the hypothetical wren

I’m back in ABQ.

The drive down here from Denver is long. I nearly got into two accidents on the way down, as well, which made it just that much more pleasant. But I’m back.

Too tired to have much more to say, though, so in lieu of an entry, you should all read this review of the comic Achewood, which you should read, as well.

Accomplishments today:

• Edited two horribly written reports. I go away for four months and people revert to capitalizing random rock and mineral names in the middle of sentences as if they were proper nouns or were incorrectly translated from the original German. I’m tired of reading about Nahcolite instead of nahcolite, and my five-year battle to get people to change seems to have completely atrophied the minute I moved to ABQ.
• Talked a co-worker out of buying his seventeen-year-old daughter an iPod. He was skeptical to begin with, since they’re expensive, but said daughter has a history of wrecking cars and losing important things like her passport, so I recommended that she get a ‘Pod when she could buy one herself. I felt pretty middle aged after that conversation, but one of the things that makes me remember where the damn thing is at any given moment is knowing how much it would cost me to buy another one.
• Downloaded my list of books for next semester from the UNM bookstore’s website. I’ve never been able to do this before: as an undergrad, I had to stalk the bookstore in the weeks before school started to find out what books I needed to buy, surrepticiously writing down ISBNs and sneaking the list out of the store so that I could then order the books off of the internet. Now I can just download them and order them like a normal, guilt-free person. The bad news, though, is that I have to read 25 books next semester, which all cost about $20 to $30 each. Eeep.
• Had beer and nachos with D., and complained about grad school together.
• Came home, played with the dog, and ate hot wings. Today is Good Nutrition Day, I tell you.

Tomorrow night is family night, and Saturday is yet more family. Sunday is realxing and then I head to Denver on Monday to spend a few days hanging out with S., who is home from Japan for a few weeks. Then back to New Mexico, and a well-deserved two weeks of napping and watching DVDs.

They’re showing old, old hockey games on TV here, to compensate for the lack of televised hockey overall. The newspaper is even running old hockey stories to give people some sort of sports to read. Things are sad.

I’m back in Colorado for Christmas, napping and watching TV and (unfortunately) working at my old job for a bit. I’m sort of taking a break from the Internet, both as a mental respite and as a consequence of the crappy net access here at the house. I didn’t die or anything: don’t worry about the lack of posts.

I am done grading exams! Yay for me! This means that I am done for the semester. All I have left to do is go turn the grades in and take some books back to the art library, and I’m done. Then I can come home and nap, nap, nap.

My review session went well, despite my misgivings. Only four students turned out, which is one less than I thought I would have. The first one walked in the door 2 minutes before the session was to begin, so I thought for a while that no one would come at all. Had that happened, it would have been sort of disheartening, but I would have also been able to go home early, so it would have evened out.

I didn’t recognize most of the students, which I thought odd. They asked pretty good questions, but my original plan was to have the other students attempt to answer any questions before I stepped in. However, with so few students there, that didn’t seem like it was going to work, so I answered them instead, in a kind of vague, long-winded, rambling way. I think I erred on the side of Too Much Information, though.

One of the students, the one I did recognize, asked me to summarize the causes of the Civil War in fifteen words or less. I took thirteen: “Two civilizations. Industrial North versus agrarian, slaveholding South. Both think they’re right.” I suppose I could have added “War ensues” to make it fifteen. I rarely manage to be so concise.