Late, late last night...
So, procrastinating, as always, I was lazily loking through some materials on the life and work of Ariadna Tyrkova-Williams, one of the major Russian liberals of the early 20th century (since I had to do a presentation on her today) at the same time as leafing through Russian Cosmo (quite amusing, I must say! although I was disappointed wth the American December issue -- first of all, it was twice thinner than the Russian, and it had almost no mention of the holidays! I December! But still, it was my little piece of America...)
I heard my Chinese neighbor arguing with her boyfriend, as always (yeah, this sweet innocent little girl who speaks almost no Russian spends every other day in a crazy melodramatic fight with her boyfriend -- with hysterical shrieks, lots of Chinese cursing, and the usual throwing of objects at him), and so I paid almost no attention to them, as I was used to their fights by then. Afterwards, I was on the phone with S and my door was open slightly so that Toshka could play in our little hallway, when, all of a sudden, Toshka runs in at a crazy pace and hides under the bed, and the Chinese guy, as always, stumbles into the hallway... the only difference was that he had a huge fresh bruise on one of his eyes, and his face, hands, and neck were scratched bloody... and I mean bloody! So, of course, I stopped my conversation, went out there and gave the poor dude some iodine for his wounds. Man, that sweet little girl's vicious!
Anyway, at about 1am, I decided it was time to do some actual research, so I spent a while gatherine info. on Mme. Tyrkova and trying to put it all together into a fairly cohesive presentation. Then, (this was at about 3-3:30am) J IMed me, and, of course, the topic switched to ballroom, as it tends to with ballroom addicts... ended up going to bed around 4:30am, waking up at 8am, and, notwithstanding, doing quite well on the presentation! Aah, another point in my favor -- and they'll all count on the extremely subjective exam I'll take in 2 weeks...