The Weekend and a Halloween Party

Another Monday.... Today's a busy day--lots of meetings and things that need to be done.

The weekend, however, was quite eventful. The movie party on Friday night was fun. We (the graduate students in the department) transformed our seminar classroom into something resembling a movie theatre, ordered pizza, and watched Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The movie was good, and we had fun hanging out and chatting together.

Anna, one of the people that I worked with this summer, came to town to visit for part of the weekend. We spent the remainder of the Friday night just hanging out and catching up; Saturday was more eventful. I made breakfast in the morning (apple crisp -- still have apples), and we went out to a steakhouse for dinner (or lunch or whatever you call that noon meal) with the other two members of our summer teaching team. We all spent the afternoon shopping and running around town; then we all got dressed up and went to a Halloween party in the evening. We didn't win any of the costume contests, but we had a good time together and we managed to win the pumpkin carving contest. (We carved an angel in our pumpkin; the design also looked like an upside-down traditional pumpkin face. We also painted out entire pumpkin blue.) Anna left after the party, as she had some commitments at home on Sunday morning.

Sunday felt like a very long day--and the dreary weather here didn't help. The sky was grey all day--everything was fuzzy and gloomy. The time change probably also contributed to the day feeling long. And now today's another cold and fuzzy and dreary (and rainy) day....

Movies, Witches, and Fish

Lots of movies this weekend.... Jimmy and I watched Bewitched last night. I was a little leery to see the movie since it's a spin-off of the old television show. I like the old series, so I was worried that the movie would be some type of poor re-make of the original. However, the filmmakers (or screenwriters or whoever) did a nice job of adjusting the story and making it work. I actually liked the movie; it was a good, fun pre-Halloween flick.

The grad students in my department are having a movie night tonight. We're going to turn out classroom into a movie room, eat junk food, order pizza, and watch Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I've never read the books (it's a series by Douglas Adams), but I've seen the movie before. The answer is 42. Always remember to bring a towel when traveling through the galaxy. So long and thanks for all the fish.

Apples

Sunday evening I made cinnamon apples--the cooked apples like Mom makes. Monday I made apple muffins. Tuesday I made apple salad. Today I think I'll have an apple salad for supper and maybe make an apple pie or a loaf of apple bread.... Jimmy and I got a box of apples from an orchard when we were in Missouri, and now I'm trying to figure out what to do with all of the apples before they go bad. I've been baking and having lots of fun finding recipes, but I'm beginning to get tired of apples. Maybe I need to freeze them so I can make pies and stuff later....

Explaining Things....

"I hate explanations; they fog a thing up so that you can't tell anything about it." --Mark Twain

Okay, so I've been reading Twain again. We're currently on A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. I've never read this work before, but I'm finding it very entertaining. One of my favorite things about the work so far is the language. I'm enjoying how Twain shows the differences between Arthurian English (or what he sees as the English of that time period) and the English of his day. An example:
"Who are they? Where do they hang out?"
"Where hang they out?"
"Yes; where do they live?"
"Ah, I understand thee not. That will I tell thee eftsoons. [. . .] Hang they out--hang they out-- where hang--where do they hang out; ah, right so: where do they hang out."

Winter and Hot Tea

BRRRR!! The weather's gotten colder here lately. I've started to pull my sweaters out from their drawers and summer homes, and I probably need to turn my heater on in the next few days. I don't think the temperatures here have hit freezing yet, but it's been down in the 30s during the past few nights. I'd been warned about Oklahoma weather before I moved here: fall only lasts about a week, it's more like an abrupt jump from summer to winter instead of a gradual transition. (But then again, for all we know we'll see summer temperatures again this weekend....)

I'm having conferences with my students this morning to discuss the projects on which they're working. My office is dreadfully cold (as usual), so I decided to pull out my electric teapot (actually, it's a hotpot) and have tea this morning. It looks like I'll be drinking peach tea since that's the only thing that I seem to have in the office....

Lazy Days....

Well, it's been a rather lazy Saturday.... Yesterday was relatively uneventful too. My apartment's clean and my laundry's done, but that's about it. I'm spending this evening watching "The Godfather, Part II," one of my favorite movies. (I'm still not sure whether I prefer the original or II, though I prefer both of those to III.) I'll probably stay up and read a bit yet tonight before I go to bed...lots of pages to read before the week starts....

A Thought for Today

I have one of those little 'thought-a-day' calendars on my desk in my office. Today's message: "Make seeking the kingdom of God your top priority." Yep....

Word of the Day

I have a 'Word of the Day" section that shows up on my "My Yahoo" page. Just thought I'd share today's word with the rest of the world....

"procrastinate"
DEFINITION: (verb) to put off, to delay.
EXAMPLE: If you habitually procrastinate, try this technique: never touch a piece of paper without either filing it, responding to it, or throwing it out.
SYNONYMS: dawdle, drag, linger

Road Trip

Since I didn't post over the weekend, I'm playing catch-up a little bit today. I'll try to be relatively brief and only include the more interesting stuff....

I got my hair cut on this past Friday. One of my friends who's going to beauty school cut it for me. She cut off nearly 14 inches, so it was easily long enough to donate to Locks of Love (http://www.locksoflove.org). Now I'm re-learning how to take care of my short hair. I had to dig out my blow dryer again, and I need to put all of my pretty little clips and hair chop-sticks (and pencils, and paintbrushes) away.

Friday was also the beginning of a little weekend road trip. Jimmy (that's my boyfriend) and I made a nice big loop up through Missouri and Kansas to visit friends. We first stopped in Conception, MO to visit some friends who go to school (seminary) there. Our next stop was Manhattan (Kansas, the Little Apple, home of Kansas State University). While in Manhattan, we attended a friend's percussion recital, went to Mass at St. Isidore's, wandered around Aggieville, and spent time simply visiting with friends. Wichita, KS was our next (and quasi-unplanned) stop. We decided to stop there and visit people when we were driving south out of Manhattan; we made a few phone calls and surprised a few people, and it was fun to see everyone. Our final (and also even more quasi-unplanned) stop was in Stillwater, OK. As we were driving back home, we decided to take a little detour and go to Eskimo Joe's for supper. The trip was fun, but now I need to try to transition back into my regular week and weekend work schedule....

I managed to sleep in a bit this morning (in an attempt to catch up on the lost sleep from the weekend), but the rest of the day will be busy. I'm working all afternoon and then there's class in the evening. A typical Tuesday....

Sade and Recess

Well, class today didn't quite cover what I'd anticipated. We spent nearly two hours reading and discussing the work of Marquis de Sade. (If you haven't read his work, DON'T!!) The last hour, when we actually began discussing Camilla, was certainly much more pleasant than the first two hours....

I went to "recess" with a few other graduate students after class. ("Recess" is when a group of graduate students goes out for supper between the afternoon and the evening set of classes. We started calling our supper outings "recess" when one of the nontraditional students in the department said that his daughter had asked if he had any friends at school that he could play with during recess. Thus, we have recess.) Now it's back to grading papers....

Weapons Against Procrastination

A random quote taken out of context for today:
"I usually get at least one new weapon every year."

Despite what the quote might suggest, there's not much excitement here today. (No, I'm not quoting myself. Someone else said it and it was appropriate in the given context...it's just more fun without the given context!) Anyway, I tutored this morning, have class all afternoon, and will probably spend the evening grading papers. I know there's Adoration and other stuff going on at Newman tonight, so I'll probably spend some time over there. The papers, however, are a priority. I've already had them way too long and I need to return them to my students very, very soon.

We'll be discussing Fanny Burney's novel Camilla in class this afternoon. I haven't finished the book (it's massive, over 900 pages!), but what I've read of it has been wonderful--it's relatively easy to read and generally entertaining. I need to start being brilliant and coming up with topics for my papers for this semester....

Huck Finn....

Okay, so I just spent the last three hours in a seminar class discussing Mark Twain's Huck Finn. I'd read the book before, and I entered the classroom discussion thinking that everyone in the class had probably read the book before too. (I assumed that everyone probably read it in high school just as I read it in high school. I thought Huck Finn was considered standard reading in most Kansas high schools.) I was quite surprised by the nature of the discussion simply because we spent most of the class talking about the elements and debates surrounding the text rather than the text itself. Well, I guess that's a common trend in contemporary academia....

So the questions for the readers (if there are any readers out there): Have you read Huck Finn and, if so, when? (And watching the movie--though it may have gotten you through your high school English class--doesn't count here.)

"She was a totally normal schizophrenic."

No, this phrase wasn't said of me. (And I'm neither 'totally normal' nor 'schizophrenic.') Anyway, I saw this line in an on-line news article and thought it was something that most definitely needed to be quoted out of context.

Just Playing....Photos from Ireland

I just wanted to play with putting some photographs up on my new little blog. (Basically, I just wanted to see if I could figure out how to get pictures up here all by my self...and I did it!!) These are a few pictures from my trip to Ireland this past May. Ireland was absolutely beautiful, maybe I'll go back someday....

Words, words, words....

Still generally unmotivated to do any real work....

While I probably should have been working, I spent several hours last night playing Scrabble with my boyfriend. We had fun, but we got a little too competitive. (I still need to check and see if 'il,' 'ye,' 'meshing,' 'devile,' 'quib,' and 'taxe' are words. All of the above were challenged and most were removed from the board as we didn't have a dictionary on hand. A pair of graduate students without a dictionary--pathetic, I know.) I graded a few papers after we finished our games, but I didn't work as late as I probably should have.

Similarly, I was a lazy bum this morning. I read the papers (and thus feel like I'm quasi-informed of the events going on in the vast world around me) and worked on random little projects. The task for the remainder of the afternoon and the evening (preferably before my night class tonight) is to finish grading papers and finish re-reading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn so I'm prepared for class tomorrow. Always pages to read, pages to grade, and pages to write....

My First Post

The title's brilliant, I know....

Anyway, I'm feeling generally unmotivated today and I don't want to work. I have books that I need to read and papers that I need to grade, but I'm spending my time putting together a blog instead. (Since we were discussing the value of blogs in my Composition and Rhetoric class the other day, I'll pretend that I'm putting this blog together as an experiment in rhetorical styles and composition pedagogies, but that's not necessarily the truth....)

Seems like somebody's got a case of the Mondays....