roundup
The turkey and its accoutrements (side note: spell-check prefers "accouterments", but I refuse) are almost gone. My uncle and aunt have gone home. I have played a fair amount of cribbage (winning only twice, but almost winning several times) and a little bridge (making my own contracts and setting a fair few of my opponents' with clever defense, and usually - but not always - bidding correctly, even, though only once causing confusion with two cards stuck together so my hand appeared to have one less than anyone else's), and accomplished some knitting, and written about a third of my team's final paper for my class, which is due December 10 - a week from this Thursday - or, in fact, actually December 9, so everyone can read it (ha!) before we present it in class that evening. I'm more or less making shit up, but I understand from the general grapevine that that's more or less normal?
Also, I'm not claiming to be a rock star or anything, but my teammates are collectively not especially helpful. In the first stage of the project, we tried to schedule times to get together and that kept not working out and I finally despaired and began actually doing the work, and fortunately when I said so the girl got with the program and the boy asked what we'd like him to do and then did it, and we got an A-minus (which we probably didn't deserve) on the lit review; in this stage, the boy has done actual data collection (and a bit of mysterious processing), and I've so far been on my own w/r/t analysis - and the girl, we haven't seen or heard from in three weeks. We're kind of assuming she's sick, which of course sucks more for her - but it kind of sucks for us, too, not being able to rely on her, and I'm just not sure what's going to happen group-wise to the three of us. We've been sort of plugging along without her, and I don't want to be the girl who meets with the professor and says We want you to be aware that actually only two of us have done any work, here. But if the fact that we're only 2/3 of a team is going to hurt us, I kind of do want her to know, you know? Not to yank grades away from the girl who hasn't been with us, but to throw a little understanding on us, right? Only in real life, if one of your teammates drops the ball, you don't have a lot of options besides pick it up and run. So I think we'll probably go on saying nothing.
In general, I suppose I'm not that concerned; there are five equally-weighted components to the final grade, and I had an A on the first one and an A- on the second, this is the third, and I feel confident I'll be okay in Class Participation and on the final, so I can pretty much get a D on this presentation and still pull something A-like in the course, and I don't think I'll get a D (see above re: not deserving the A-; I think as long as we turn something in and avoid the zero, it's unlikely we'll be lower than the C range).
Having thought that through will probably help me sleep tonight. Last night I had a dream that my sister-in-law was driving me to the first day of my next class, which was somewhere I'd never been before but apparently sort of nearby some places I do know, approximately - Strathmore and Kosher Mart and so on, up that way - but I didn't know exactly how to get there from anywhere I knew how to get to, and I wasn't a hundred percent positive when it began, but I knew I was late, and I checked my voice mail to be sure: five useless messages to delete and then one from the professor, confirming that I was enrolled in his class and that the first meeting was "tomorrow, Thursday, November 28" - and it wasn't until I woke up that it occurred to me that it would be very strange to have the first meeting of a new class on Thanksgiving Day. (Of course that wasn't the case this year, but I believe Thanksgiving can be as late as the 28th if November 1 is a Friday.) Obviously I have been having some class-related anxiety and maybe now that, oh, 1500 words are written the subconscious can lighten up.
The house is almost completely quiet. My parents are off tomorrow to Australia and Other Faraway Places - my mother is giving a paper at a conference in Cairns, and they are quite sensibly not going all that way just to turn around and come home. Cairns, Brisbane, Sydney, (no Uluru, but you can bet when I get to Australia I won't miss it), Kuala Lumpur, Phnom Penh - remember when we wouldn't let them go to Cambodia? Somehow a side trip to Cambodia doesn't distress us as much as a deliberate trip to Cambodia and nowhere else. (Plus, they've taken our concerns seriously and etc.) Anyway, my brother is driving them to the airport at 4am, so all three of them are asleep now, and the house is making the sort of occasional noise houses make - the whir of the appliances, the occasional muffled thunk as something settles somewhere. I'm off to bed now; I'll wake up and say goodbye when they go, and then go back to sleep and wake up when I wake up and drive home again.
Thanksgiving is good. It's my favorite holiday. (This year, also, I get to wish a happy birth day to Young Zaphod, my newest baby friend. [g]) But I'm already ready for Christmas, I think, when most of what is currently stressing me out (to sum up, from the above and what's in my head: class work and the non-teamwork thereof; concert for which I'm not confident enough of us will know the music well enough not to be a moderate embarrassment; curling, which is always good, taking up just a shade more of my time than I feel I have free at the moment; my parents ten thousand miles away where there are, in no particular order, scorpions, land mines, tropical heat and its related contagions, armed gangs - listen, it's not that I don't think world travel is a positive thing, it's just that they are not especially adventurous and I worry about them; did I mention this class teamwork thing?) will be over. Right now I sort of feel like I don't have time to be doing nothing tomorrow but driving. Alas, I'll be in the car by myself, so driving it is.
Also, I'm not claiming to be a rock star or anything, but my teammates are collectively not especially helpful. In the first stage of the project, we tried to schedule times to get together and that kept not working out and I finally despaired and began actually doing the work, and fortunately when I said so the girl got with the program and the boy asked what we'd like him to do and then did it, and we got an A-minus (which we probably didn't deserve) on the lit review; in this stage, the boy has done actual data collection (and a bit of mysterious processing), and I've so far been on my own w/r/t analysis - and the girl, we haven't seen or heard from in three weeks. We're kind of assuming she's sick, which of course sucks more for her - but it kind of sucks for us, too, not being able to rely on her, and I'm just not sure what's going to happen group-wise to the three of us. We've been sort of plugging along without her, and I don't want to be the girl who meets with the professor and says We want you to be aware that actually only two of us have done any work, here. But if the fact that we're only 2/3 of a team is going to hurt us, I kind of do want her to know, you know? Not to yank grades away from the girl who hasn't been with us, but to throw a little understanding on us, right? Only in real life, if one of your teammates drops the ball, you don't have a lot of options besides pick it up and run. So I think we'll probably go on saying nothing.
In general, I suppose I'm not that concerned; there are five equally-weighted components to the final grade, and I had an A on the first one and an A- on the second, this is the third, and I feel confident I'll be okay in Class Participation and on the final, so I can pretty much get a D on this presentation and still pull something A-like in the course, and I don't think I'll get a D (see above re: not deserving the A-; I think as long as we turn something in and avoid the zero, it's unlikely we'll be lower than the C range).
Having thought that through will probably help me sleep tonight. Last night I had a dream that my sister-in-law was driving me to the first day of my next class, which was somewhere I'd never been before but apparently sort of nearby some places I do know, approximately - Strathmore and Kosher Mart and so on, up that way - but I didn't know exactly how to get there from anywhere I knew how to get to, and I wasn't a hundred percent positive when it began, but I knew I was late, and I checked my voice mail to be sure: five useless messages to delete and then one from the professor, confirming that I was enrolled in his class and that the first meeting was "tomorrow, Thursday, November 28" - and it wasn't until I woke up that it occurred to me that it would be very strange to have the first meeting of a new class on Thanksgiving Day. (Of course that wasn't the case this year, but I believe Thanksgiving can be as late as the 28th if November 1 is a Friday.) Obviously I have been having some class-related anxiety and maybe now that, oh, 1500 words are written the subconscious can lighten up.
The house is almost completely quiet. My parents are off tomorrow to Australia and Other Faraway Places - my mother is giving a paper at a conference in Cairns, and they are quite sensibly not going all that way just to turn around and come home. Cairns, Brisbane, Sydney, (no Uluru, but you can bet when I get to Australia I won't miss it), Kuala Lumpur, Phnom Penh - remember when we wouldn't let them go to Cambodia? Somehow a side trip to Cambodia doesn't distress us as much as a deliberate trip to Cambodia and nowhere else. (Plus, they've taken our concerns seriously and etc.) Anyway, my brother is driving them to the airport at 4am, so all three of them are asleep now, and the house is making the sort of occasional noise houses make - the whir of the appliances, the occasional muffled thunk as something settles somewhere. I'm off to bed now; I'll wake up and say goodbye when they go, and then go back to sleep and wake up when I wake up and drive home again.
Thanksgiving is good. It's my favorite holiday. (This year, also, I get to wish a happy birth day to Young Zaphod, my newest baby friend. [g]) But I'm already ready for Christmas, I think, when most of what is currently stressing me out (to sum up, from the above and what's in my head: class work and the non-teamwork thereof; concert for which I'm not confident enough of us will know the music well enough not to be a moderate embarrassment; curling, which is always good, taking up just a shade more of my time than I feel I have free at the moment; my parents ten thousand miles away where there are, in no particular order, scorpions, land mines, tropical heat and its related contagions, armed gangs - listen, it's not that I don't think world travel is a positive thing, it's just that they are not especially adventurous and I worry about them; did I mention this class teamwork thing?) will be over. Right now I sort of feel like I don't have time to be doing nothing tomorrow but driving. Alas, I'll be in the car by myself, so driving it is.