Oh hai! Here I am. Does anybody notice when I don’t post for four days in a row? Anyway, I’m done with school for the semester!! Only two of my grades are in, but they are both A’s - Deaf Studies, and Sex & Gender. kawaiibishounen already got his linguistics grade, so I am frantically checking the online system for mine, but it’s still not there! I only just had the history final exam today, so I don’t expect that grade tonight. Grades are due by Monday at noon, though, so hopefully I’ll have them by then!

Not a whole lot has been going on. I’m hoping to organize my workdays so that I’ll be working 10-1 and 2-5, though I’m not sure they’ll go for that…it’s basically because a 30-minute lunch break isn’t enough for me, emotionally or physically. We only get an hour paid lunch if we work 8+ hours, and I don’t work more than a 6-hr day, so I shouldn’t be getting an hour lunch…but I’m giving up my 30-min paid lunch in order to have a 60-min unpaid lunch, so they ought to go for it, I would think…we’ll see. The scheduler approved it for this coming Monday, but I think he’s going to talk it over with the boss because he didn’t say it was approved for the whole week as I had requested.

I’m finally playing The Sims again! My Sims blog is called My Sims Stories, and it’s just fun to keep a log of what’s happened. I started a new character using the romance aspiration to see if I could play it, but then I just used the InSIMinator cheats so I’m not sure it really counts. Oh look, this person instantly loves me! Now I can woo-hoo with them! Yeah, not very challenging.

I really want to travel this summer, it seems like everybody I know is traveling in some way or another. I want $1500 to burn on travel, I could have such a fabulous time with that, but I spent $5700 on hearing aids so that’s not very likely. I get to go to New Orleans in July anyway…I just have to be patient and wait for that to come around rather than lusting over trips for June or August. Anyway, I can’t afford to take so much time off, I need to work the whole summer!

The final word of wisdom I would like to impart right now is: Ben & Jerry’s Cheesecake Brownie ice cream is simply astonishingly wonderful. NOM NOM NOM.

Whoops, I missed a couple of days there, I should let people know I’m not dead!

• The ant problem in my computer seems to be resolved. Unfortunately the ones making a line from the back porch in through the cracks and to the cat’s food dish are not resolved.
• I’m writing a letter to the audiologist who told me hearing aids wouldn’t help…letting her know that THEY HELP!
• We went to see Vantage Point today; I was not at all impressed. Definitely not what I was hoping for. I like Forest Whitaker, and I wanted to see all the different points of view, but the whole thing was kind of blah with about 20 minutes of actual plot.
• Got shoes at Payless, woo hoo!
• Still too much homework and stuff to get done, including three papers due within the next month. Fun!

• Having fun doing research for my paper on transgender children.
• Really disappointed with the 75 I got on my deaf studies test, especially since I studied for it.
• The A I got on my test is dampened by the B I got on my paper.
• I wish I didn’t feel I had to be perfect. But I really want to keep my 3.7 GPA or even improve it.
• Having fun with my Blackberry. It knows where I am! I downloaded the free Blackberry trial of Geocache Navigator, I hope to find some caches with it. If I can, and I like it, I will probably sign up for the yearly subscription.
• Back still hurts. Also tired.

• My custom earphone kit came today; I had a problem with it and it didn’t come out quite the way I expected. They don’t take returns, but I e-mailed and let them know what happened and they’re going to replace it! I’ll reserve my review for then.
• I finally heard back from the farm about my Cat’s Meow piece. Turns out they are interested after all! I think all three of mine already have homes, but when I get them I will send pictures and they can order more of their own if they like.
• Yesterday I signed up for this tour of the Grand Canyon for next month when we’re in Las Vegas. It was about $220 for two people. I realized I never got a confirmation e-mail, so I went back to the site…and it now says $190 for two people. I signed up last night! I eventually did get the confirmation e-mail and it has the $220 price, so I am going to call them tomorrow and ask about it. There are plenty of other tour operators, if they won’t give me the lower price I might ask for a refund - then again, there’s a $25 cancellation fee, and that’s the difference anyway. We’ll see what happens when I call.

• I have been watching The Lost Room on Sci-Fi. It is ultra-good, but I am going to miss tonight’s CSI:NY because of it, which makes me sad because tonight’s episode is heavily deaf-themed. But The Lost Room is just that good.
• My new addiction is Sugar Free Chocolate & Caramel Creme Savers, by the people who make Life Savers. Just 9 calories each and SO good…they taste like chocolate pudding! I think I am eating more than I should be in a day, though.
• I no longer want to win Blingo movie tickets. I used to get a bunch of them, but I hadn’t in a while until yesterday. I was given the choice of a movie ticket or a $10 iTunes card, and I chose the former; I should have chosen the latter. They don’t send movie vouchers in the mail anymore - you have to pick what movie you want to see, and what showing, and then you put in a code and print out the ticket. I pretty much never know what movie I’m going to see in advance; the old way was much more convenient. I sent the code to an unemployed friend in NYC, who will get more bang for the buck than I would have.
• Nobody has tagged me on 43 People. Tag me? I need to be classified! (And if you want to meet me, put that down too.)

• I am getting to play travel agent. I like playing travel agent. The numbers are alarmingly large, but I still like playing travel agent!
• I don’t have to go to the office tomorrow after all! I will either be in my normal job all day, or I will have a holiday lunch assignment at a restaurant near here, and I’ll be teamed with my supervisor who will creatively schedule my annual review around the lunch assignment so I will have a short day! And fortunately I was able to put my Diet-to-Go food back to my usual pickup location, instead of the place in McLean I’d moved it to when I thought I was going to be in Silver Spring.
• My Coexist sticker finally arrived, I put my DOD decals on, I have my own license plates on, I have insurance, and everything is happy skippy with my car. She looks good!
• I mailed my application to Gallaudet yesterday. I know I’ve mentioned it a billion times, but it’s on my mind a lot. I am excited and scared! Fortunately the school-provided health insurance is United Healthcare’s Choice Plus plan, and my current physician already accepts them, so I won’t even have to switch doctors!
• Today is a woot-off! It’s been going very slowly though.

• I have had a headache for two and a half days now.
• I forgot that I had put my tiny diamond earrings on the bed, and then I went and slept in the bed. They are not lost, they are just missing - either on the bed or the floor. But it’s going to be a pain to find them.
• Although 25% of voters have voted for deafjournal.net, I realized that I don’t want to be solely responsible for providing support for however many users I get! So that one is probably out of the running. Really, right now, it’s between corsetworld.net, geekygrrl.net, and meredithonline.org. I still don’t know what I would do with the latter two, because I already have amanita.net where I keep all my stuff. CorsetWorld would have a purpose, though, so I’m kind of leaning that way - but I still like the geekygrrl.net too.
• The ATM in the building where I work is no longer making us pay a surcharge! Yay! (I use a credit union with exactly one location in the metro area, so I am used to paying a surcharge at all ATMs.)
• I am on a million Gallaudet-related mailing lists right now. I am getting several blogs (People of the Eye, Elisa Writes, Mishka Zena, and RidorLIVE) by e-mail and I am also on the GallyNet-L mailing list which is very active. I also continue to get two copies of every USA-L News mailing that goes out (can’t figure out how to deactivate either of them!) and I signed up for the GUFSSA alert list this morning. My mail is full of Gallaudet-related stuff.
• I am no longer sad when the scale hasn’t gone down. I have been at 160 for a couple of months now, give or take a couple of pounds now and then. I am going to continue on my diet, so I will be elated if I lose weight, but I will still be happy if I just maintain.
• I still have a headache. I have no Advil at work.

• Today my keyboard at work broke. There was about an hour left in the day so I called the helpdesk, but nobody came to replace it; fortunately a neighbor was already gone for the day so I stole hers. I had to put it back though.
• I wanted to find a feed reader other than Bloglines. The closest I found was Rojo; I also tried Google Reader. I’m going to keep all three running for a while but I think I’ll end up sticking with Bloglines. I’ll just have to cross my fingers that they come up with a more attractive interface without changing functionality.
• Tomorrow is going to suck. I have a technical meeting from 9-10, a laid-back meeting from 10-11 that might be canceled (and if not, will be done by 10:30), and a meeting from 11-12:30 that is in a public area (always a pain in the ass because I can never hear what’s being said). I also have a meeting from 1-2 that I have basically no preparation for, and my only previous experience with this meeting is that it’s fast-paced and everybody talks all at once. Plus I have to go kayaking in the evening so a kind soul will be able to bring my kayak home for me. (I was going to take a self-esteem class, but that got canceled, so kayaking became a possibility.) So, yeah, tomorrow is going to suck. I better finish packing tonight. edit: Turns out I’m not going kayaking after all, so I will get some shopping and stuff done tomorrow.
• Friday will probably involve waiting in line for my CAC card…all day. I will be picking up some shoes from the cobbler after work, and getting a manicure. I don’t get them often, but you better believe if I am not working for a week I will be getting my nails done with a fancy color!
• I am enjoying using Twitter - I’m actually keeping it up to date. I hope to figure out how to display it on my webpage, or something.

Tonight I:

• Locked myself out of the house. When we went to the theme park on Sunday, I took the heavy stuff out of my purse. This included my keys. When we borrowed the car from my mom on Monday, I put her key in my purse. When I got home on Tuesday, somebody was already home and I didn’t need to unlock the door. But today…nobody was home. Fortunately my father-in-law was coming over anyway for something, and he had a spare key, so he brought it over and let me in.
• Finally got the DVD recorder set up so it can record flawlessly from both TV and VCR. It’s about time. Boo-yah!

• The ants are still there after all. They’ve got their babies up there with them now. Oh goody. Fortunately there was absolutely nothing interesting in the mail today.
• I have not received any e-mails in over five hours. Not spam, not test messages sent to myself, not anything. I normally get 3500+ spam messages a day, and LiveJournal comments throughout the day, and Freecycle/mailing list updates throughout the day…none of them have shown up for five hours. I have contacted Gmail support, and replied to their auto-response (sent to a backup address), but I don’t really expect a response. I don’t know if this is an outage, a bottleneck, or what.
• I also checked out the “Problem solving” section of the Gmail category at Google Groups. While there, I found the dumbest person on the Internet. I hope it’s a joke, because the enter key has been around since the typewriter.
• Not having e-mail is extremely annoying, but fortunately I bought a mouse the other day and I can play Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 again now. I never got the hang of it before because the scroll wheel is an essential part of the camera controls, and there is no scroll wheel on a laptop’s touchpad. But I re-installed the game a couple of nights ago and it’s been great!