Meanwhile, in the rest of my life....

The cold, wet weather is over in Tucson for now. Killjoy climatologists said that all the rain didn't do much to alleviate the nine year drought. They claim it would take three times the normal annual rainfall to officially end it. They don't want much, do they? Snow has completely disappeared from our mountain views. The high today is supposed to be 62.

Last night was the end of my Economics course. Aside from my disagreements with the instructor about adverbs, the passive voice and the verb "to be," the course was relatively painless, even interesting. Despite reservations, I humored Michelle on the language bugaboos. I changed everyone's passive sentence constructions in all the remaining team papers, including the 41-page compilation at the end of the course. I'll even admit that it's a valid exercise, not a real "rule" to be followed blindly, but something to bear in mind in my writing.

Finishing the team paper Monday night at 2 AM didn't leave me much time to prepare for last night's team PowerPoint presentation. Fortunately, someone else did most of the work on the slides (for a change). I winged my narration as usual. It wasn't brilliant, but I made the class laugh, so I'm happy.

I'm sure I aced the final, despite not having read at least two of the assigned chapters. If she really wanted to stump people with the test, she probably shouldn't have embedded some of the answers into later questions. Most likely she wanted people to pass the thing.

After class, my team stood around and said nice things to each other, and especially to me for putting the papers together. Karl called me the "lynchpin" of the group. (I also gave a fair amount of guidance to teammates who wanted my advice or reassurance. Several times on Monday and Tuesday, I shouted at the computer, "Leave me the h- alone!" after a particularly annoying and inane IM.)  Andrea B and Andrea J and I had never met the two guys before, and after last night I may never see them again. They were great, though, especially Michael. The two Andreas and I will be taking the capstone" course together in January, which is reportedly about ethics; so I expect we'll team up one last time.

So that's done. Now I've got three weeks for Christmas and house cleaning (my office at home is an unbelievable pit, with two years' worth of schoolwork and printed texts strewn around). And writing. I fully intend to put some serious work in on Mages of Mâvarin. I can't submit it anywhere until it's edited to my own satisfaction.

It would be nice to make some progress on my backlog at the office, too. Maybe I should be working on that instead of journaling!

Karen