The cleaning ladies broke my grandmother's vase. This is the 3rd time they have broken something, and I tried to fire them, but I got talked into giving them one more chance.

Part of me feels guilty for being mad. It's a luxury to have someone else clean your house, and if I don't want anything to get broken, I should just do it myself and be careful. Of course accidents happen. But I made the lady show me what happened, and what happened was pure carelessness.

This vase and a conch shell were the only things I asked for from my grandmother's house after she died. They both lived in her bathroom, and at one time the nails on this vase were painted. With nail polish. Hilarious. I know it's ugly and tacky, but it was hers, and I remember her every single time I look at it. And now it's broken and I'm sad.

I might re-break it and see if I can't get more pieces to fit so there aren't two huge gaping holes in the thumb, and maybe I can get the rim to not be crooked. I'm sad that I might throw it away someday now. I really want to keep it.

I forgot to take a picture of it all in pieces, so I just have a picture of the glued-together version.

High School Dreams

I have these recurring dreams that there was some mistake with my grades from high school, and I have to back because I never fulfilled my P.E. requirement. So, I'm 30 years old wandering around my high school trying to find my locker, and I'm lost and end up being late or missing class entirely.

I had one of these dreams last night. There are different variations on it - sometimes I make it to class, and all the other girls make fun of me, or I find my locker, but I can't remember the combination. Last night I was in some torrid high school love affair, and I was trying to avoid the other people involved.

I don't know why I have these dreams, but I get them pretty frequently. I think it just goes to show how important my teenage years were to my development. They were nice years, but also traumatic, and I think that's why my psyche defaults to them. I've never tried to analyze these dreams - maybe because I have them so often, I either disregard them as silly stress dreams, or maybe I'm too scared of what my brain is trying to tell me about myself.

New Year's Resolutions

I know that New Year's Resolutions are kind of silly since most people don't even keep them through the entire month of January, but I'm in the resolution-making mood, so here goes:

I resolve:

1) to graduate with my MA

2) to start some kind of regular exercise, even if it's just playing Dance, Dance Revolution for 30 minutes 3 times a week

3) to write a family history book

Here's to optimism that I will accomplish these things, and here's to a Happy 2008!

Admissions Dumbasses

I will blog about my Christmas later. For now, I'm going to complain about the dumbasses running college admissions departments.

I returned home from what my husband affectionately calls the family "Hiroshima" (just because there are a lot of people all talking and playing and eating at the same time in utter chaos, not because our flesh melts off or anything) on Thursday night. I checked my e-mail and found I had something from a To-Remain-Nameless University saying that my application was incomplete as my undergraduate transcripts were missing. All of my anxieties are coming true!

Let me explain: last year, when I applied to Purdue, everything that could go wrong did go wrong. My GRE scores were lost in the mail, my recommenders did not send their letters on time, there was a mixup about my registration at SMU and they wouldn't send out my transcripts, and my undergraduate transcripts were misfiled when they arrived at Purdue. Now, some of this was my fault, but the majority of it was completely out of my control, which is why I am having some anxiety issues about it this year.

Anyway, with Purdue last year, I panicked, called Baylor who verified they had sent my transcripts, and ended up opening a FedEx account so I could overnight new ones to Purdue. All of that, and it turns out the admissions people had filed my transcripts under my maiden name instead of my married name, even though I wrote all over my application that I attended my undergraduate school under a different name. They even have a special line for it on the application. I guess they don't bother to actually LOOK at that line. So, that was a total waste of like $60.

So when I got the e-mail from Nameless University on Thursday night, I didn't panic. I just thought, "Those dumbasses." I called on Friday, and sure enough, "Oh, we filed it under your maiden name." You'd think they'd never had a married person apply to their university before.