Some good pots.

Well, I made it through another semester of grad school. This was probably the toughest yet. I really had some difficult classes. During the last several days of the semester, trying to finish my last two assignments, I think I spent between 50 and 60 hours working in 5 days, including the 20 hours I worked out of the last 27 hours before the assignments were due. Still, I persevered, and I made it through. As long as I was making progress, it wasn't so bad. The only times I got really discouraged were when I went more than an hour or two without figuring out anything new. Sharayah was amazingly supporting, putting up with the 12+ hour days and taking care of everything else in the house so I could just focus, not to mention putting up with me during those frustrated times. Sometimes I'm not sure how I'm making it through, but other times I know it's her constant support and encouragement. I would have quit a long time ago without her.

So today we went ice skating at the rink at UD. I like skating, but I'm very bad. I can generally stay up (I only fell 2 or 3 times in the 2 hours we were there!) but I have terrible form and I know I look silly not falling. However, Sharayah holds my hand to serve as a point of balance and I do alright. I saw plenty of people who were worse than I was, which is always an encouraging thing. Oddly enough I skate better when I skate faster, although I'm not great at stopping (read: I don't know how to stop except by coasting until I slow down) so that's maybe not a good recipe for success. Either way it was fun as always. I'd never skated on a full-size rink before, since I've only skated on cruises and those are like 1/4 size (imagine a cruise ship big enough for a full hockey rink. cool.) Hopefully we'll go again sometime soon.

In an amazing feat of perfect timing, the new Zelda game came out just before the aforementioned week of absurd amounts of homework. Still, we found a little time to play it now and then, and a little more now that I've finished. If you've ever played a Zelda game in the past and enjoyed it, I'd definitely suggest you get it. We've had a lot of fun so far.

We are so on top of Christmas this year. We got our chop-your-own-tree tree the first weekend after getting back from Thanksgiving vacation, we got a real wreath on our door (by which I mean it's made of real branches and stuff) and we have totally finished Christmas shopping already. Normally we don't finish until... well normally we don't finish, and some people end up with nothing from us. Sometimes we correct it in time, and sometimes it's March and we think... hmm, by now it's just offensive to call this a Christmas gift, I guess we'll wait until next year. So the big deal here is that we actually got everyone in our immediate families a gift this year. And we were over a week early! (Though we are waiting for things to be shipped to us, after which we have to ship them, so... don't expect anything Christmas morning...)

We saw a tiny orange fluffy cat at Petsmart. If we didn't think we'd look crazy for having 3 cats in such a small space, we may have gotten him. He was an adorable ball of... orange fluff... and he would follow Sharayah's finger as she traced it around his little window. And I don't mean follow with his eyes. He chased her finger around his whole little cage. I think I would have named him Percival. Is Percival a good name for a cat? You could call it Perry. Or Percy if it was girly. I was thinking today that pets are a good outlet for names that you kinda like but obviously would never want to name a child (no offense to the 0.0008% of children born last year who were named Percival, or the 0.0003% the two years before that).

the first time that you opened your eyes