stuff and bother

[joyce]

• I've been lacking in brain cycles lately, hence the lack of posting. I go to work, I do my thing, I come home, I work, I WoW, I talk to faecat and play Scrabble with my sisters, I sleep.
  
• Last weekend, we tripped down to Raleigh for jeni's birthday party, which was very low key and very nice. There was dinner at Neo Asia, featuring incredibly good red curry (mmm, mussels) and the best Thai ice tea I've had like, ever. There was good conversation. There was a Jeni, looking happy and well. :) After dinner, we took off, since we had to drive back here and we were tired, so we exchanged hugs and left them batting around bar plans.
  
• Tomorrow is my father's birthday, and schedules converged so that we could all come together Friday, so we did. There was lunch out with him and mom and Hope and Faith and Jeff and I, and then hanging around the house and playing hearts, and tacos for dinner, and playing Scrabble. Jeff's mom joined us for the hanging out and dinner. Everyone was in great moods, and it was a glorious, wonderful, happy day.
  
• Dad didn't care about a birthday cake, so we got a box of Betty Crocker GF brownies to try. It's a sign of how much my taste buds have changed that Hope and Faith were both saying "Not bad, but the texture is off... next time, we need to add more chocolate chips or something" and meantime, I was like "These are faboooooo."
  
• I got my first jury summons ever this week. Fortunately, it's towards the end of the semester. I've already arranged one sub, and I need to figure out what to do about the other two classes.
  
• The world keeps getting smaller.
  
  A couple of year ago, when I was in grad school, there was a girl in one of my classes who was working on a masters in a related field at one of the major universities about an hour up the road. She'd look around and decided that a masters from our department would compliment her studies well, so she started our program. At the same time as she was working on the program there. And commuting an hour in between and working as a research assistant there.
  
  (We told her she was nuts.)
  
  She was smart and seemed to be doing well, but she was in the other half of the department, and so I lost track of her. Until last night, when she turned up at the (rocking) Halloween party thrown by a grad school friend of mine. Only she wasn't there because she knows the friend, she was there because she's still in grad school, working on a (totally different) masters with my friend's cousin and roommate.
  
  That was weird. And trippy but cool when she recognized me after three years and several inches of hair less (though I might have been going through a short stage then, too, I don't remember).
  
  So I came home and Facebook friended her, because that's what you do in this modern age. :)
  
  Oh, and my friend had several folks from her undergraduate days there, and in talking with one of them, she knew my sister (sorry, Hope, didn't catch her name, there were a lot of folks I didn't know and she was dressed as Wilma from the Flintstones). This isn't that weird, though; we discovered a few years ago that some of my grad school friends were at college at the same time as Hope and involved in the same campus groups.
  
  Yea. Small world.
  
• In a fit of incredibly bad planning, I had quizzes in all of my classes this week. What the hell I was thinking, I don't know. I have to grade:
  - 34 stats quizzes
  - miscellaneous stats homework, which is a perpetual thing
  - 31 short writing assignments to grade for the community college intro classes
  - 28 short writing assignments to grade for the university intro class
  - 40 short answer quizzes for race and ethnicity
  
  Um. Yea.
  
• Also, there was a report last night of an armed robbery on campus in broad daylight near the athletic fields. Please, please, please let it be a hoax.