Photo bonanza!

Slapping up some photos with commentary is much easier than coming up with real content, so here comes a whole pile of new photos.

Hannah desperately needed new shoes, so we hit the shoe store before going to the movies last week. She now wears the same size shoes as my mother (who admittedly has wee little fairy feet, but who is nonetheless an adult). Can you say „bling!“? (John still refuses to believe that this is a real word.)



Hannah goes through phases of digging stuff out of the backs of closets to play with, and the sports supplies have come out recently. Here, she donned a pair of rubber gloves so the black grip on the tennis racket wouldn’t continue to turn her hands black. (I don’t know what the deal is, but this photo has gotten 25 views at Flickr, without me adding any special tags.)



Here are my new glasses. You might expect them to be made of solid gold, considering how much they cost me, but no—they are plastic and metal.



Did you ever see that segment of the Muppets with the vend-o-face machine? Hannah is one of their best customers. (Oddly, she found all the parts to this get-up, minus the band-aids, in the kitchen utensil drawer.)



Here’s where Hannah stores her nose when she’s not using it. (Not something you want to see when you go into the kitchen!)



Hannah got into my make-up while I was off giving an exam last night. Sparkly! And pink!



Hannah wanted to make a cup-and-string phone, but it doesn’t work with plastic cups, so she re-purposed it to function as a pull-system of communication: 1 pull = turn out the lights, etc.

I know I’m lame

I held the last session of my class last week, so I didn’t have to teach this morning. Plus, I feel a cold coming on, and it is too cold and wet to bother going to the Mardi Gras parade, so without further ado, here is something from my notebook, written last Friday:

When I finish this course today (on break!), I’ll have spent 15 hours (minus breaks) learning what to expect from my master’s thesis and exams. The class has been useful, if redundant; everything is covered twice—once for the literature people and once for the linguistics people. But I’ve learned something every session, so it hasn’t been a complete waste of time.

Most of the other students are pretty sharp (you’d hope they would be by this point) and ask pertinent questions, but there are a few that make me wonder how they get their pants on in the morning without help. (And somebody smells like corn! I hope it isn’t me, since I am generally well groomed and haven’t eaten corn in ages...)

During one of the breaks, I braved the coffee machine. I know—I swore it off a while back, but I only had 45 cents, which is just enough to buy a cup of crappy coffee out of the machine. But check it out: I put in 45 cents and got a cup of crappy coffee and 40 cents back. Wh--? Then when I went to put my cup in the recycling machine for the 10-cent refund, I found that the last person didn’t take their 10 cents out. So basically, someone *paid me* 15 cents to drink a cup of crappy instant coffee. I won against the machine!