robglazebrook.com

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Wow. The last two days have been wholly unproductive. I had planned on starting the planning for my classes next semester on the 26th; now, I’ll be happy if I start planning sometime this afternoon. I blame it on The Sims 2. I’m slightly embarrassed to admit this, but in the last 48 hours, I’ve spent a good 28 playing that game. Somehow, simulated life is far more interesting than real life. In some ways I understand: in the last two days, I have become a smuggler, a congressperson, and a successful artist in the game (different sims). In real life, I’ve went grocery shopping, stopped at the bank, and become generally unkempt.

…frightened pause…

…that scared the hell out of me. I went downstairs about twenty minutes ago, and the front door was sitting open. We generally keep our doors unlocked and even open during the summer, but not during the winter. Seeing as how I haven’t been venturing outside much (see above) and I’m the only one here, I got a little nervous. I shut the door, came back upstairs and started writing this entry. Suddenly, I heard the sound of furniture moving around and several male voices. It sounded like they were in the living room near the front stairway, so I snuck down the back stairway to have a look-see (I momentarily thought about changing out of my pajamas into something nice, but I figured thieves didn’t much care). Turns out it was ex-housemate Jordan along with new-wife Lindsay, a brother, and people I’m guessing were grandfathers. They’d come to claim a few things Jordan had left behind when he moved to Kansas City, such as the giant scoreboard and a set of stoplights. Our living room suddenly looks a lot barer.

I heard a rumor from Lindsay that ex-housemate and former occupant of my room (prior to my occupancy of it) JJ was going to be in town today. Wonder if I’ll get a chance to see him. Regardless, I guess he’ll be back all this coming semester, seeing as how he hasn’t graduated yet. He spent last semester in Rome, though, so it’d be nice to see him again.

Back to work with me. And by work, I don’t mean Sims 2 this time. I’m working on this site today, and hoping to teach myself enough to work on my class site in the process. You might see some big changes soon. :)

I slept for twelve hours today, from 2am until just after 2pm. Today is the first time since last summer that I’ve gotten more than eight hours sleep. It’s also the first time since summer that I haven’t felt the overwhelming need to brew a pot of coffee. I’m both decaffeinated and awake this morning. It’s an interesting feeling.

The semester has ended. I turned in my students grades Sunday, and plan to check on mine in a few minutes. I attempted to get mine last night, but the system was inexplicably down. Ah, well… I’ll go check them now. Anyone wanna take bets? If so, don’t scroll down to the bottom yet. I’ll put the grades down there. *g*

Break, thus far, has been very… break-like, I guess. I haven’t done much of anything. Unless you count partying as doing something, because I accomplished quite a bit of that last week. Otherwise, I’d say the last fortnight or so experienced a complete loss of productivity about which I couldn’t be more pleased. :) It felt nice to get out and have fun. That isn’t to say I didn’t go out sometimes on the weekends last semester, but even when I did (and it wasn’t frequent… more often than not I studied upstairs while a party roared downstairs) I couldn’t escape thoughts of what I should rather be doing.

Of course, I haven’t completely escaped those nefarious thoughts this week. I still have things I should be doing. I have two websites I should be working on (mine is one), and I need to start planning my syllabus for next semester. All of these things, I keep telling myself, will happen later. I tend to ignore the fact that break only lasts for a couple more weeks, and that later is rather sooner, when I tell myself that. :)

I’ll be heading to my parents’ house tomorrow evening for our traditional Christmas Eve festivities, which include food and drinks crammed with more saturated fat than the laws of modern science allow. Christmas day will be spent at my grandparents’ house with whatever relatives decide to attend. I’ll trek back north to Ames that evening, and hopefully start working on the next semester the very next day. Well see.

My grades are as follows:
English 500 (teaching composition): A
English 507 (tech writing (theory)): A
English 510 (tech and linguistics): A

Too bad I still don’t get paid for As, eh? Wait, that wasn’t me. That was everyone else. :)

Wow. The end of the semester has been hectic, to say the least. And it isn’t over yet. I have stayed up to at least 3am the last five days. Three of those days were to work on homework, too! (Hey, I gotta relax sometime, yano?) Last night was a looong homework day. I sat in front of my computer working on stuff from 10am - 5am (19 hours) with naught but a two-hour break to cook/consume BBQ pork ribs (which turned out okay, but not great. My BBQ sauce was a little too runny).

Friday night was a Christmas party at Katie’s house, which was a blast, though I didn’t get nearly as much homework done as I’d intended. I’m such a nerd I even brought some homework with me in my coat pocket, but I didn’t get a chance to work on it. They were the final exam questions for my 507 class. I figured, since I was going to be hanging out with a buch of Rhetoric PhD students, I might be able to coerce them into helping a poor lil’ MA out. No dice.

Saturday night was a Christmas party at Volker’s (Dr. Hegelheimer’s? I don’t know yet which I’m supposed to use) house, which was also fun. He had lots of food, lots of people, and lots of alcohol. :) I brought a six-pack of Newcastle with me and ended up sharing with a few people, which was nice, since it was the only thing I brought to the party. I also had a couple of Volker’s Leinenkugels and a shot of something that tasted like pears and looked expensive. I would mention it by name here, but the bottle only spoke German, and I do not.

Anyway, it’s time to head to campus for a while. I’ll try to post again Tuesday night or Wednesday, but no promises.

PS - Volker: sorry about stealing your altoids. I’ll bring them back on Tuesday (unless I see you today). :)