I'm such a horrendous blog slacker.

The semester is starting to wind down already. I just finished the first draft of my only big term paper, and there's just two weeks of classes left after Thanksgiving. My only sizeable school tasks left, other than normal TAing and readings, are to revise that paper and take one final. Sometimes it seems like Ryan's two distance learning classes take more time than my three classes! But I guess he's working full time rather than TAing, which is only 15-20 hours per week.

We're headed up to Ryan's mom's for Thanksgiving (huge surprise there), leaving tomorrow afternoon and staying until either Friday evening or Saturday morning. Ryan and I are cooking all of the side dishes, while his mom is doing the turkey and desserts. I wasn't at all worried about the cooking until I found out that they're having another family who I don't know at all join us for dinner. It's going to be about 13 people in total, and now I feel the need to impress the newcomers since they aren't already aware of how wonderful and awesome I am.

The kitten's new nickname is "The Sheriff of Naughty Ham" because he's naughty and likes ham. Ryan and I started a puzzle last night and covered most of it with heavy books to protect against Nibblin damage, but he still managed to tear apart the few places that weren't well protected, littering puzzle pieces all over the floor for us to find in the morning. Naughty, naughty!

Crunch time is setting in; most of my work and studying is between now and Thanksgiving. Not much to report. Car insurance is twice as expensive here as in Syracuse :( I'm dragging Ryan to a dinner party at a professor's house tonight in celebration of someone getting their PhD. I'm looking forward to it, but I'm sure he's not.

While I'm doing fine in my classes, they're just okay. Nothing is really grabbing my attention. At least with TAing I can make it somewhat fun for my students. Like this week we were looking at preserved slides of tapeworms, so I told the class how Christ (well, I just said "a friend at undergrad") TA'd for a parasite guy who actually ingested the tapeworms to transport them into the US, then "recovered" them later. They were sufficiently grossed out.

I've still got it. What a relief!

"It" being the ability to be a good student. I was afraid that after two years in the real world I'd go soft and all my smarts would be replaced with mental snapshots of plankton. Fortunately, that seems to not be the case. I got the highest grade in the class on the first exam in the ecology course of death. I also impressed a few people with my NSF research proposal. That whole application is done (provided that my letters of recommendation get sent), so I can breathe easy there.

Nothing too interesting on the horizon, just doing my thing. Looking forward to Thanksgiving, I guess?