robglazebrook.com

Okay, so I’ve got a lot of stuff to say tonight, so you’d better just settle in with a big steaming cup of Joe (or whomever you’d prefer) and get ready. Everybody settled? Good. :)

First up, I might as well talk about my grades last semester, and get them off my chest, even though they’ve only been available to me and therefore ~on~ my chest for the last few minutes. I seem to be a big fan of telling my stories reverse chronologically.

My worst class was American Lit, which I’d counted on ahead of time. It’s a little ironic, considering I probably invested the most time and worry in that class overall. I just couldn’t get into the groove of that class, no matter how hard I tried. And I *did* try, too. I’d try and listen to the professor lecture in class, but I’d end up sitting there and counting how many times she used the phrase, “to be sure,” to close a sentence (on average, seventeen times in a seventy minute lecture). That gets on one’s nerves in a hurry, to be sure. :) It was like her version of a closing “um” or something. I’d also spend hours nightly (or as close to nightly as I could manage) trying to read for the class, but the literature for that class always made me doze off. I’m sure that my physical exhaustion played a part in that, but I rarely fell asleep while reading for Medieval Brit Lit, and I never once fell asleep wading through my web design reading assignments. Saw what you will about the Puritans in early America, but they wrote like a man with Alzheimer’s walks: they can both usually make it from point A to point B, but the actual path taken is a convoluted mess. My sentence structuring is messy and slow enough, but it’d be recklessly fast by their standards.

Anyway, enough about that class. It’s over now. In fact, unless I find a literature class that I ~want~ to take, I’m done with them for the rest of my undergraduate career. I think so, at any rate. I’m pretty sure I have 21 credits of pure literature now (if I include my two Greek lit classes), and that’s enough generalized reading for anyone. Well, for me. My problem is, I’m horrible with names. I’ll remember scenes and situations and lines of dialogue from all these works until my dying day. But unless I make some sort of Herculean mental effort while I’m reading the work, I won’t remember the name of the author, the book, or the major characters a week after I’ve finished. Even if I never touch it again, I’ll probably be able to visualize and describe “The Miller’s Tale” by Chaucer when I’m thirty. I probably won’t remember Chaucer wrote it by January thirtieth. :) Some well-ingrained mental fallacy is at work there, methinks. I musta landed on that part of my head particularly hard when I was younger.

Gah! I keep getting distracted. That’s going to make this post even longer. *g* Okies, without further adieu whatsoever, here’s my grades from last semester:

English 313 (my Web Design class):     A
English 314 (Technical Communication): A
English 360 (Early American Lit):      B
English 373 (Medieval British Lit):    A-
French  101 (this space is useless):   A

So, yeah. Not so bad. :) That works out to a semester GPA of 3.75, which is slightly above an A- average, which is what I was shooting for. Not so bad at all, considering how exhausted I was (am?) most of the time. My cumulative still isn’t above a 3.0, but it should be next semester if I can repeat my performance. No guarantees about next semester yet, though. This body of mine is bound to drop sometime.

— Insert witty and completely relevant transitory paragraph here. —

Speaking of that (heh), I have some news that has earth-shaking significance (or something like that) for my life, and probably far less significance for all of your lives. And it’s probably not as much “news” as “the worst-kept secret since that military base that doesn’t exist in Nevada,” since several people that read this probably already know by now. If not, consider yourselves hereby knowed.

Megan and I are planning on striking off into this big, wide world and getting a place of our own. I’m sure a few of you like this idea and a few of you hate this idea (and a few of you couldn’t care less), but in the end we can only trust ourselves and what we think is right. And we think that this is right. :) We’ve been dating for 16 or so months now, and living together with Eric for the last few, and through it all we’ve grown closer. And now, we lay awake at night and dream about getting a place of our own.

And the cool thing about Ames is, that dream is fairly easily turned into a reality. :) We did an extensive amount of searching and research on our own before we started talking to realtors, but we ~have~ talked to realtors now, and we’ve found a place that I’m willing to bet we’ll take. It’s an apartment, about a five-minute drive from where we live now. Because all of the utilities except electric (including heat and basic cable) are paid, living there would be cheaper than living three-persons-deep is for us now. And to make the deal even sweeter, the current tenant is in a bit of a crunch (due to a job he’s starting in Omaha on the 1st), and has lowered the sublease a full $100 a month. It has a dishwasher, a deck, and its own water heater. The bedroom is a bit smaller than I’d like, but I’m guessing I’ve just been spoiled by the bedroom I have now (hardwood floors, and it’s holding a queen-sized bed, two dressers, two desks, a bookcase, several small tables and all my other miscellaneous stuff with plenty of open floor space). The kitchen is much nicer than the one I’ve got now, which is an important feature for We Who Cook.

So we’ll see. If we do move in to this place, we’ll likely be moving the weekend of January 18th (three weeks from now), which doesn’t leave a lot of time to find a subleaser for our piece of the place we have now. I’m going to start probing the minds of my friends as soon as possible. Sometimes, the friend of a friend is good for filling a position in a pinch. If that doesn’t turn up anything, then I’ll post a bunch of fliers in the dorms when they reopen after the holidays. At the beginning of new semesters, there’s always a quiet but significantly sized exodus out of the dorms as people realize that this coming semester would be one semester too many in a ten by twelve foot cell. Between the two sources, I’m pretty sure I can find someone who like the idea of having a bedroom to themselves that’s easily twice the size of their dormroom (or four times the size of their half of the dormroom) for roughly half the price.

Well, that’ll do for now, I think. I have more to post about an adventure with a very large frozen turkey in a very small kitchen in very inexperienced hands, but that can wait for another day, I think. :)