from other projects and dumped it in a low patch in the back. And there are a lot of low patches. There are still a lot of low patches. It's looking pretty bare back there, but I knew that this was going to be a year of removal and hoped that next year would be a year of planting. It looks like grass seed will be essential to the plan of improving the yard to make our 1/2 acre more "Edenic." It'll take a few years, but it will look wonderful.

On tap for next weekend: trimming back about a dozen lilacs, rototilling my future garden area(s), painting windows, raking leaves, killing (more) weeds, spreading grass seed, moving a crab apple tree, spreading mulch.

No problem.