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.