Suzanne Calling

I think it's pretty obvious I don't watch a lot of television and what I do watch is not typically network programming. For instance, right now, I'm sitting in the living room with a nice new TV and it's dark and quiet. Ed's at work, the boys are enjoying the pool and that's typical for me. Half the time, I don't even turn the thing on when I know that there's a program I like on Food, Discovery or TLC. However, there's something airing on Monday night that I'm looking forward to. A few times, I've watched "House" and I've enjoyed the medical mysteries that they present in a fictionalized way. One of those occasions, the diagnosis before the real one was a friend's rare and very hard to live with Still's Disease. Such is the case with House, they tend to showcase health issues outside of the mainstream. From what I understand, a couple of the things I have been diagnosed with have been on the show-I just don'...

Last weekend, Chef spent most of the weekend with his best friend at his house. They spent Sunday visiting Gatorland and he's still telling me how much he enjoyed the place and needs to head back soon This weekend, best friend's mom gets to be one kid lighter. Sent them to bed at 9:30 and they're still awake in his room, thinking that if the sound is turned way down, we might not notice that they're not asleep yet. Wonder if this means they'll sleep really late in the morning?

Well, I took a final at 8am. I ended that class with an A. That's three down, and two to go. Then again, that wasn't silly. Nor was the trip to the bookstore to pick up summer textbooks and some Spanish study materials. That Spanish class had a written an and oral final. If you had a 92 overall after completing the semester and the written final, you're exempt from the final. I ended up with a 96.5, so I was exempt. Meghan got 100 in the class, she was also exempt and makes me look like a total slacker! However, my friend and classmate Meghan and I both expressed concerns about spending a month not speaking any Spanish before we begin the summer class. The summer class in which the instructor no longer utters any words in English. Both of us know how rusty we can get with a couple of days w/o practice and we're the ones who ENJOYED the homework and extra credit. I mentioned picking up some study guides on my own, but Meghan approached our professor and arrange...

Yesterday, I took final number one. This was a written final and after it was complete, if my overall average was above 92, I would be exempt from the oral exam. I could have bombed the test and still been clear. Around midnight, the confirmation showed up-I completed Spanish with a 96.5 overall. After studying about ten hours, I took final number two this afternoon. It was for my lone web based course and I sweated it, because I needed a 92 on the test to maintain my A in the course. There is an opportunity to earn twenty points of extra credit by writing a comprehensive paper about the course. Based on the previous three exams, I thought I'd be close, but figured I'd be off by a hair. I was, but I noticed something that points to my future. There is a major glitch with the software used for online course content. My selections were being switched when I cursored from my selection to the 'save answer' button. It happened a total of twelve times in the course ...

Today, someone in the house was playing a video game I'd never seen before, Little Big Planet. It looks pretty good, graphics are good, but the character he was playing as looked strangely familiar. This is a black and white image I found online: It brought me back to a show the child liked a few years back, one whose theme song got changed by me to "I'm just a kid who's four, each day I whine some more, I'm an annoying bore, I'm Caillou." The only part of that show that was tolerable was the section with the puppets of Gilbert the Cat and Rexy the dragon and this character from that game looked like Rexy: Get the cute character without the whiny kid? Sign me up.

...and being a good girl. Despite the pool finally being warm enough to consider taking a swim today, I only dipped my feet for an hour while reading my developmental psych text book. Tomorrow morning, my first final. Another Thursday morning and the Developmental by 5pm Friday. That leaves two finals the following week and a couple of weeks of rest between semesters. Maybe. I got a call this morning, asking if I'd come tomorrow morning in for training for the next phase of work. Instead, I will start training for that process in two weeks. Fortunately, the school schedule will not interfere with being able to work over the summer. So, the weather has finally brought us around to swimming, but the calendar says not until next week.

Some thirty years ago, Madame Boucai gave us a homework assignment to assist us in learning body parts and articles of clothing. We got dittos of a boy on a beach and a girl in a store to label. Some of us colored them in, because it gave us an excuse to color something as teens. One girl in my class, Faith, painted the boy's fingernails pink and gave him earrings, something that wasn't very common in 1980. It was the source of Madame's joking for a long time after the assignment had been turned in. The method used to remember these worked very well. So much so that now that I'm studying for my Spanish final on Tuesday (with much better results than French), I decided it was time to make my own clothing page: