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For whatever reason, I truly believed I’d be getting lots of things done over Thanksgiving break. Silly me. I spent the first three days of break (Friday night, Saturday, Sunday) immersed in Rome: Total War, which I’d had sitting here for a month or so, but hadn’t had time to install and/or play. So, I treated myself to a little carnage on Friday evening, and that carnage spilled over to the weekend, as well. I did muster the energy to take Alicia to the airport Saturday morning, and I spent several hours on Sunday building a new computer for Justin (which is better than mine now, *mutter*), so the weekend wasn’t a ~total~ loss.

I did do a bit of homework on Monday. I spent a good four hours working on a website for a four-person project I’ve got going on, before switching for a couple of hours to the website for the sixteen-person project. I felt madly productive, and treated myself to (you guessed it) a bit of Rome: Total War.

I don’t remember much of what I did on Tuesday, but I can about guarantee that it didn’t involve homework. I think I played R:TW in the morning, until the last of my roommates headed home. Then I went downstairs and watched Willow, cause all my roommates had watched it the day after Halloween while I was doing homework and felt all left out and stuff. I’m pretty sure I was also drinking coffee and Bailey’s, since I had nowhere to be. I’ve no recollection of what I did Tuesday night (and no, it wasn’t because of the Bailey’s. It’s because I’ve no short term memory to speak of).

Wednesday is also mostly a loss. I watched Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers sometime in the afternoon, since Willow had put me in the mood for something fantastic. Later in the evening, I’m pretty sure I headed to Lisa’s house to try and fix her computer. Computer: 1. Rob: 0.

Thursday was turkey day, so I did the turkey thing with the family down in Des Moines. Lisa was also in attendance, which turned out to be an interesting experiment. If you ask my little brother, there’s a pretty decent chance that Lisa and I are not only married (we eloped), but Lisa’s expecting. You can blame my sister and mother for that one… they are horrible at keeping ’secrets’ from Willie. *grin* After the family thing, Lisa and I headed back to Ames and watched Return of the King, since you can’t really watch #2 without following it with #3. Except I don’t ~own~ #3, so I had to use Lisa’s copy.

Friday morning I made a copy of #3, and then made the mistake of testing it in the DVD player to make sure it’d work. Ended up watching the whole thing again. Friday afternoon, in a desperate and largely successful attempt to avoid homework, I dismantled my computer and rearranged the innards to make it cleaner, prettier, and quieter. Justin’s computer project got me in the mood to play with computers again. That evening, I had dinner at Carlos O’Kelly’s (Irish-Mexican?) with Lisa and her parents, who’d driven from Georgia for a visit. T’was a good time. I tried to fix Lisa’s computer again. Computer: 2. Rob: 0.

I spent all of Saturday morning and afternoon attempting to do homework, to little avail. I simply couldn’t concentrate. I gave up in disgust around 6pm, I think. I ended up going out that evening with Megan, since it was her 21st birthday. T’was a good time. Came home from the bar and watched Bend it Like Beckham, though I couldn’t remember it by Sunday morning.

Sunday morning, I re-watched Bend it Like Beckham. :) That’s the sort of movie I daren’t watch while my roommates are around, so I figured I’d better get it out of the way before peoples got home. I spent all that evening immersed in homework, though my productivity was less than ideal.

Monday! Back to school. I was surprisingly productive in the office, and had a decent 104 class, despite my student’s vacation. In the evening, instead of doing homework like I should, I spent manyplus hours (well, like six) working on Lisa’s computer. Computer: 2. Rob: 1! It’s now running beautifully (considering it’s five years old), though it’s also running on my spare RAM, HD, and video card.

Today had better be more productive. As you can easily see by the mere existence and length of this entry, however, I’m off to a very bad start. *sigh* Just can’t seem to get back into the swing of it. Eventually, deadlines will kick me in the face hard enough to get me motivated. Like in five hours, when I have to give a presentation on the website portion of the four-person project, and I don’t know what I’m going to say yet. Hmm. That did it. Off to work.

This has been floating around for the last couple weeks (or more, who knows?), and while I’m usually not big on the whole meme-thing, I thought I’d play along with this one. Mostly because maps are fun, even if my understanding of geography is at a third-grade level.

States I’ve tainted with my presence:

To make your own: Visit the website.

Interesting facts derivable from the map:

• I’ve never been to the South, dirty deep or otherwise.
• I’ve never seen a ‘real’ mountain (and I crossed the Appalachians at night).
• I’ve never seen a ‘real’ ocean (New York and Boston harbors don’t count).
• I’ve never seen a ‘real’ desert (or a fake one, for that matter).
• I’ve never left the ground for more than a few minutes, meaning I’ve carved a contiguous swath of red destruction across this land.

In other words, I need to go on another road trip at some point soon. If it hadn’t been for my road trip of three or so years ago, my map would have been frighteningly more bland (i.e., I’d never left any of Iowa’s neighboring states). The roomies are talking about a trip to Las Vegas over spring break, and I’ve declined as yet due to the expected cost. Maybe I should reconsider.

Someone once told me, “The problem with life is there’s no background music.” I’ve decided she is entirely off her rocker.

I’ve been training myself to get used to the idea of listening to music while studying (normally I require total silence) by playing music very quietly on my computer while I read, grade papers, write, and so on. The biggest problem is I still can’t listen to music with lyrics (or at least lyric-heavy music), because I catch myself paying more attention to the vocalizations than the text in front of me, seriously slowing down that whole ‘reading’ thing and obliterating my comprehension level. As such, I’ve been listening mostly to music without a lot of lyrics. Unfortunately, I don’t own much of the stuff. My ‘homework’ playlist is thus comprised almost entirely of Lord of the Rings soundtracks and Gregorian chants, both of which contain a little singing, but are mostly just pretty melodies and harmonies (yes, I realize chants are entirely vocal, but I consider them to be more melodic than lyrical). All and all, my homework playlist has about seventy songs on it, give or take a couple than I occasionally add or remove given my mood. That may sound like a decent number of songs to work through, but when you figure roughly four minutes per song, that’s less than five hours of music. Since I do six to ten hours of homework on an average day (…sigh), that means I hear each song nearly twice a day, or probably a dozen times a week. A dozen times per week, over the last dozen weeks, means I’ve heard the same songs nearly one hundred and fifty times, or conservatively speaking, at least a hundred times in the last couple months.

So I was sitting at my desk Thursday evening, grading papers, when I decided I was fairly well sick and tired of the music I was listening to. I decided I needed to either find some new lyrics-free music, learn to deal with lyrics and expand my playlist, or just turn the damn thing off and study in silence for a while. Besides, Winamp’s shuffle was being cruel and playing mostly LoTR lyrical songs. I rolled my chair over to the computer went to pull up Winamp.

Winamp wasn’t open. My computer was silent. The music was playing in my head.

Good lord, do I need a vacation.

1. I noticed a comma splice on the bus a couple days ago, and I wasn’t looking at my students’ work. It was in one of the ads lining the bus interior. It said something along the lines of “Obey your fear, exit through the rear doors” in bright red lettering. I seriously contemplated brining a red sharpie from home so I could turn the comma into a semicolon before I realized a) I don’t own a red sharpie, b) I’ve seen that same ad on dozens of buses meaning I’d never find them all, and c) that would officially make me a “stickler” according to Lynne Truss, queen of all sticklers.*

2. One of my students sent me an email yesterday. It was two sentences long and possessed three exclamation points. I considered replying asking her if she’d bought bulk punctuation at overstock.com or something, before realizing that overstock would probably mostly have semicolons, colons, and properly-employed dashes of various lengths. I thought this damnably witty, and spent a good ten seconds or so giggling.

3. My “homework” away message on AIM used to say “I’m doing homework somewhere other than the computer. So any message, no matter how witty, may not illicit an immediate response.” Amanda pointed out to me a day or two ago that I was using ‘illicit’ where I probably meant ‘elicit’. She was right, of course. I decided to leave the message unchanged for a couple days after looking up the definition of ‘illicit’ and learning it could mean both unlawful/immoral and ungrammatical; the irony of using a word meaning ungrammatical in a grammatically incorrect way was just too good to pass up. Tonight, I switched my message to read “I’m doing homework somewhere other than the computer. So any message, no matter how illicit, may not elicit an immediate response.” It works, as most the instant messages I receive are both immoral and ungrammatical. Words are fun.

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* Please note: I am not a stickler. Not in the true sense of the word, at least. I’ve gotten annoyingly good at noticing punctuation problems in other people’s work, but I usually don’t recognize it in my own. Which I guess makes me a grammar hypocrite instead of a grammar Nazi.

Some vehicle with a fairly loud and musical horn just honked outside my window. I looked up from my reading (some essay on software design and usability), noticed nothing different, and thought to myself, “Boy, I hope that wasn’t Gabriel’s horn.” Then I realized I was doubly glad the world hadn’t just ended, because then I’d never know the outcome of the election, and I can guarantee that’d bug me for the rest of eternity. The world can end November 3rd (and may, who knows?), as long as I go to bed on the 2nd knowing one way or another. And as long as the end of the world means all my major projects (five of them currently, I think — one each for 500 and 510 and three for 507) are never due.

I’m still counting the days to the end of the semester and cursing my decision not to become a shepherd with my BS in English. I bet shepherds don’t lay awake in bed at 3am worrying about finding sources for their major papers. I’d rather prefer a wolf, at this point. :)

I think I shocked a couple of my students yesterday. One of them commented that I still had the beard (or start of one, at least) I’d grown to play Aragorn at Halloween. I told them I was planning on going as Jesus for Christmas. Thousands of people go as Santa Claus, after all; why can’t I play Jesus? Every Christmas party needs a Saint Nick in red and a Savior Jeebs in white.

In reality, I’m just seeing how a beard looks this year. I’m ambivalent so far. It looks nice (in my opinion) with my hair down and my contacts in, but scraggy with my hair in a ponytail (which occurs when I’m reading, eating or exercising). Also, it makes my face look fatter when I’m wearing my glasses. And Eric, before you make some snide remark about how me worrying about how my beard looks somehow makes me womanish, you need to re-examine this statement for logical errors. And/or figure out a tactful way of suggesting waxing to Renée. *beams*