Belated birthday appreciation and other updates
So, I am disgracefully late in sharing the absolutely AWESOME Harry Potter-themed birthday card hamsterwoman and family sent me. It deserves a photo, it's just so cool:
Please note that it's not only super-adorable, but the ENVELOPE has a lightning-bolt scar motif all over the inside. Definitely one of the best cards I've ever seen.
She also gave me two books, one paper and one Kindle format: Swordheart by T. Kingfisher and False Value (RoL #8). Looking forward to reading them both! She also lent me the RoL graphic novel I hadn't seen yet, Water Weed. (Conveniently, our birthdays are spaced so that I was able to return it to her when I sent her her present last week. :D)
(Oh, speaking of books, I forgot to mention that I recently read Creating Chaos by Lacey Dailey, a brain-candy feel-good m/m YA story. It was cute and fluffy but it also dropped a LOT of potentially interesting plot points along the way, which annoyed me. Not my favorite of the genre.)
Update on MiniPlu's moving in: So, it turns out the wording says, "Strongly encouraged" to limit their stuff to the two bags/boxes, floor fan and backpack. But it doesn't say REQUIRED. Most of MiniPlu's future classmates are planning to politely but firmly ignore the suggestion. MiniPlu will still have to handle whatever she brings on her own, so we'll still ship up the dorm fridge (hopefully she can have a dorm-mate help her), but I think we'll throw the rug and maybe one more bag or bin into the car. We also got some of those bags where you can vacuum all the air out and compress the contents, in order to better fit all her bedding into one bag, and maybe still have room for some other stuff.
I'm still nervous, though, because a local college just announced yesterday that they would be 100% online after all - a mere two weeks before students were expecting to move in. I'm terrified that MHC will do the same, which is why I haven't re-bought/shipped her dorm fridge up yet.
Update on my attempt to register for classes: HOLY HELL DO I HATE RUTGERS' STUDENT PORTAL. I'd been contacting people via my regular Gmail, but I had the professor I'd contacted tell me that my email had gone to his spam folder and it's possible that was happening to other recipients, and that I should use my student account. Which meant I had to find out how to access said student account. I remembered RECEIVING a student email when I registered, but finding out where it was located was a bitch. First I had to dig around to find the student portal, and then figure out where, in all the fifty billion options, the damn email was located. And because I have my incoming email is sent to my personal gmail, at first THAT'S what came up and it took me another age to figure out how to see the Rutgers account directly. I wanted to get that added to the various accounts on my gmail window, but then Safari was being a bitch and wouldn't let me, so I had to switch to Chrome for that.
Sure enough, the director DID reply promptly this time ... only to tell me she was foisting me off on someone else (and had cc:ed that person on the reply). So now I have to wait to hear from THEM.
Sigh.
Update on our district's plans: imminent. We'll find out on Thursday what those are. Two's schedule is supposed to be released soon, too.
Hurricane/Tropical Storm Isaias was supposed to clobber us but moved further west than initially expected, so we got a couple of hours of rain and wind, but nothing too serious. Lost a branch off one of our rosebushes, and a neighbor lost a tree but it didn't fall on anything but lawn, thank goodness. On the other hand, my TKD master (in PA) had to close one of the branch schools today because nobody could get to it through flooded roads - they got all the rain that NJ was supposed to have received. Instead, by mid afternoon the sun was shining and the wind was dropping.
But I had anticipated lousy weather so I decided to push my usual Tuesday weekly grocery run to Wed. Instead, I spent the morning and early afternoon in the kitchen, making homemade tomato soup with garden tomatoes, pepper and herbs, my best friend's warm corn salad with garden corn, pepper and herbs, plus our favorite oatmeal bread and
blueraccoon's PB sandies. Oh, and I made another round of pesto with our surplus of basil - that'll get used in tomorrow's dinner. Of course, I'm sure the tomato plants have been busy replenishing all the ones I just used up today :-P.
Gah - how the heck did it get to be midnight already? I'm off to bed.
Please note that it's not only super-adorable, but the ENVELOPE has a lightning-bolt scar motif all over the inside. Definitely one of the best cards I've ever seen.
She also gave me two books, one paper and one Kindle format: Swordheart by T. Kingfisher and False Value (RoL #8). Looking forward to reading them both! She also lent me the RoL graphic novel I hadn't seen yet, Water Weed. (Conveniently, our birthdays are spaced so that I was able to return it to her when I sent her her present last week. :D)
(Oh, speaking of books, I forgot to mention that I recently read Creating Chaos by Lacey Dailey, a brain-candy feel-good m/m YA story. It was cute and fluffy but it also dropped a LOT of potentially interesting plot points along the way, which annoyed me. Not my favorite of the genre.)
Update on MiniPlu's moving in: So, it turns out the wording says, "Strongly encouraged" to limit their stuff to the two bags/boxes, floor fan and backpack. But it doesn't say REQUIRED. Most of MiniPlu's future classmates are planning to politely but firmly ignore the suggestion. MiniPlu will still have to handle whatever she brings on her own, so we'll still ship up the dorm fridge (hopefully she can have a dorm-mate help her), but I think we'll throw the rug and maybe one more bag or bin into the car. We also got some of those bags where you can vacuum all the air out and compress the contents, in order to better fit all her bedding into one bag, and maybe still have room for some other stuff.
I'm still nervous, though, because a local college just announced yesterday that they would be 100% online after all - a mere two weeks before students were expecting to move in. I'm terrified that MHC will do the same, which is why I haven't re-bought/shipped her dorm fridge up yet.
Update on my attempt to register for classes: HOLY HELL DO I HATE RUTGERS' STUDENT PORTAL. I'd been contacting people via my regular Gmail, but I had the professor I'd contacted tell me that my email had gone to his spam folder and it's possible that was happening to other recipients, and that I should use my student account. Which meant I had to find out how to access said student account. I remembered RECEIVING a student email when I registered, but finding out where it was located was a bitch. First I had to dig around to find the student portal, and then figure out where, in all the fifty billion options, the damn email was located. And because I have my incoming email is sent to my personal gmail, at first THAT'S what came up and it took me another age to figure out how to see the Rutgers account directly. I wanted to get that added to the various accounts on my gmail window, but then Safari was being a bitch and wouldn't let me, so I had to switch to Chrome for that.
Sure enough, the director DID reply promptly this time ... only to tell me she was foisting me off on someone else (and had cc:ed that person on the reply). So now I have to wait to hear from THEM.
Sigh.
Update on our district's plans: imminent. We'll find out on Thursday what those are. Two's schedule is supposed to be released soon, too.
Hurricane/Tropical Storm Isaias was supposed to clobber us but moved further west than initially expected, so we got a couple of hours of rain and wind, but nothing too serious. Lost a branch off one of our rosebushes, and a neighbor lost a tree but it didn't fall on anything but lawn, thank goodness. On the other hand, my TKD master (in PA) had to close one of the branch schools today because nobody could get to it through flooded roads - they got all the rain that NJ was supposed to have received. Instead, by mid afternoon the sun was shining and the wind was dropping.
But I had anticipated lousy weather so I decided to push my usual Tuesday weekly grocery run to Wed. Instead, I spent the morning and early afternoon in the kitchen, making homemade tomato soup with garden tomatoes, pepper and herbs, my best friend's warm corn salad with garden corn, pepper and herbs, plus our favorite oatmeal bread and
blueraccoon's PB sandies. Oh, and I made another round of pesto with our surplus of basil - that'll get used in tomorrow's dinner. Of course, I'm sure the tomato plants have been busy replenishing all the ones I just used up today :-P.
Gah - how the heck did it get to be midnight already? I'm off to bed.