bookish dreamer

1. i'm a grad student working on my phd. (sorry, i know i bring it up a lot, but it's the defining element in my identity right now)

2. i've never been able to decide on a favorite color (it's between blue, green, and purple), but i bought three all-purple dresses last year on the same shopping trip.

3. i wear skirts or dresses every day (except to walk the dog). i only have two pairs of dress pants and two pairs of sweat pants.

4. i love teaching students even though i also probably complain most about my students.

5. i watch shows and consume books and fanfic critically - it's part of how i enjoy a show/book/story.

( 6-20, to save your flist )

• because it rained all weekend, the dog has not gone out on a long walk (though we did do short ones where she came in soaking wet, because of course as soon as we were far enough from the door to commit the rain came pouring down), and I am chomping at the bit to do so
• i woke up to a ticket on my car this morning because i don't have a front license plate.  even though my sister, who drove my car for like three years, never got ticketed for being without her front license plate. Not fair.
• my favorite arm chair broke this morning.  structurally broke.  unfixable.  (or at least, uber-costly-un-fixable).  I am a sad panda.
• a friend loaned me her TV (for movie watching) and we set it up last night and watched S03 of Sherlock (ep 2 & 3).  
• I made sweet potato soup. Pepper flakes are a necessary addition.  Also, baked apples.  of which I ate both because they were too sugary for her.  She doesn't really like sweets? I don't know either.
• I only have 15 or so tests left to grade and I am done with grading mid-terms, yay!
• i need to do laundry SO BAD. keep putting it off. hopefully today will be the day.
• my mom is coming to visit this week, so sometime in the next two days I need to head to target and get an air mattress for her to sleep on.  Oh, and an extension cord so I can plug said loaner TV in without having to rearrange the furniture to do so.
• i did yoga last week!  and hope to again this week, but it's getting pretty crowded.
• i have a half dozen things on my to do list and i keep knocking them off only to put three more things on.  *something* feels really wrong with this scenario, but i think the big secret is it might just be life.

but, at least there was an update! :)

Gleee!
1. I broke through my writer's block concerning my presentation!! I now have recorded a rough draft that is 30 minutes long - all I have to do is go back and edit and put in the references (which I will do tomorrow)
2. It rained in LA! For those of you outside of CA you may not have heard we're in a mega-drought... which means every little drop of water helps!
3. I made waffles yesterday, which means I get to still crow about them today! And even though they were gluten free and made with coconut milk and water in honor of my allergic housemate, they're actually tasty. Of course I promptly ate them with bacon, thus negating their awesome sort-of-healthy-ness, but it was also delicious.
4. I have clean clothes! I'd had a block against doing them for like three weeks, and had run into my last pair of underwear (or almost last - ( cut for tmi ))

Three things I'm proud of myself for today:
1. Getting the planning going on our grad organization mock presentations - we're going to do six presentations over three months, and i had been putting off organizing it for two weeks. I finalized the schedule and reserved the rooms today, and once I hear back from the presenters I'll send out the notifications.
2. I did my Daoism reading (which I have to say is way more my style than Confucianism).
3. I broke through the writer's block! So important, OMG.

Two things I look forward to doing (better) tomorrow:
1. I will edit and submit my application for summer funding (it's due tomorrow)
2. I will finish at least typing out the draft of the presentation I recorded today and get it to the professor who is acting as my respondent (it's only a week late)

( Rocking housework: how i fixed my fridge )

( Apparently I'm stressing my own dog into having IBS )

( that will show me to ask to be emailed comments on a thread in a discussion of SF and post-binary gender )

school is busy and i need to write funding proposals for summer, a presentation draft to send to a professor tomorrow, and i'm going to drive to riverside, sadly, for a local conference tomorrow. the fun never ends. at least the housemate and i made each other dinner this week! (mine was artichoke lemon chicken, and hers was shrimp scampi)

I hope everyone survived warm and snug despite all the freezing going on this last week (hint: link is pretty pictures). And hopefully those of you who had your ground water poisoned are getting help and clean water from someone (not so pretty article)

The thing is, because I've grown up with parents divorced and then remarried (no really, my stepmom came into my life when i was 3 years old), I've often had Christmas celebrations like Hobbits have meals: 1st Christmas, Christmas Eve, Christmas Breakfast, Christmas Day, and Post-Christmas (well, ok, not quite that many, but still). And now that I'm an adult they aren't so much about the presents as about warm holidays filled with family and love and good food and lots of hugs. We do a white elephant-esque gift exchange each year on my Dad's side of the family, and I found a horrible (but also awesome) light up pillow to exchange. It starts out white and fuzzy, but when you lean on it lights up in rainbow colors. I ended up with a clock that is powered entirely by water, but horse traded it afterwards for some old not-so-classic Sci Fi Movies (seriously, things no one has ever heard of, these things weren't even Zardoz calibre). And since this year was also the year of the !BABY! (three of my nephews became fathers this summer), we had a second dinner at my dad's and I got to check in with the happiest baby ever, Luno.

And then there was Christmas breakfast (and Eve, and Day) at my Mom's house, where the present I made her totally made her and her best friend cry. I decided this year I'd make her a kind of hand made quote book where I wrote out inspirational or amusing quotes in a book, intermixed with little letters I wrote to her meant to cheer her up, or remind her she's inspiring, or just an awesome Mom. it was a hell of a fun project to do, even if I was still glueing the day before Christmas because it took waay longer than I thought to assemble all the fiddly bits of paper.

( pics or it didn't happen, right? )

then for the New Year I was off to South Dakota!

I managed to totally survive in South Dakota in the winter, which was awesome, though I did mostly miss the extra cold stuff by leaving the day it started (of course that meant plane delays and lost luggage, but they eventually delivered me at 1 am and the luggage like two days later).

( what i did on my vacation in south dakota -- with pictures (though not a ton) )

And now I'm back in la-la-land, getting ready to start the semester (i think).

That's what started this whole post - I got my evals from last semester! And man, I pissed off a couple of students (who rated me poor across the board, called me condescending, and were pissed I never finished class on time). The rest, however, seem to have universally agreed that the adjectives that best describe me (and this is from their comments section) were: "enthusiastic" and "energetic" or some form of the two used in combination. LOL. All that coffee is good for something!! I'm both super grumbly about the students who were critical, probably in part because their criticisms hit home, and just a little bit smug about the happy evals. It's so easy to dwell on the bad reviews and not acknowledge the good ones, but I feel like every semester I get a little bit better at both hearing criticism and remembering I did do things right. (well, fingers crossed at least)

I hope anyone reading this is just taking a quiet break and having themselves a warm evening of peace and joy, no matter if you celebrate the whole christmas part or not.

Mom and I are marathonning the Mummy series (with a chaser of Tomb Raider perhaps - the jury is still out).

I've done one Christmas already with my Dad's side of the family on Saturday. Lots of good food, lots of hugs, and tons of goodness. And even though we spent almost four hours in the car to get to my sister's house, having my other sister sing while driving to almost every seventies song on the radio was adorable and awesome. I haven't seen her be that goofy in years. And I got to see babies and nephews and sisters and parents and it was already good.

Tomorrow Mom and I will cook dinner for ourselves and a friend, and bake and frost sugar cookies (which I think we like baking and frosting better than eating, truth be told). But our sugar cookie recipe this time called for lemon zest, so perhaps they will be extra tasty?

and i leave you with this pretty by Aron Jansco (that's his tumblr)

i guess nobody but me still uses yahoo!mail? anyway, mine's been out for three days (for "system maintenance") and so i've felt a little (or a lot) disconnected. i'm in the process of moving all my notifications to gmail (it's not like i haven't had an account there, but it was largely used for filtering spam). thoroughly disappointed in yahoo though.

i have a paper due on the 13th that i'm madly, crazily, belatedly trying to work through (i have to read a lot of complex theory in Japanese to get to it - that's on the menu today).

new housemate moved in on the 1st of Dec and we get a long pretty great. she's a chatterbox, which fills the house in a way i haven't been used to for a while, but it's nice. we spent Saturday rearranging the living room into a new formation and putting up christmas decorations (bonding!!)

( other things - like turkey day, family stuff, state of me )

so maybe if i get the chance picspam soon. well, not today. today i have to work. really, i'm going to work. you see me going, right?

I'm going to write about media in my next post, but here's the upshot for me in RL.

I found a housemate! She moves in Dec 1! So far all our interactions have been really good and I think it's going to be absolutely great. She got the dog seal of approval right away, too, and the second time she came over Domino didn't even bark at her, so that's a comfort.

Dog has been slowly getting over her tummy troubles. She's not through the woods entirely yet, but the chinese medicine I've been giving her has definitely made it so she's not having scary BMs anymore and she's eating every day. It's called yunnan bayao and it's good for internal bleeding and even putting on small cuts if you get them (I've read some reviews where people say they put it in their medicine cabinet just cuz it helps close up little wounds). It'll take a bit longer with this stuff just because it's about using it until her own natural healing kicks the rest of the way in (at least, this according to my chinese medicine consultant). But she's happy and energetic and eating and pooping, so that's the important stuff for me. Oh, and just in case I switched her to this low-grain food and her coat has become even softer than before over the last three weeks - she's like a teddy bear to pet now. A constantly shedding teddy bear.

Along with school, which frankly has been pretty busy as the semester starts to wrap up, I've been dealing with a new and not exciting medical issue: I didn't realize it at first, but I've been experiencing hearing loss in my left ear for about five months. I just thought I needed a cleaning. Went in for that and found out I'm whistle clean and there's no sign of an infection (redness, swelling). The doc put me on prednisone and sudafed, assuming there was some kind of fluid build up on the inside of my ear, and it didn't clear up the hearing loss. In fact, it made me hyper aware of my left ear (which is the one having problems), and seems to have actually sort of aggravated whatever was happening before. I took a hearing test, but sadly the results were conclusively "yep, you've got some hearing loss" and not clearly anything else. After working through all that they finally gave me the referral for an ENT, whose first appointment was the second week of December. So for now I'm on sudafed and ibuprofin and hoping it doesn't get any worse before I can get into see this Doctor (and hopefully the specialist will do something other than proscribe me things that make me feel like it feels worse). It's made me tired just thinking about it, so I've been doing quite a bit of snail-shelling with TV and the like.

EXCEPT when my Mom came to visit for four days two weeks ago. It was so nice to see her, even though her visit was WAY shorter than usual. We packed a ton of stuff into the two real days she was here - went looking at Amoeba Music for lady singers for her (she's doing her lesbian protest rock phase now, lol), got new plants for my patio, tried to get some things at Ikea for her craft/art room (but Ikea was sadly out of the things she wanted - which is crazy but it does happen), and then topped it all off with a trip to Huntington Gardens. Which were AWESOME and perhaps I will have to picspam. It was so bright too that we bought HATS! (from the gift shop - they were expensive but really pretty so... i think on balance we won.) And we went and saw Ender's Game. Oh, and helped my housemate move the last of her stuff out of the apartment. For us that's like a whirl-wind of stuff to pack into two days :D

ETA: OMG AND I FORGOT THAT TWO FRIENDS CAME UP TO VISIT FROM LONG BEACH LAST WEEKEND and we had a great time at breakfast and then visiting my favorite place in LA, the Planetarium. And we saw Ride of the Valkries (Planetarium show). I am COMPLETE sucker for Planetarium shows, even if, as wise friend noted, they're not in depth enough to make you happy about learning more on the science side (re: aurora borealis) OR on the myth side (re: norse gods)... it's basically a show that sketches some cool stuff and has stars and Wagner accompanying it. But still. It's awesome. And these women were awesome company too - it was such a good sunday to walk around and just hang out (and compare notes on life and media and living in sunny california, even if its' rainy right now)

So yeah, I've mostly been trying to balance dog and work and ear and the quiet of my apartment (which i'm not the hugest fan of - it makes it really easy to just keep clicking 'next' on netflix to fill the silence instead of getting things done). Our semester ends the week after Turkey day, so that's coming up all in a rush too.

• First, got slight food poisoning from a sandwich I bought yesterday - no tummy upset, but I was in the bathroom for most of the evening yesterday (so much fun). had a lurching moment this morning, but luckily just a lurch.
• I get rolling this morning, but the dog isn't interested in breakfast, so that's a worry.
• She has a terrifying bowel movement (there's a phenomenon called raspberry jam. i saw it. it was scary).
• However, I have to go to class.
• I decide to use housemate's travel mug and manage to pour like a quarter cup coffee down my front on my way to school.
• Get to school to realize I've forgotten the corrected tests I needed to give the prof for the class I'm TAing for.
• Hop back in car, drive home, pet dog, pick up tests, make it back to school only half an hour after class has started.
• Come home, call vet for dog, and schedule her to be dropped off for ultrasound.
• Results of ultrasound are that yep, she has colitis (her colon is not doing well - it's all enlarged and weirdly lumpy). There's a medicine she can take for 5 days that will hopefully make it all better (antibiotics, yay)
• Vet also did an xray, and discovered she has a small calcium (or something) deposit under her spine near her tailbone. it's not affecting anything *right* this second, but will probably at some point. Treatment here is a series of shots (starting at 2 a week for 2 weeks, going to 1 a week, then 1 every other week, forever) ... each shot costs $50 -- that would blow my food budget for *me* much less her, so yeah, can't do that. OR they have a stem cell therapy that only costs like $1,800 and will help her for like two years. yay.
• Get a dog with a totally shaved tummy back.

The bright side of the day?
- dog ate dinner and her medicine
- Vet gave me the x-ray for free (though i had to pay $300 for the ultrasound)
- i found the text i'm reading for Japanese crit theory class wed online
- the boyfriend had a weird day too?

yeah, that's all i got for the moment. i think i'm calling it. hopefully this was enough this week and this is not a sign of things to come.

I've had on my To Do List this thing... this thing where I have to create a bibliography of the works I'm going to need for my dissertation. And since I am rewriting my proposal from the ground up, most of the works on my qualifying exams list aren't really helpful or necessary anymore. Oh, sure, like 20 or 30 of them will come over, but I've needed to actually go start to outline the works I *will* need since last year.

Well today I finally got started on it! And found a bunch of dissertations that I am aching to read, including a monograph on one of the authors I would like to write about in my later chapters on feminist writers! It was very exciting!!

But I totally looked up and it was like an hour later and I have 10 citations. Which is good! Dont' get me wrong! But I'd meant to only sit down with the database for like 20 minutes, which is just laughable. Resaerch is awesome.

That's my life. Except that I totally read scarimonious's giggling and saw that entrenous88 had done a review of Sleepy Hollow and it sounded kind of hilarious, so, yeah, two episodes in I think I've adopted a new TV show. Not that I need anymore! But accents! Awesome cops! Headless Horsemen!!!

(yes, i know, this post has a lot of exclamation points. i think i'm feeling less sick finally, and it shows in the punctuation!)