Frog and Goat

I’m off from work today. Hip, hip, hooray.

Earlier in the week, I ordered three CDs from CD Baby. I’ve never ordered from them before; have only lurked to see what they have to offer. I specifically went to the site to find a Mary Gordon Hall CD after seeing her perform a song at the Christine Lavin concert back in March. You know what happens when you go looking for just one CD; you come back with more.

The CDs arrived yesterday and I’m highly recommending Mary Gordon Hall if you like your folk with a bit of country thrown in. And, if you like good songwriting, good guitar playing and a beautiful voice you should check out Kim Taylor. The other CD is also good but it’s in the Trip Hop fusion genre.

Yes, all over the music board here at F&G.

The whole CD Baby experience was excellent and it’s as if they knew me with their shipping notification email:

Your CDs have been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow.

A team of 50 employees inspected your CDs and polished them to make sure they were in the best possible condition before mailing.

Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your CDs into the finest gold-lined box that money can buy.

We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of Portland waved ‘Bon Voyage!’ to your package, on its way to you, in our private CD Baby jet on this day, Tuesday, April 25th.

I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. We sure did.
Your picture is on our wall as “Customer of the Year”. We’re all exhausted but can’t wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!

I’ve been using my laptop at the kitchen table lately because there’s more room at the table than on my desk and with research and paper-writing to do, it just makes sense.

The cat loves it. Usually when I get home he barely lifts his head to acknowledge me and then he sleeps until I come back downstairs to fix dinner. For the past couple of days he’s been sitting right next to me and the love my feet have been getting is truly remarkable. As long as I occasionally give him a pat on the head, he stays put.

Right now, he’s sitting next to me and his bag of Kosmic Kitty Katnip. All is very right with the world.

This little guy has been sitting on our back steps all day. I guess there’s a perfect combination of sun and shade.

When you get way too many peeps for Easter, what’s the best thing to do? Skewer them and hold them over a flame:

Of course, I realized that fire was, well, fire. So I put on a glove:

When I was in college, specifically, senior year, everyone I was friends with seemed to think they were so very stressed. Looking back on that time, I seem to remember being irritated that everyone said that, and now I know what stress is and we were STUPID. I don’t care that many of my friends were honor student brainiacs (I hung out with them but I wasn’t an honor student). We were STUPID. When the stress in our lives was all about whether or not to go to free taco night on Wednesdays or stay in and drink, well, that’s not really stress, is it?

What I consider stress now:

• I’ve totally changed my mind about going back to grad school. I really think I might and considering I’ve had nearly a whole week of motivation while thinking about grad school, I should probably go with it. Who knows when I’ll feel like this again. The problem is I won’t be able to officially start until January 2007. The other problem? Being accepted into the program.

• I finished my portion of our group project and I’ve spent lots of time trying to get the two people in the group we’ve been calling “blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things” to actually do their work only to find out they are worse than lame so I’ve been spending time editing and re-writing their portions. Because, really, I have nothing better to do with my time.
• I’ve watched the planets align and can now officially start working as an e-learning wonk. I have twenty-four gazillion things to learn, but for the last five or six years what I’ve really wanted to do was learn how to design courses for online deployment and now I’m finally going to spend part of my work day learning how to and actually doing that. The other part of my work day will be spent amazing my co-workers with all the crazy mad computing skillz and figuring out what we’re going to do for lunch. Believe me, the lunch decision takes time, energy and serious effort.
  

Yesterday we went over to my sister’s to help with a wiring problem they were having. This week they had some work done to their kitchen and now have a new floor, new dishwasher and a new table and chairs. The better-half switched out some wiring so the two-way switch for the kitchen light worked on both switches.

Their kitchen looks great but it made me look at the lousy vinyl we have in a back hallway with even more disgust than usual. So, today, I mopped it. And when that didn’t make any difference, I got out the bleach spray and a scrubby and cleaned the floor the hard way…on my hands and knees.

I still hate the floor but at least now it’s cleaner. I have new floor envy.

This picture is from Wednesday night. The clouds were moving pretty quickly but this is a fairly accurate depiction of our night sky.

We’re serving Steak Diane tomorrow for Easter dinner. A traditional favorite, no?

In class tonight we got our second paper assignments back. There are 14 people in my class. 2 got As and the rest Cs. The first 5 minutes or so of the class was how to write better, what to do next time, etc. We were all feeling pretty low about our abilities.

One professor’s comments:

The other professor’s comments:

I may have mentioned this before, but there used to be an employee in my building who was well over 40 years old and totally into Hello Kitty. One of the folks in my lunch group had the misfortune of sitting next to her. He packed his stuff up and moved upstairs to an empty cube and has since cracked us up about the Hello Kitty madness–he still makes us laugh even though that employee has been gone for a few months. Her Hello Kitty legacy remains warmly in our hearts.

I found a Hello Kitty song over the weekend and cropped it down. I’ve been waiting all week for the opportunity to get on his machine and make the cropped song his new email notification. Today I finally had my chance as he had to run an errand at lunch. Two partners in crime suggested that I find a Hello Kitty background for his computer. The hideousness that we created was breath-taking.

When he got back from his errand, he was a little annoyed but then decided the worst thing he could do was to keep the Hello Kitty splendor to drive us all nuts and share in his pain.

I’m a little worried about what I may find at my desk tomorrow morning. I’m sure there will be payback.

I have a 3-4 page portion of a group paper due on Thursday and I’m this close to being done but I just can’t seem to get it together and finish. I was emailing someone from class this morning and she’s having the same problem. We agreed that this is a big sign that we’re not cut out for continuing with this program.

We also said that we’re going to knock out our final paper (which is 10-12 pages) before the week it is due. I’m a little concerned that if I’m having this much trouble staying focused for 3 1/2 pages that I’ll never get 12 pages done. So, I’d better start it soon rather than wait for the last possible second.

This evening I asked The Niece if she knew anything about informal learning and could she please finish writing my paper. She declined my request.