The 2005 Holiday Season Commences!

Ok, I haven’t had much time to write, ‘cos I have been busy doing nothing productive.  But now I’m back and…everything’s just like it always has been.  Or so it feels.  Today is Son-Friend’s birthday.  Happy birthday, Son-Friend!  As (quite practically) always, I’m belatedly celebrating it…later.  He already knows this, and I have already given him a sort-of present yesterday, and I’ll make up the rest when I belatedly do whatever it is that I’ll be belatedly doing.  I don’t have this all planned out quite yet, although I am declaring that the 2005 Holiday Season starts today.  Yes, today.  So sing holiday songs out loud, go decorate something, and start shopping.  This is your Captain speaking.  :-)

Ok, on to our regularly scheduled post.

Online courses suck ass, and group-work sucks ass.

No, rilly.  They do.  And there’s just no describing what group-work conducted in an online class does; it’s vile, morally reprehensible, and illegal in states that allow sodomy.  No, rilly.

I am currently a busy worker bee (I’m waiting for a gicunda .pdf to load) trying to throw something together for an online class that I have to take this term to count towards a certificate that I’m doing in addition to my major.  After this class, I’ll only have one more (thank god), and then I’ll be all certificated and stuff.  But this one is a requirement, and this one is only offered online.  Pfft.

And this one has group-work.  We’re divided up into groups of four, and out of our group of four, only two of us are actually working.  It seems like this happens EVERY FREAKING TIME THAT I HAVE TO DO GROUP-WORK.  Grr.

But of course, I’m wrong.  It doesn’t happen *every* freaking time; it only happens *half* the freaking time—the other half of the freaking time, I get someone who wants to do everything wrong, or make “happy to glad” changes until the project is past-due.  What’s kind of funny is that, this time, when the other person and I met, I nominated her to be Team Leader; I’m so sick of leading anything that I could just puke.  I think she was happy with that, because she thought that I wanted to be Leader…which I don’t.  I just started the group emailing so that no one would say later that I didn’t do anything.  So our Fearless Leader emailed the group that slacking off will not be allowed, and one of the slackers-off responded by saying that she resented the tone of the email.  Sigh.  You can’t respond to anything else, but you can email to say what you resent?  Well, you just resent away and rock on with yo’ bad se’f.  And I just *know* that el Slacker-off will use this as an excuse to do nothing.  People like that are just gunning for a reason to not participate; I’ve dealt with too many of them to be naïve and think that it’s because they’re genuinely offended.  If they weren’t offended by that, they’d be offended by something else, so that they don’t have to participate ‘cos they’re too busy being offended.  

Butsoanyway.

In Other News, Squooshable is now over six pounds, but isn’t thrilled with his food any more; he just picks at it.  I know that he’s supposed to seem as if he’s eating less because it’s Science Diet, Iams, Eukaneuba, Authority and all that I’m feeding him, but I kind of wish he’d go back to being a great big pig, like he always has been.  He’s by no stretch of the imagination undernourished, it’s just that…well…I worry about him.  He had eight fangs (his adult teeth coming in), but then the two baby fangs on the bottom fell out, so now he only has six fangs.  :-)  He thinks he’s dangerous.  And he’s gnawing on everything, including me.  And Meg made fun of me for looking for his baby bottom fangs that fell out.  I was going to go get a little baby tooth holder and keep them, but I couldn’t find them anywhere.  I hope he didn’t eat them!  Meg now calls him Six-Fang.  

I am doing the Blogger for Word posting, and it’s a pain in the butt to use emoticons, because Word converts them, and they don’t show up properly in Blogger.  I would turn the conversion off, but I don’t know offhand how to turn it back on if I want it, and I know me—I’d put off reading Help until I *desperately* needed it, and then it would be all complicated, and stuff.  But at least by using Word I can preemptively address my allegedly god-awful spelling and some fragments, and stuff.  

During the time that I wasn’t posting, I didn’t do anything really phenomenal, so that’s why I’m skipping over it.  I didn’t miss Eviljob in the slightest.  Mike is still in New Orleans, but he calls his mother (and wife, and sometimes others) often.  He’s doing ok, and with things a little more under-control there, I’m less concerned.  What can I really do about it, anyway?  

And I have another business-travel-thing coming up in a little over a month.  Sigh.  It’s always something.  I guess in a way it’s good that I only have the online class and another class that meets once a week, or I’d be back to Totally Drowning (I’m rounding out my required credits with a Directed Readings class for which I am forever Reading Directedly, but I can do that anywhere, and it’s all things that I would have to be reading even if not directed to do so).  :-)  

And I don’t know what I want to do for my birthday, which is coming up; I want to do something really fun and special, but I can’t think of anything, at least not yet.  I am absolutely, positively, decidedly, and unwaveringly taking the day off…I just don’t know what I am going to do with it.  

And for now I have to finish reading this humongous .pdf and get back to work.  Sigh.

Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way!