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?