that time of year

It's that time of year,
When Christmas spirit pours from
Everywhere. And how!

It's been pretty amusing to watch the transformation in stores. Some started Christmas in October, and it seems like prices are getting slashed in anticipation of the holiday season even more rapidly this year, probably due to the fact that consumer spending is expected to drop dramatically. I just read an article in the New York Times about Saks Fifth Avenue and how they're cutting some of their prices up to 80% already. Amazing.

I haven't actually done any Christmas shopping yet, myself, but it's looking like a pretty easy season. The internet now offers more gifts than ever, and I have some extra time to spend making creative gifts (i.e. spending less money). :)

I was pretty excited today; I busted out my Jack Skellington earmuffs for the first time this season and got lots of compliments on them. :D Winter is a fun season to dress for, haha. I'm also excited because I was talking to one of the guys from Dresden who was on the CC team, and he has promised to send me a Christmas care package with more chocolate. What he wants in exchange is... barbecue sauce?

Classes are winding down, which is nice. One of my profs has canceled all his lectures for next week, and I had two classes with him, so that frees up my schedule a lot. I also won't be (I don't think) teaching the lab that I generally teach, since there won't be any new work to do. The only nagging thing for me now is calculus. It seems like that work never ends. I can't say that I'm terribly excited about Calc IV next semester, but we'll see how it goes. Hopefully we'll be learning a lot more; I feel like this term I didn't pick up a lot of new material from 311. Meh.

Oh, did you hear that "meh" was added to the dictionary? It's a very recent thing. I was pretty excited. :3

Anyway, that's about all for the moment. I have calculus to do!

anticipating

Action! Adventure!

And no time to do it all!

Frickin triage time.

I can't believe how quickly next weekend is coming up! I spent way too much money on groceries this weekend preparing for it, and some cleaning, lots of homework... but there isn't time to get ready! There's a crapload of things to do now.

This past weekend: the Lotus Festival! It was pretty frickin sweet. Musical groups from all over the world came to perform. My favorite performances? Funkadesi (some kind of crazy punjab rock/rave band), Little Cow (rock band from Hungary), and the March Fourth Marching Band (from Portland, OR, a group of men on stilts and women dressed like slutty marching band performers doing silly dances to awesome jazz music). I also saw a group from Mongolia that did throat singing, which is teh awesome. Let's see... oh, there was a group that performed Celtic music that was pretty neat, and some Spanish a capella music that I liked. I didn't have a chance to see everything (the festival was sort of set up to make that impossible), but I'm really glad I dropped the $30 to check it out this year.

Also over the weekend was ridiculous amounts of working on the programming project due yesterday. Instead of building a game, we were instructed to build a game builder, which was... er... complicated. During our presentation, my team didn't choke as badly as I expected, haha.

Oh, man! The VP debates! I haven't had a chance to comment on them yet. I was fairly impressed with Palin. Not impressed in such a way that I'd want her to be the VP of my country, but from what I'd seen of her previously she was totally incapable of forming coherent sentences. She did a pretty fair job of that in the debate. Her issue was, instead, that she only had a few answers, and there were more than a few questions. So she continually fell back on things that she new that were laughably unrelated to the queries at hand. There were a few things that I learned about Biden, too. I have to admit that I was woefully undereducated on their positions at the start of the debate. But I didn't realize that he was opposed to gay marriage. I'm actually not sure that he is, even though he said that; his phrasing seemed to imply that he actually understands that there should be a separation of church and state. Wow! It's like our founding fathers designed it that way!

I spent a nonnnegligible amount of time working to get ready for my visitors next weekend, too. Shopping! Woot! And I found a place to get free-range turkey for the thanksgiving dinner I'm setting up. I'm so excited! And I just got wind of an interesting opportunity for Saturday night shenanigans when they arrive. Wouldn't want them to think that BTown is boring. ;) I've actually managed to convince myself of that this semester; it's kinda nice.

Oh, and what up with this bizarre heat wave? 80 degrees is way too hot for October.