Grades are in. . .

I managed to finish my MA in English with a 4.0! Yea! So that will look good if I ever completely lose my mind and decide to apply to a PhD program.

It's a Girl!!!

It's official! We found out Friday morning that we are going to be having a baby girl in May! We went to the ob/gyn on Friday for our 20 week ultrasound/anatomy scan. They scheduled an hour to look at all of the baby's systems, like the brain, the heart (beating at 141 bpm at the beginning of the exam), and kidneys. They measured the arms and legs and saw how much the baby weighed (11 oz. - right on target for 20 weeks). The best news of the visit was that everything looked great - she is healthy and developing well.

She is also extremely active! (Which was no surprise to her mom, who has been feeling her turn somersaults in there pretty much all the time these days.) She was asleep when we first got there, but after a few pokes of the ultrasound wand, she woke up, gave us a big yawn, stretched her whole body, and started wriggling around like crazy. By the time we got to the end of the ultrasound, she had actually flipped all the way over!

Finally, once all the important stuff had been checked out, the lady asked us if we were ready to find out the gender. The baby actually cooperated for this, and we got several very clear shots. The lady asked us to guess what we saw on the screen. Neither one of us really knew what we were seeing, but Cy was brave enough to guess "boy." (It seemed like the obvious choice since it is a Shealy baby!) But the lady said, "No, it's a little girl" and showed us the girl parts on the screen. We are so excited! We are having tons of fun picking out all kinds of pink stuff for our baby girl. We can't wait until May when we will finally get to meet her!

I am posting a couple of pictures from the ultrasound. I won't embarrass the poor little baby girl by posting her girl parts up here for the world to see. ;) I may also post a tummy picture of mom & baby if I feel brave enough. . .there hasn't been much to see until about a week ago, but a little belly is poking out some now.

Best Reads of 2009 (Thus Far)

I'm stealing this idea from Jeff Tell, although I'm positive there will be no overlap. . .

I was going to do a list of the top 10 books I read this year, but I'm going to go with the top 10% (ish) of books I read this year, so I'll do 20, since I've read about 236 books to date. (Notice this is my list thus far, as there are still a couple more weeks, in which I could manage to read quite a few more books.)

So here there are, in the order in which I read them:

1. Watership Down by Richard Adams (RABBERTS! This is what came out when I tried to tell Cy this book was about "adventuring rabbits" - somehow it came out "rabberts")

2. Silent on the Moor by Deanna Raybourn - 3rd in the Lady Julia Gray series. Loved it so much I read it straight through twice as soon as I bought it.

3. Dog On It by Spencer Quinn - Really clever detective story told from the point of view of a dog. Sounds cheesy, but it is really well done. There is a sequel coming out next month.

4. Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford - sad, beautiful, and touching.

5. The Virgin Queen's Daughter by Ella March Chase - sounds much more scandalous than it is. A really great story about what might have happened if Queen Elizabeth I had secretly had a daughter with Robert Dudley (as is often rumored).

6. Moloka'i by Alan Brennert - great historical fiction about a leper colony on the Hawaiian island of Moloka'i.

7. Honolulu by Alan Brennert - another great historical fiction offering from Brennert.

8. Beloved Counterfeit by Kathleen Y'Barbo - the latest in the Fairweather Keys series. Love anything by Kathleen Y'Barbo, but especially love the historical Caribbean setting of these books.

9. Midwives by Chris Bohjalian - it would probably freak me out if I read it again right now since I'm pregnant, but this was a really well-written, engaging story. I love his books in general though.

10. Gilead by Marilynne Robinson - One of the most amazing books I've ever read (and I've read it twice in the past year). The writing is beautiful, and I love the way she blends religion with the story of a family and a town.

11. The Mark of the Lion trilogy by Francine Rivers - amazing. Definitely her best.

12. Down River by John Hart - North Carolina mystery writer. Couldn't put this down.

13. The Last Child by John Hart - Loved this one too. Read all of his books back to back.

14. The Book of Illusions by Paul Auster - actually had to read this one for a class. I've since read some of his other books and hated them, but this one was really great. The plot was so intricate, and it was really amazing how he tied it all together.

15. The Girl Who Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson - great 2nd installment of the posthumously published Millennium Trilogy. LOVE these books.

16. The Apothecary's Daughter by Julie Klassen

17. Legacy by Cayla Kluver - Left me hanging. I'm ready for the second one. And the author's only like 16 years old - really impressive.

18. Ruined by Paula Morris - Great YA read, not your typical ghost story. Loved the New Orleans setting and the historical subplot.

19. The Observations by Jane Harris - kind of a neo-Victorian Gothic type thing. Brilliantly written.

20. I'm saving this space for one more great read!

It's beginning to look A LOT like Christmas

So. . .we may have gotten a bit carried away with the Christmas decorations this year. We put up our normal tree the day after Thanksgiving (yes we actually waited until after Thanksgiving this year). Then I was saying that we have such a big house that I wished we had another tree to put up. So Cy tried to track down another tree and we ended up with 2 more - a 4 ft. and another 7 1/2 ft. tree. I was like, Great! The more trees the better!



(Notice that there are 3 stockings this year and that Baby Shealy is already racking up the presents, notably a deer/owl!)

Then we had this great idea that the small tree should be solely flamingo-themed. So I took all the flamingo ornaments back of the big tree, filled in the holes, and put them on the little tree. To make the flamingo tree even more awesome, I had the great idea to put pink lights on it (if I could even find such a thing). We went to Target and fortunately they randomly had 2 packages of pink lights. (I have never again seen pink lights since then.) I'm loving the flamingo tree though. . .and it goes great with the mechanical Santa-hat-wearing flamingo that is chilling in the front yard (sadly, this is the extent of our outside decor as Cy was too sick with concussions and swine flu to put up lights).
In our kitchen, we put up a tiny 1-2 foot tree decorated with M&M ornaments.

Then finally we put up the final tree in our breakfast nook. It is really pretty - it is color coordinated with clear lights, white, blue, and silver ornaments and icicles. The breakfast table was to heavy for me to move so I just covered it with a blue blanket and put some houses on it.

And now it looks like we will be here for Christmas after all so we are excited that we will get to share all of our plethora of Christmas trees!

No more pencils, no more books, no more teachers' dirty looks. . .

In the words of Alice Cooper, school's out forever!!! For me at least. I finished everything for my Master's Degree at approximately 9:15 pm last night. At that point, all that was standing in my way was the pesky final exam scheduled from 7:30-10:30 last night.

I must say that my very last day of grad school was quite interesting. It started with me receiving my first B (of grad school - I may have gotten like 1 somewhere in my 160 credit hours of undergrad). And not just a B, but an 89 - 1 point shy of an A. I stewed about it pretty much all day long and tried to convince myself that I didn't care. It also inspired me to study less for my exam, since my GPA was already ruined. Then around 3:00 yesterday afternoon, I couldn't take it anymore and decided to dispute the grade. I was all set to beg my professor to find me an extra point somewhere when I decided to calculate the grade myself just to be sure. I discovered that for one of my grades, she had given me just a letter grade and not a number. I looked at her grading scale figured out that the missing grade was at least a 94, so I calculated using the 94 and my grade came out to 89.65, which clearly should round up to a 90. So I sent her a polite email suggesting that she may have calculated my grade wrong. As it turns out, the missing grade was actually a 95, putting me solidly on the A side of the fence. She had entered it as only a 92. Needless to say, I'm glad I decided to go ahead and check, since I had in fact, earned the A, and since her mistake made the difference between an A and a B. Yikes.

After I got that sorted out, it was off to take my final exam. Oh yes, the one for James Joyce class. I decided that I would enjoy my 4.0 for a few more hours, because I was pretty convinced there was no way it would survive James Joyce class intact. When I went into the exam, about 70% of my grade was still unaccounted for - 50% of it was the really crappy paper I wrote one day last week on Ulysses. I just went ahead and assumed that there was no hope of getting an A on a paper on Ulysses (due to me not understanding a word of Ulysses). I went and faked my way through the exam (didn't really know what was going on there either) and finished up around 9:15, accepting my B and just being glad to be finished. Imagine my surprise when he gave me my paper and I had gotten an A! That gave me a solid A in the class, so I think that even if my performance on the exam was less than stellar, I should make it out with my 4.0!!!

Anyway. . . the important part of this whole story is that I am finally finally done with graduate school. FOREVER! (Unless I lose my mind at some point in the future and decide to pursue a PhD.) I may have shrieked a lot and danced around when I got in the car last night after the exam. I AM DONE!!!! Now I can move on to bigger and better things - like reading books all day and never leaving my house!

Mad as a Victorian

I have spent about 12 hours a day working on term papers for the past 5 days or so, and I think I'm slowly going mad. Of course that is probably due in part to the paper I have been working on for the past two days, which is about James Joyce's use of the figure of the colonial madwoman in Ulysses. (I clearly was mad before I started writing, as evidenced by my insane choice of paper topic.)

So as part of writing this paper, I've been reading treatises on madness, in particular, on "moral madness". . . written by Victorians. And basically, the Victorians were all just nuts. And if I have to read too many more of these essays, I will be nuts too.

But my favorite by far is the essay called "The Loaded Colon" by a guy named Daniel Noble, written in 1853, in which he discusses "derangement of the colon" and "the prejudicial effects of a loaded colon upon the temper and moral disposition." According to Daniel Noble, "premonitory symptoms of insanity are sometimes dissipated by procuring a free and vigorous action of the large intestines." And if someone gets snarky with you? Well, it might just be because their colon is backed up! Noble writes that "we should frequently find the misfortunes of one man caused by the intestines of another, whom the former endeavoured to inspire with sympathy in his fate at a moment when the frame of mind of the latter was affected by impeded secretion. An hour later, and his fortune would have been made."

And then it continues on to describe in detail (which I will spare you) the precise methods of "derangement" that might lead to insanity.

So the next time someone starts acting crazy on you, just give them a laxative and pretty soon it'll be all good.

I kind of hate NaNoWriMo a little bit

OH. MY. GOSH. The past ten minutes have been intense and excruciating. I went into the next to last day of NaNoWriMo today at 46,000 words. Ish. I wanted to knock it out today, since tomorrow is the last day and I also have yet to read the book for class tomorrow night (due to the fact that I hate school). But I spent the whole day wasting time by putting up way too many Christmas trees in my house (which were awesome, and will shortly appear on this blog), and didn't start writing until around 6 pm.

Then I somehow got motivated and just kept going and decided to knock the whole thing out. So I finished up a little after 8 o'clock with around 50,300 words (according to Open Office). I was relieved, because I had written the ending a while back, and I had just gotten to the ending, so I was out of plot. Figuring I was good to go, I used an algorithm to randomize my novel (so no one could steal it off the NaNoWriMo server, because it's clearly a future bestseller!) and uploaded it. Imagine my surprise. . .and fury. . . when it set my word count back to 49,345 words. Apparently there is a discrepancy of 1,000 words between their word counter and mine!

Did I mention I was out of plot at this time? I went back into my novel, pretty much picked a paragraph at random and started adding tons of descriptions of wherever the heck the characters had happened to be in this scene. I then uploaded it again. It returned a word count of 49,645 words-ish. By this point, I'm pretty much furious and punching the couch, yelling, etc. I go back and add some more flowery nonsense to my novel. Finally, just before I'm about to have a heart attack and chuck my laptop across the room, the thing gives me a word count of 50,006. 6 words to spare. I'll take it. By this point, I'm pretty much hating NaNoWriMo. The daily writing had gotten to be almost like torture, and their word count validator was just the icing on the cake of torture. I say all this now, but I like to punish myself, so I'm sure next November I'll be on here ranting again about the pain that is NaNoWriMo, just as I have for four Novembers in a row now.

But for now, I'll just be relieved that it's over. And I guess it was cool that I actually finished the plot this year (a first), because now I'll be able to get a free copy of my novel actually printed like a book, which will be cool, even though I'm hating everything about my novel at the moment.

And 50,000 words of a novel is going to seem like nothing when I start tackling those 60 pages of term paper writing I have yet to do. . .especially since I only have a week to write them!

Poor Rudolph. . .

Last night we went to see the lights at James Island County Park with Wes, Kelly, & Noah. It was of course, extra fun with Noah. Like when there was a husky in the car next to us and Noah kept saying, "There's the woof (wolf)!" There were a few rough patches when the mean people told him he wasn't tall enough to ride the "little train," even though they had let him ride it before. He was heartbroken at first, but some popcorn soon cheered him up.

But the best moment of the evening was when Noah was singing "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" and he got to the line "Then one foggy Christmas Eve, Santa came to. . ." and he trailed off and then said, "Momma, did he cut him?" None of us were sure where that came from, but it was pretty hilarious. Fortunately, the next time around, the lyrics were back to normal.

We had a really great evening getting to see the lights. Plus, there were flamingo ornaments at the gift shop. Which means that an entire flamingo-themed tree might be in the works. . .stay tuned. . .

Happy Thanksgiving!

A brief disclaimer: The pictures on this blog are going to look a lot like the pictures on Wes & Kelly's blog. Because they are the same. Due to me stealing them from Kelly's Facebook page since I left my camera at home the other night. (Also, I promise Cy has other shirts. Even though he is wearing that blue sweater in pretty much every family picture on every holiday.)

Anyway, that being said. . .we had a really great Thanksgiving. I spent most of Wednesday baking to get ready for the big day. I made my first-ever pumpkin pie (with homemade crust!) and it turned out great! I also made a cranberry apple crunch dish (basically apple crisp with cranberries) that turned out pretty delicious too. I wasn't sure the pie was going to happen at one point on Wednesday. . .there were a lot of hiccups involving the crust instructions being out of order and then being confusing, and then me not being able to get a hold of my mom for clarification due to her being in the middle of nowhere, North Carolina, with no cell phone service. But I ended up just winging it on the end and it turned out all right. Cy even liked the pie, so it must have been pretty good.

On Thursday, we took it easy in the morning--didn't do too much at all. Then we headed over to Wes & Kelly's house around 3:15 where we had dinner with Frank & Andrea, Mike & Jean, and Wes, Kelly, & Noah. There was so much food it was insane. I think I put about a tablespoon of everything on my plate and filled up the entire plate. Aside from that, it was nice just to get to take some time out from all of our crazy lives and spend some time together, just hanging out and catching up.We wrapped up our Thanksgiving by watching the movie The Proposal. . .at which we laughed hysterically. Overall, it was a really great day.

Sister Weekend

Last weekend, Rachel came down to spend the weekend so that we could go see New Moon together. We drove up to Florence on Friday and had dinner with my parents at Cracker Barrel, then Rachel climbed in the car with us and we drove back to Chucktown. We spent Friday night watching/laughing at Twilight (and Saturday morning, as we were too tired to finish it on Friday after our road trip).

On Saturday morning, we hit up Wal-Mart in search of New Moon t-shirts. We didn't find any, however, we did find these super cool Madagascar Christmas stuffed animals. It turns out that Madagascar Christmas animals really enjoy riding around on the Roomba. Who knew?

After watching a few spoofs of New Moon on Youtube to get us in the mood, we went to the theater (Cy bought us tickets in advance, just in case they sold out). There was a pretty big line waiting to get into the theater, and we were afraid we were going to get trampled at first, but it turned out okay. The new Citadel Mall theater is really nice, and we enjoyed the movie--it was a lot better than Twilight (which we decided was because Robert Pattinson was hardly in it).

Saturday night we went to Joe Pasta and Cupcake (yum), then watched The Pink Panther 2 and caught up on some homework/noveling. Then Sunday morning it was church, and then back on the road to Florence and home again. Did I mention it was snowing in Charleston when we left? Weird. It was a quick, whirlwind weekend, but we had tons of fun!

Another Good Report

Just wanted to post an update - we went to the ob/gyn for my monthly checkup this morning and everything was great. They said my weight was good, we talked through a few questions as well as some future plans, and then we got to hear the baby's heartbeat - loud and strong in the 150's! We were also excited to find out that we get to have the next ultrasound and find out if it's a boy or a girl sooner than we thought! We didn't think that it would be until after Christmas because of the holiday, but they have me scheduled for Friday, Dec. 18. That will be a nice early Christmas present! :)

In other news, Cy is doing much better these days. For anyone who hasn't heard (again, not that I think the readership of this blog is terribly extensive), he had a scary episode last Wednesday where he passed out at work (for reasons unknown) and fell and hit his head on a cubicle wall. We spent about 6 hours in the ER while they ran all kinds of tests, but they didn't find anything, which is good and bad. Good, because there's nothing obviously wrong. But bad, because we still don't know what caused it and we are just hoping it won't happen again. After that, he has been suffering from concussion symptoms ever since. It has been a rough week for us but he finally seems to be making some progress toward getting better.

And in yet other news, we are excited about Rachel coming tomorrow to stay for the weekend. We have a weekend of Twilight-filled fun planned. We are going to watch Twilight, then go see New Moon on Saturday. (I am sure we will manage to squeeze in a trip to Joe Pasta and Cupcake as well.)

And now for other, less exciting updates. School is nearing to a close. Both my Tuesday and my Wednesday class meet only once more each (first week of December). Unfortunately, I have my Monday night class 3 more times, plus a 4th time to take the final exam. Other than that, I just have to churn out two 15 page term papers (I have yet to write a single word) and a 30 page bibliography project (at least I have rounded up the 100+ sources needed for that - they finally cut me off at the library the other day and said I couldn't have any more books until I brought some back!). Needless to say, I absolutely cannot wait to be completely finished.

As for NaNoWriMo, it is going okay. . .not as great as years past. I have just been too busy spending all my days working on school projects, and then I'm just too exhausted by the time I get home from class at night. At only 23,000 words as of right now, I am lagging behind, but still in the running. I am planning to catch up some this week, and maybe even get ahead next week when I have a break from school.

All right, I have bored everyone (all one or two of my readers) enough with my less than exciting life. On December 18, I will have much more exciting news to post (as well as pictures)!

Comprehensive Exam Update

An update on the graduate comprehensive exam: I got an email yesterday afternoon saying that not only had I passed the exam, but that the quality of my exam was so high that the committee elected to designate mine as "passed with honors," which they said was awarded very rarely, only to the best exams.

YEA! Now I just have to survive one more month of classes and I will be DONE!

It's that time again. . .novel writing time!

It's that crazy time of year again. . .National Novel Writing Month. NaNoWriMo began at 12 am on Nov. 1. Since I'm finishing up my last semester of graduate school (taking 3 whopping classes) and I have about a billion papers to write before the end of the month, and I'm also in the midst of an epic battle with morning sickness that lasts all day long. . .well, I was going to sit this one out. (I think I may have said the same thing last year too - due to working full time and taking grad classes.)

But then I thought about it, and this would be my fourth year in a row participating. Ever since November '06 I've been hooked. And due to writing billions of term papers on subjects I couldn't care less about, I haven't been doing a lot of "fun" writing. And then I realized that maybe a little NaNoWriMo was just the kind of stress relief activity I needed to get me through this last semester.

So I decided on Oct. 31 that I would do it. But then I had a big problem. Normally, I spend the months leading up to NaNoWriMo coming up with a plot and characters, and I usually have at least an outline when I get started. Not this year. The last few months have been consumed with studying for the comprehensive exam.

Then it hit me: everyone is turning out teen vampire novels right and left these days. Certainly that would be much easier to tackle than the elaborate restructuring of Jane Eyre into the Southern Gothic mode that I undertook last year (and have yet to finish). And better yet? Why not borrow a famous plot for my teen vampire novel?

To make a long story short (although hopefully I'll be able to make my actual story at least 50,000 words by Nov. 30): I decided to steal the plot of Jane Austen's novel Northanger Abbey (which I'm actually writing about in a paper right now, so I had a chance to brush up on it), but write my novel about a teenage girl who is so obsessed with teen vampire novels (like Twilight, the Vampire Diaries, etc.) that she starts to suspect that everyone around her just might be one of the walking undead. So that's what I'm attempting to do right now. And so far, I'm having a lot of fun. I've read so many teen vampire novels myself (hate to admit it, but it's true) that it's coming pretty easily. I finished out yesterday (day 2) with 4,332 words (about 1,000 words ahead of schedule). Hopefully I can keep cranking out 1500 or so words per day to get to that goal of 50,000 by November 30!

(And hopefully no one will read my blog and steal my already stolen plot since I laid it out there. Shouldn't be a problem - pretty sure no one reads this blog anyway. Also, hopefully I won't get my novel confused with my Jane Austen paper and start writing about vampires in Northanger Abbey. That could be problematic.)

Lego my Castle. . .and also my Pirates!

For a while, Cy and I were really into Legos and we would set up our card table in front our fireplace and build Legos in front of the fire every evening and on the weekends. We have been working on a medieval castle. Since school is wrapping up and I have more free time, we have revived the tradition. We hit up Target last week and stocked up on more Legos. This weekend we built a troll castle and then Cy set up the good castle and the troll castle and staged an epic battle of the good guys vs. the trolls/skeletons. There are tons of pieces for the Lego castle set and it will take us forever to collect and build all of them.

In the meantime, we made an awesome discovery. There is a recently new set of Legos. . .Lego pirates!!! As anyone who knows me will know, I love all things pirate (or vampire). I started with a couple of small pirate pieces (that was all I could afford since I had just bought a stack of books from Amazon). I am hoping to get all the big pieces either for graduation gifts or Christmas. And there aren't a whole lot of Pirate ones yet, so I can easily get them all now and then keep up with them as new sets come out. We are loving the Legos at our house!

This is the first Pirate set we got. It is called "Kraken Attackin'"!

Why Come We Did Carve These Pumpakins?

Well it is that time of year again. Time for pumpkin guts and crazy costumes. For the first time in a long time, we did not do the matching costume thing this year. Mostly because we have run out of ideas by now. We did finally carve pumpkins last night, though, and opted once again for something a little less. . .involved. . .than our spectacular Pirates of the Caribbean pumpkins from a couple years back.


Cy bravely scooped his own pumpkin guts even though he hated every second of it.

Cy's pumpkin was a funny smiley face. I told him that the crooked smile reminded me of his crooked smile. The resemblance is uncanny! Mine was supposed to be a vampire. It looked really cool on the paper, and it was much harder to carve than I was hoping for, but when I turned out the lights, it looked pretty stupid, so I was disappointed. To me, it looked more like Strong Bad or Magneto or some sort of weird owl (not a deer/owl) than a vampire. Oh well.

There was also this really weird picture where the pumpkins looked spooky and possessed. . .I snapped the picture, thought the camera was done, then put it down. When I heard it click a few seconds later, I realized it was still doing its thing. The result? Evil demon pumpkins with flames shooting out the tops!!! Ahh!!!

I shall call it. . .Mini Shealy!

It is official - there will be a little addition to our family of two next May! Baby Shealy is about 12-13 weeks-ish right now (there has been much debate in the doctor's office as to the official dates). The official due date is May 13, but we are expecting it to be earlier than that. We have been to the ob/gyn several times now, and have had two ultrasounds. On the first ultrasound, the baby was measuring a bit smaller than expected, so they pushed the due date out. On the second date, the baby had caught up to where it should be according to the original date, so there was much confusion about the due date, after which they decided to just stick with the May 13 date even though that seemed wrong. . .we don't get it but they insist they know what they are doing. :)


We are very excited. Things have been a bit rough for me trying to finish up my last semester of grad school while being pregnant. It of course happened that my worst week of morning sickness coincided with the worst week of the semester (the week I had to take the comprehensive exams) but oh well. I also thought (and hoped) I was through the worst of the morning sickness (which is a total misnomer, as I have been feeling nauseous all day long) because I started feeling like a normal human again, but apparently it was just a few days' reprieve and now I am back to the 24-7 nausea. Lovely. Oh well. In the end it will all be worth it when we get to finally hold that precious little baby!

Everything has gone well at doctor appointments, and I was able to get both a seasonal flu shot and an H1N1 flu shot to provide some extra protection for the baby (which is good, as College of Charleston is pretty much Swine Flu Central these days). We are already making big plans for getting the house in order, picking out baby furniture, etc. Now we are just counting down the days until the next big doctor appointment when we get to find out if it's a boy or a girl! Also very exciting. . .our little baby Shealy will get to have a cousin exactly the same age as him/her!

There is an End in Sight!

It's been a really long time since we've posted anything on the blog. That is due to it being my last semester of graduate school. In order to make sure this is in fact my last semester of graduate school, I'm having to take three classes and also prepare for the comprehensive exams (which is basically the equivalent of an additional class). I'm taking a class on British Fiction from 1900-1945 (Joseph Conrad, E.M.Forster, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf), 18th Century British Women Writers (some poetry, some plays, and some Jane Austen - yea!), and a class called Principles of Literary Research that is basically a library science/bibliography type class.

It's a lot of work and I'm struggling just to stay caught up, but I finally feel like there is an end in sight! Tomorrow is the comprehensive exam. Once I get through that, I just have to finish up my classes and I will be done. The comprehensive exam is based on a reading list that covers three time periods in literature: British Literature before 1800, British Literature after 1800, and American Literature. For the first category, the works are: Parliament of Fowls by Chaucer, King Lear by Shakespeare, and The Battle of the Books by Jonathan Swift. The second category is Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Man and Superman (play) by George Bernard Shaw, and Crow (super crappy poetry) by Ted Hughes. The American lit. works are The Confidence-Man by Herman Melville (horrible book), The Golden Apples by Eudora Welty (also terrible), and The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros.

After months of reading the primary works and stacks of literary criticism about the works, I will be taking the exam from 9-12 tomorrow at the Citadel. Cy has planned a celebration for afterward that includes purchasing pumpkins, hitting up Joe Pasta and the used bookstore, and hopefully a pumpkin cupcake. :)

Then with Comps out of the way, I just have to write 4 more papers (one of them being a 30+ page bibliography with 100-150 sources), give a couple of presentations, and take 2 finals in December and I will be done with school forever! Hooray!!!

What's With All the Weirdness?

Yesterday was kind of a bizarre day. Sometimes we really feel like the world is just out to get us. . .stuff keeps happening to us that we couldn't imagine no matter how hard we tried. Like yesterday.

For a couple months now, we've had this weird tall grass/weed stuff taking over our backyard. It grows really fast, gets really tall, and has incredibly thick, strong roots so it's practically impossible to pull. We Googled some stuff that we thought it was (like crabgrass) and couldn't find anything that matched. So last night, on a whim, I thought, it really looks like stuff you see in a marsh to me so I randomly Googled 'marsh grass' (not expecting anything). As it turns out. . .that is in fact what it is. It's called cordgrass or spartina, and it generally only grows in saltwater marshes. Okay, so step 1 was done - we figured out what it was. Step 2 - how do we kill it? We start Googling that, and get all these hits about conserving the marsh grass and coastal erosion and preserving the wetlands. So apparently everyone is trying desperately to save this junk to prevent coastal erosion, and meanwhile we've somehow got it in our yard and there is nothing to kill it with because it's endangered or something. Maybe we can get the government to come dig it up out of our yard and transplant it into a marsh somewhere nearby? We ended up taking some shovels out there and digging up a few of the biggest patches (which was also fun), but there is so much of it out there that will literally take us years.

In addition to our yard turning into a marsh, it has also become infested with baby rabbits (possibly these are marsh rabbits who like the spartina?). So we can't get some sort of normal bug infestation that the exterminator can come take care of. No. We get infested with baby rabbits. We chased at least four of them off the other day when we were working in the yard. So if that's not bad enough. . .yesterday I go outside to scope out the rabbits and see what they are up to, and one of them has crawled up in this tiny niche between two boards of the fence. . .and died. So in addition to digging up marsh grass from our backyard, we also had to dig a dead baby rabbit out of our fence and dispose of it.

We finish all of this nonsense and decide to go play some tennis. I know, it's a bold move after the way things have been going. We head over to St. Andrews, it's slammed, so we make a U-turn and are sitting at the intersection of Playground Road and 61 waiting to turn right onto 61 and some jogger comes running up, apparently decides we're deliberately blocking his passage across the intersection (even though we've been sitting there waiting to turn for quite some time), gets really angry, and runs up and slaps our car as hard as he can. What the heck? Who just runs up and slaps someone's car? Cy was so ticked off by this (which is a rare event and should show just how well things were going for us yesterday), I seriously thought he was going to whip the car around and just run the guy over.

Dazed, we drive downtown to check out the courts at Colonial Lake. We pull in and this low-hanging tree branch scrapes the crap out of the top of the car (same car that has just been slapped by a jogger). And again, all the courts are full. We're like, what the crap?

So we head over to the public courts by the Citadel. On our way there, we see this Neo-Nazi skinhead looking guy on a motorcycle. He's wearing a black leather vest with studs all over it and there is a lime green mohawk sprouting from the top of his helmet. No joke.

We finally find a court over by the Citadel and it's okay (aside from being in the ghetto). It was a little hard to focus on playing what with the pack of dogs barking everytime anyone went past, and the loud music, and the fear of being shot. But we played, and made it home okay, and fortunately, there was no time for anymore weirdness after that.

Is it just us, or is all of that extremely bizarre?

Bloomin' like an onion

Okay, so I was trying to think of a clever title for this blog entry and in regards to "blooming," all I could think of were bloomin' onions, which in turn made me think of what might be my favorite scene from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, where Andrew is riding on the back of Spike's motorcycle and they have the following conversation:

Andrew: You sure you don't wanna stop and pick up some burgers or something, you know, road trip food?

Spike: It's not a road trip. It's a covert operation.

Andrew: Right. Right. Gotcha... I—I bet even covert operatives eat curly fries. They're really good.

Spike: Not as good as those onion blossom things.

Andrew: Ooh, I love those.

Spike: Yeah, me, too.

Andrew: It's an onion... and it's a flower. I—I don't understand how such a thing is possible.

Spike: See, the genius of it is, you soak it in ice water for an hour so it holds its shape. Then you deep-fry it root-side up for about 5 minutes.

Andrew: Masterful.

Spike: Yeah. Tell anyone we had this conversation, I'll bite you.

Andrew: Right.

Love it. It has nothing to do with this post, but it's just so funny. Anyway, the real reason for this post is to express how super excited I am because one of our crape myrtle trees just started blooming for the first time over the weekend! This may not seem like a big deal, but they are little baby crape myrtle trees and we thought they would not bloom for another couple of years (which I was pretty heartbroken about), so it was a really nice surprise! And the blooms are hot pink, the color of flamingos. I feel like it's my birthday all over again (since I got the trees for my birthday and now they are blooming)!

Yes, yes, it's very patriotic. . .

On Saturday, July 4, at our house we celebrated not the birth of our country, but the birth of Cy. Of course people were making their typical jokes about being born on the Fourth of July (it's not like he hasn't heard every single one of those jokes a billion times before).

We started the festivities on Friday night with a trip to Chili's where our waiter called Cy "Boss" and "Birthday Man." (He was less than thrilled.) We got a free chocolate chip molten cake for his birthday though, so I guess it was worth enduring the silly comments.

On Saturday, we played some tennis then had breakfast at IHOP. Then Saturday night, we headed over to Frank and Andrea's house for some Pizza Hut pizza and break-and-bake cookies (Cy's birthday request). For his birthday, Cy had already received an iPod touch from me and rain barrels from his parents (pictures to come, along with aforementioned pictures of trees). On his birthday, he got the Ultimate Missions Collection (Mission Impossible 1, 2, & 3) on blu-ray from my family, and a plethora of tennis balls and some grip from Wes, Kelly, & Noah (tennis balls are always a great gift, and much needed).

Then we went home to watch one of the Mission Impossible movies and try to ignore the fact that all of our neighbors were setting off fireworks well into the night. The people behind us were setting off some huge ones that we could watch through our living room windows. That was kind of interesting.

Overall, I think it was a good birthday for Cy. Even if he is now only one year away from thirty.

Happy Barfday!!!

We arrived back on solid ground from our cruise on Saturday, May 30, the day before my birthday. I think we all felt a little shaky once we got off the boat, but I didn't feel too bad. . .until later that night. After removing the seasickness patch, and getting off the boat, I began to experience the worst seasickness yet. I spent most of Saturday night throwing up, and still felt horrible on Sunday, so we had to postpone the birthday festivities. My family went ahead and gave me my presents (Twilight, fabric for two purses!, the book Higher Hope by Robert Whitlow, and various flamingo-themed things) and then hit the road. It was sad that the plans for a pizza party got cancelled.
Finally, by about Tuesday, I was feeling enough better that the Shealys came over (with the cookie cake). We had cookie cake (yum - Rachel is probably still mad that she didn't get any of it), and Noah helped me blow out my candles and open my presents. I got a couple of vampire books that I wanted, and from Cy & his parents I got two crape myrtle trees for the backyard (pictures of trees to come in next post). Cy also gave me Wall-E on blu-ray.

Although my birthday certainly did not go as planned, I still enjoyed it, and I am now clearly getting old - at 26, I am closer to 30 than 25 now!

Cruisin' With Cocky: A Cock-eyed View of the Carnival Triumph

Hi there, this is Cocky, everyone's favorite traveling chicken. I recently accompanied the Browns and Shealys on the Carnival Triumph to the Bahamas. They were rude and wouldn't let me embark with them actually in the Bahamas since they smuggled me onboard, so all I got was a glimpse of those Caribbean blue seas! Here are some pictures of the fun things I did get to do while confined to the boat.

I made friends with several other animals during our trip. Oddly, they were all albino and they kept disappearing every time Cy or Carissa took a shower. I think it was some sort of conspiracy. I should probably notify PETA.


I enjoyed lounging on the chair on our deck as we said goodbye to the Ravenel Bridge and Charleston Harbor.
'S in da bag. Here I am riding in style in Carissa's new bag from the straw market in Port Lucaya.


Catching some Zzzz's in Rachel's bunk.


This mermaid needed to cover up her breastuses!


The rain made me so sad and forlorn. Perhaps the rain was why they would not let me embark. Maybe they were afraid I would start molting. . . er, melting.


Ah, twenty-four hour ice cream cones. Clearly the best part of the vacation.


Below, you can see me shakin' my tailfeathers on the tail of the boat.

Here I am on the jogging track. There wasn't much to the jogging track, yet people kept lapping me - what's up with that?


Trying my luck at the casino. Cha-ching!


Here I am posing for my formal portrait. I even put my foots out. Pendragon would be proud.


Singing a cock-a-doodle-duet with Dad during karaoke hour. He obviously needed my help on backup.


I put the "fun" in the Carnival funship!!!