It is scheduled.

My defense, that is. For Wednesday, January 10th, at 1pm.

I MAY have heart failure before then.

I MAY have heart failure after then, when I see all the revisions I still have to do. :)

I DO, however, see a light at the end of the tunnel, and it looks like it just might be a disco ball at the biggest party of the decade.

I feel sorry for my sisters.

After all, nothing they give my dad for Christmas this year can POSSIBLY compare to what I am giving him -

A COPY OF MY COMPLETED THESIS.

Printed and bound last night, delivered to the committee today - it is ready to defend. And seriously, I am wrapping one copy in a box and giving it to my dad for Christmas. (shh...don't tell him!)

But right now - I'm going shopping. :) Merry Christmas, internets!

P.S. And really, somehow I thought I'd have more to say about this day, when it arrived. But, huh. I don't. Maybe later. Blog out.

Let's revisit...

...this for a second. Just that part right after "Blog out" and before "Blog out, take 2." Oh, and this, too.

'Cause people, I'm freaking out here. I have worked approximately a million hours on the "last few details" of my thesis today, in prep for printing it out and giving it to my committee, and I haven't even STARTED the main task on it that I was going to do today.

And it's 11:37pm and I have to teach junior high tomorrow and so far have no lesson plans written.

And I HAVE to get up early enough to wash my hair tomorrow, because "3rd-day hair in a ponytail with bobby pins keeping any greasy strands from touching my face" is one thing, but 4th-day hair? I'm afraid to even THINK about it.

But all the stuff I DID do today needed to be done.

But there is sOOOOooOOoOoOOOOooo much more to do.

And I HAVE to have it done by Thursday. And I teach all day tomorrow. (Did I already say that?)

And I HATE that that post that I linked to was in MARCH. MARCH, people. That was EIGHT MONTHS ago. Or so. Whatever. And I'm STILL not done, and I have until Thursday.

I'm freaking out here.

I'm frightened...

...at how well this pegged me.

Your 1996 Theme Song Is: Ironic by Alanis Morisette

It's like rain on your wedding day It's a free ride when you've already paid It's the good advice that you just didn't take Who would've thought ... it figures

What's Your 1996 Theme Song?

Thanks, Lauren. I DO feel better knowing.

This does not bode well.

My gChat status currently reads, "frantically attempting to quell feelings of total panic."

AAH. AAH. AAH. AAH. AAH. AAH. AAH. AAH. AAH. AAH.

It's finals week, and I have no finals. But don't be jealous - I am in the throes of "manuscript preparation," as I get my thesis ready to give to my committee next week, so that I can schedule my defense for the beginning of January, and I just found out that I was doing one type of citation TOTALLY WRONG.

AAH. AAH. AAH. AAH. AAH. AAH. AAH. AAH.

And it frightens me to think that there are probably a million other things like that, lurking in the background, just waiting for me to think that I'm close to done so they can poke their nasty little formatting heads up and say, "ha ha, fix me!" like one of those sick sick sick SICK games at the amusement parks and roller-skating rinks where you have to hit the little heads of the chipmunks or whatever as they pop out of various holes and you don't know which hole the head will pop out of next or how many more there will be before you are done with your turn but you HAVE to hit them all to win the game...

That's what this feels like. And I've NEVER been good at that *&*$%# game.

Favorite license plate of the day

It said:

ONOIML8

The best part was that the car that it adorned was going slow. Huh.

If you call your sister...

...and she says, "I really can't talk right now; I'm in the middle of a liver transplant. Is it urgent?"

Just say no and hang up, people. Just say no, and hang up.

"Opine" is the verb form of the word "opinion" (at least according to my dad)

So I recently got offended because I misunderstood something that one of my friends was saying. I asked a clarifying question and got over both the misunderstanding AND the being offended. :) Here's what happened:

What I thought my friend said: Anyone who doesn't agree with her political stance and opinions is gutless and an idiot. (I'm paraphrasing; she would never dream of being that harsh.)

What my friend meant: It's not interesting to talk to people who don't know where they stand on certain key issues or who don't have opinions on important things.

But even after the misunderstanding was resolved, the whole thing threw me, to quote Richard Gere in Runaway Bride, "into at least 15 minutes of serious reflection." I thought, "Do I have opinions about things?" (No comment from you, Jer.)

So I decided to find out by, of course!, making a list. And you, lucky reader, are about to see today's version of that list. As you read this, please keep in mind that I am NOT stating here what my strong feelings about these topics ARE; I am just listing things about which I HAVE strong feelings, one way or the other. If you want to know where I stand on these issues, email me or post a comment and I'll consider devoting a post to a given topic. :)

So here you go - I have strong feelings about:

• mens facial hair (that was for you, Josh)
• electric blankets
• appropriate usage of cell phones
• how meetings should be conducted
• pornography
• reading
• speaking other languages
• world travel
• teaching in general
• language teaching
• project management
• the right of other people to have an opinion different from mine
  
• loyalty - to family, spouse, friends, country, God, religion, employer, profession, ideals (not necessarily in that order)
  
• chocolate
• raw vegetables
• how a graduate program should be approached
• the position a toilet seat and lid should be in when the user of said toilet exits the room
• germs
• narrow-mindedness
• my family
  
• how men should and should not treat women
• journal keeping
• God
• my bro-in-law's pies
• reusing and recycling of paper
• the "Twizzlers versus Red Vines" question

I'm sure there are more, but this was a good enough list for me to discover that, YES, I opine.

Phew.

I also discovered in this process that there are other things that I feel neutral about. Stay tuned, maybe I'll list them in a future post. People will surely be interested to read a list entitled, "Things I couldn't care less about."

...and sometimes it's even BETTER than you first thought!!

I just went to the link to the program that my aunt is going to France with, and...

!!!

The TOTAL cost of the program is $2800!!!!!!!

That means I only have to save $1400!!!!

Holy cow! I am SOOOO excited!!!

Sometimes prayers are answered before they are even uttered

So I went to France last summer. And I'm planning to go next summer. And I am saving my money so I CAN go next summer. :) But this morning I was thinking, "Maybe I should NOT go back to the same place in France. Maybe I should even go to a DIFFERENT French-speaking country or figure out some way to increase my knowledge and understanding of French-speaking cultures."
AND THEN!!

I logged into my email account and read the following email from my aunt, who teaches French at a university in the eastern US (names and some other info have been changed to protect, well, ME) :

Hey, Very Important Question: would you be interested in coming on a study abroad with me, summer 2007, as my (unpaid) assistant? [ The university] would pay about half the cost ($2800) for three weeks in France - two in Paris, one in [another region] - maybe a little more. The dates are depart June 25 and return July 15. I have 12 students signed up and have been given permission to take along an assistant.

Let me know if you would be at all interested. I wish they would pay all of it for you, but I have created a bare-bones budget to save the students money and the result is there isn't much padding to pay for the leaders. The $2800 covers airfare, TGV, room & board, metro passes, museum passes, trains in [that other region]. Does not cover 3 Paris dinners or any lunches, or personal expenses on free days, etc.

I would LOVE to have you with me! You are The Best.

!!!! Can you EVEN believe it?!?! It's PERFECT!! I was recently offered a new job, that will be part time and last through the summer, and I told them I wouldn't do it unless they would guarantee me time off (2 weeks minimum) to go to France, and we discussed that that might need to be at the beginning of the summer rather than the end...and this is 3 weeks, and I'll get to do TOURING, and see a region that I've been to but don't know SUPER well, and go to ALL the cool places in PARIS...AND get to know my aunt better. :) :)

It's going to cost quite a bit more than I was planning on having saved, but if Heavenly Father can so nicely line up

1. a job that will let me go AND
2. the opportunity to go,

I feel reasonably sure that He can help me line up

3. the finances to make the trip possible. :) :)

So, needless to say, I'm emailing her to tell her that YES! I want in, and I'll be making plans shortly to make sure that I have accumulated that sum of money in time, but kids, I'M GOIN' TO FRANCE!!

This is me until I'm done...

OK, maybe just the last three squares. Or maybe just the last one and forget about even TRYING to sleep.

Seriously, tho, my chair forbade me from having ANY kind of a social life or anything-other-than-thesis-life until I finish. And it is SO CLOSE to being done that I can TASTE it!

And it tastes like...

In which I contemplate the more serious and significant things in life

We also got our first snow the other day, which brought this question to mind, inspired, as you might imagine, by my current profession:

Who prays harder for snow days, students or teachers?

And also:

Have I officially and terminally ruined the area rug that my parents got me as part of a "new bedroom" Christmas present when I was a teenager in NY by leaving it thrown over the back fence for the last month, ever since I came home from trick-or-treating with my nieces and nephews on Halloween to find an inch of water on my bathroom floor and half the carpet in my bedroom, the half with said area rug covering it, totally submersed in water?

Discuss.

New Year's in California, anyone??

So two of my very best friends are getting married - not to each other :) , one day and several hundred miles apart. I'll be spending basically two straight days in the car, but I WILL be there. Wouldn't miss it!

I received the wedding invitation for one of them yesterday, and stared at the picture for a long time. And, yes, I am cheesy, but the song that was running through my head was, "Fairy tales can come true, it can happen to you" - but I wasn't thinking about me - I was thinking about the girl in the picture, my dear friend. It's been more than 2 years since she met the guy she is now engaged to, and she was impressed with him and liked him more and more as she got to know him, but he wasn't interested, for whatever reason, until just recently, even though they were SUCH good friends for so long. And when they started dating and then got engaged, it was like a miracle - she liked him for SO LONG before this FINALLY happened! And she is a FANTASTIC girl - he's a lucky guy, it just took him a while to figure it out. :)

So I just looked at the smile on her face - she looked like a little girl on Christmas morning - SO stinkin' happy! And I am happy for her, and I wonder if SHE has to pinch herself, daily :) , that this is really, finally, happening with this guy.

And the selfish side of me, which sometimes takes over :) , realizes that I'll miss her A LOT when they get married - he lives in the northwest, many hours away, and they'll live there. And I hope and trust that I will be that happy someday with the man I'll eventually marry, and I look at the smile on her face and am THRILLED for her. Fairy tales can come true, and sometimes they happen to the people who MOST deserve it.

T-shirts I saw on campus today that I enjoyed because they reminded me of my life

"Aged to perfection"

"Procrastinators unite! tomorrow"

Not sure I know what a "weekend" is.

So this weekend was crazy busy. I went to my parents' house to watch General Conference, and literally HALF of my backseat was FULL of work materials - 2 laptops, a big file box, a little set of file folders, a stack of baskets with junior high French homework to grade, and my school bag with books and materials to plan more lessons.

And none of it left the car all weekend.

erg

And please don't get me wrong - Conference was GREAT! Playing gospel bingo with the niece and nephews was...fun. ;) Being with the family was fantastic! But it was just busy.

And then yesterday I realized that, no, really, I'm sick. So I called in sick to a meeting at the junior high and a class observation at the university and basically sat on my couch all day. And it's too bad that life goes on, even when we are sick. I mean, I can't get a note from my mom saying, "Please excuse Mademoiselle from having to teach today. She was too sick yesterday to prepare lessons." Uh, no, it doesn't work that way. And even if I were to call in sick, I would still have to prepare the lessons for the sub.

All of which means that last night, when the drainage from my nose kept turning on and off like unto a faucet, I was up until 2am preparing for school today.

See, isn't that what weekends are supposed to be for?? Aren't they supposed to be a time to sit on your couch in your pjs and catch up on life and breathe a little and maybe do laundry, or grocery shopping or something else around the house? Well, I did that yesterday, ladies and gents, and I am glad that I did, but I am still sick, and I still need to catch up, and I'm getting tired of having every weekend s'dang FULL! I need time to breathe and absorb the fact that what I am doing IS my life, and I just don't have time for it! I think I have just gotten spoiled over the last few years of having so much of my schedule under my control, and being able to pretty much do what I wanted when I wanted. And now I have 7th graders expecting me to teach them French every other day. :)

So maybe just consider this the 2-yr-old-attitude rant of a 30-year-old woman. :) I'll get over it. :)

And now I will pack up and go to my other job.

I GOT PAID TODAY!!!

...and really, no I mean REALLY, that is enough news for a whole dang post. It has been way, way, way too long, people.

Holy crow!!

...I just realized that it has been a while since I posted, and it's not that I don't have things to say ;) but that I've been crazy-busy and unfortunately, blogging has been one thing that has dropped down on the priority list. Blogging and sleeping. Oh, and eating three meals a day. <whine>And I had been doing SO WELL at eating three healthy meals a day since I got back from France! </whine> Just gotta start again.

But, see, life goes in cycles, and I am caught in one where I don't sleep enough. But only every other night. See, I teach part-time at the junior high, which in my case means that I teach every other day. So on days like today, I get to school at 7:45am-ish, already tired and stressed from staying up too late prepping for today, and not sure if the lesson plans will work. I teach three classes (two of which are combined French 1 and French 2 - oh joy oh rapture), and then after school I go back through the lesson plans for today to update them according to what I actually did and didn't do, print and file them, clean off my whiteboards and chalkboard (I have three and LOVE it!), maybe grade some papers, and then, usually, go home. I feel like I don't have to plan my next day of lesson plans today, I mean, I'm SO tired, and after all, I have all day tomorrow, right? Well, right, except for that whole "my other job" thing. So tomorrow I'll be SO tired from today that I'll sleep in tomorrow, NOT go to my other (flexible hours) job as early as I should, and end up wasting most of the day, and finding myself at 10 o'clock at night with three lessons to plan! So then I'll stay up too late to plan them, and head to school the next day, already tired and stressed, resolving to NOT WAIT UNTIL LATE THE NIGHT BEFORE I TEACH TO PLAN MY LESSONS.

And that is pretty much my life. Except that the "other job" that I mentioned has been getting started again the last two weeks after the summer off, which means that I really DO need to get there and get things done, so the whole "sleeping in every other day" thing has GOT to end.

sigh.

And I think, "Man, I need a SECOND to breathe!" And then I have a second, and instead of planning for what I need to do that day, sleeping, or eating a healthy meal, I open a book, and several hours later I have finished it and am again kicking myself for wasting time. It would feel better, I think, if the book was substantial, but short stories by L.M. Montgomery?! PLEASE!!

So the upshot of it is that I spend about half my time so panicked that I think I am not going to survive that day, and the other half of my time wondering what I am so stressed about.

And the thesis sits on my hard drive, untouched.

sigh.

But on the upside I just figured out how to save a couple hundred dollars on health insurance this year (no this is NOT a Geico commercial), and I got to see some of my nieces and nephews TWICE this weekend, and as I was leaving on Sunday my seven-year-old namesake niece said to me plaintively, with her cheek pressed against mine, "When are we going to see each other again?"

And people, it just doesn't get much cuter than that.

Alone is a lonely place to be

Heavenly Father answers prayers! And here is how I know:

So I'm single, and usually I can deal with that ok. :) But last night I went to the apartment of one of my dear, dear girl friends, to hear about her weekend. See, this boy that she has liked for two years flew in from out of state to spend the three-day weekend with her, and FINALLY, after two years of close, close friendship, initiated a dating relationship with her. :) :) :) So last night I got the dirt on the weekend, and rejoiced with her. Good times. :)

And then on the way home in my car I started to feel really lonely. See, for the last year I have had three main confidants, two male and one female. And within the last month or so, culminating with last night, all three of them got, shall we say, "attached." So even though I am happy for all three of these dear people - and I really am happy for them!! - it was a little hard last night to feel like one, two, three, bam, bam, bam, and I have lost all my geographically close people-you-go-to-when-you-can't-go-to-anyone-else- because-they-know-you-and-STILL-love-you. 'Cause when you're a girl, and your guy friends get attached, things have to change between you. And then this girl friend got attached, and I felt really alone. And I prayed and asked Heavenly Father for support.

And then today, just now, the friend that I talked to last night called, and told me that she was really glad to have been able to tell me about her great weekend and new boyfriend :) and that I was one of the people she had REALLY wanted to tell about it, and she expressed to me how much she values our friendship, and just basically reassured me that she wants us to continue to be really, really good friends. And even though as I write that it sounds so cliche, I trust her and I believe her and it was sincere, and I needed it and I cried. And after I hung up I realized that that was an answer to my prayer. And I cried again.

"I'm not dead yet!"

Brownie points if you know what movie that line is from, and DOUBLE brownie points to those who can tell me what animal is being struck against a wall in the background when that line is being said.

...but here is what has been going on in the last two weeks:

• I started my first French-teaching job ever, at a junior high.
• My sister got married on Friday.

And I think that is enough to 'splain my absence from the blogging world during that time period. :)

So now I am prepping for tomorrow's classes and gathering names of people who have offered to help me move this weekend. Good times, good times.

It's kind of crazy to have started as a "real teacher." I have been studying, talking about, reading about, and teaching about language teaching for the past, oh, six or seven years, but to be actually DOING it is a little different. I know, shocker. :) It's funny - I know and have so many different theories about how to prepare lessons for language teaching, and yet here I am, struggling to come up with what I'll do tomorrow. My mom, who also taught French, says that you "pay your dues" your first year or two, and then it gets REALLY fun after that. I don't think she means that the first year will be completely DEVOID of fun ("zero fun, sir"), but as I am designing my curriculum, and establishing my patterns and my style, this year will be a lot of work. Ready, set, GO!

Thursday afternoon

So I got an email and then a phone call today, and, while the two were not connected to each other, the combination nevertheless sent me into tears and deep "life contemplation" mode. And I am currently trying to compose a blog post about it, but it may just end up in my journal rather than on the internet, depending on how personal it gets. (I really like DYM's lingerie analogy about how much to share on a blog.) (Especially the part where she invokes the power of Greyskull.) (But I digress.)

And at the risk of posting something that could be read as really dramatic and cause my friends to overreact and call me in a panic to make sure I am not DYING (oh no, wait, that's what I did to Josh ;) ), I have a good friend, who has been an emotional outlet and strength and a "wow it's been a while since I had a friend that close and it's really nice" to me, that I feel like I need to stop depending on so much. No, that's not quite right. It's that I feel like it needs to be that we are not so close, and that we don't get closer. I've felt that since the last part of my time in France, and it makes me sad, and it hurts a bit. And the other night I had another friend over for dinner, and while talking about HER life, and about a friend that I had several years ago, I suddenly had the thought that now comforts me about this other friend. It was one of those "you realize something is true and right AS you hear it being said...by you" moments. So here it is. Get ready, it's profound. :)

Just because you are not as close to someone now as you once were doesn't cancel out all the good that they did for you.

And it sounds so simple, and it is, but thinking about the hole that this friend will leave that will somehow need to be filled in other ways and by other people, it is very comforting to me right now. People change us, friendships change us, but sometimes we only need them for a while, and then we can hold on to the lessons that we learned through and with and because of them, and let the person go so that we, and they, can grow and move on. Not that we were holding them back, per se, but just that the time is not "now" anymore. And the value is in what we learned, and what we took, and what we gave, and how it changed us.

And now this does sound really dramatic, and no, no one died, and I am fine, but I have just been thinking a lot, and, as one of my friends in France said, "Don't reflect on things too much. Reflecting too much creates distances between people." But in this case, I think it is ok.