Difficult as it is to believe, Christmas is just five days away. This is a strange year for us, holiday-wise, as we’re not going up to see my parents until the weekend following Christmas. For my mom, who adores Christmas, this could have been a difficult thing to accept, until she realized the other day that she has a couple of after-Christmas days to finish her shopping. 🙂
I have been basking in the glow of time off, and thoroughly enjoying doing nothing. I haven’t even really managed to clean up the house from the accumulated clutter of a semester from hell, although I’m slowly chipping away at the mess. It is a disaster zone here, but is getting a little better every day.
Our house has sprung a leak in the foundation, so we’re roughing it without hot water until Daniel and his dad/uncle can fix it, which they hope to begin this weekend.
I added a photo album feed on the right sidebar with pictures I took in London last summer. I wish the gadget would let me randomly screen photos from all of my Picasa Web albums.
I got an e-mail from Jennifer, my BFF from college, last night, and am hoping we can reestablish regular contact soon. I miss her terribly.
The spring semester ahead is going to be so fantastic… perhaps my best semester ever. I have three government classes, am presenting papers at three conferences, am taking an independent study and two easy classes, and am going to “sit in” on an online calculus class at Quad-C. While that last bit might sound torturous to most, it is most definitely something I will benefit from, and I’m looking forward to a good math challenge that I can actually tackle (versus the quasi-math challenges lobbed my way over the past 2.5 years that I’ve failed miserably in conquering).
Finally, my mom has clued me in on probably the best Christmas present I’ll receive this year — a student license to Stata 10. My advisor at school laughed when I shared this bit of news yesterday, saying something like, “You know you’ve come over to the dark side when you’re excited to be receiving statistical software for Christmas.” Perhaps, but I’m nevertheless THRILLED that I will soon have a fully legal and recently updated/expanded bit of software to do my research work with. It’s every bit as exciting as last year’s fantastic gift of Anthony Downs’s book, “An Economic Theory of Democracy,” was!!
Possibly the best Christmas present ever! haha