the rundown

1. christmas is coming: i have purchased/planned many gifts and i am super excited

2. i had a zero sum game this week, thankfully, it was super hard but I did not gain (even though I did not lose).

3. i thought nothing on earth could be worse than a 2 hour lecture followed by a 1 hour simulated-negotiation on a Monday night, but I was proved wrong tonight when we skipped the sim and had a 3 hour lecture instead. I saw people literally pulling out their eyelashes to stay awake. *that statement may not have been true.

4. Whole Foods makes the best potato soup ever (outside of homemade).

5. my roommate's husband is home for a while from the army--either I'm missing something or military personnel go to bed REALLY early.

6. I still cannot find an explanation for "quantitative easement" that doesn't make me feel lightheaded and angry

7. 9 days of school left! (by which I mean out of the Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays that I go to school, there are 9 days left--and I'm not counting next Wednesday because I don't think that's going to happen.

8. putting a damper on the fact that next Wednesday's classes aren't going to happen for me is the fact that I have a makeup class scheduled for the night before--as in, my commute night. Last time this happened, I just sat in class and wiggled for 50 minutes. My brain is shot after my natural last class--trying to squeeze an extra one in just doesn't work for me.

9. my husband is wicked sick. I feel really bad for him. This morning I said I should stay home and take care of him. It started out as a joke, but as he worsened, I worried that maybe I really should be there to make sure he doesn't die. He seems to be doing better though, so I'm staying.

10. If you're ever looking for a really aggravating alternative to reality, try the Nancy Drew computer games. They sound all innocent and light-hearted, but they're super scary and super hard. I made the mistake of thinking I was a "Master Detective" (the only alternative to "Junior" so can you blame me?). I have a number of things I'm supposed to do at any given point, and a couple of days have elapsed since I last played, and I can't remember what I'm supposed to do. The game won't progress until I do it--none of the characters will talk to me, and when I clicked on my checklist to see what it was I was forgetting, all it said was "I'm a Master Detective, and I don't need a checklist to remind me of the things I need to do." So...let me get this straight: the older you are, the LESS you need to write things down to remember them... I keep muddling through, getting super frustrated, and looking up the game "walkthroughs" online--essentially cheating. But you know what? I feel the same sense of accomplishment when I complete one of the mind-numbingly physically impossible challenges by cheating as I do when I figure it out on my own. Even if you have to cheat to win it still means you're outsmarting the computer. Right...?

11. I wouldn't recommend the salmon pasta salad at Whole Foods. It kind of reminded me of when you're a little kid playing at the beach for the first time, and your mouth is open wide because you are laughing hysterically while you are buffeted by the waves, and then a big gob of sea foam froths into your mouth and you realize how much like being in hell it is to be in the filthy waves churning with the poop of people, land animals and all of the sea creatures who are probably just waiting to slurp you up and recycle you back into the ocean that only moments ago you thought was so lovely. I still ate my whole little container of it, though...

Have a pleasant evening!