So who knew that there is a new time standard?  Aparently we are using UTC standards now which threw me off when I was setting up the settings on my blog.  How long have I been blogging?  Yeah, I didn’t even notice until yesterday when Shirlee commented on having the post up a day ahead of time.  FYI – Chicago is UTC-5 and not UTC+6.  Who knew?

There is a briskness to the air as it takes on a cooler climate.
The changes are subtle yet obvious once you are aware.
Greens turn into yellows, oranges and reds giving the trees a veritable cacophony of color.

This is the time for football.
This is the time for campfires and smores.
This is the time to bask in the beauty of the changing season.

Don’t wait too long to observe: it will be gone in a heartbeat.

Accomplished: homework for Crown Financial class.  Whew!  Only 9 more weeks to go!

Accomplished: finished a book for one of my classes.  Whew!  Considering the mid-term is tomorrow, this was rather too close for comfort.  Hopefully I’ll do better for the next exam and finish the reading well ahead of time.

Progress: completed aobut 24 rows on SSMO – 24 rows equates to a little more than 2 inches – which is a TON by my standards.  Whew!  It is not about 1/2 way done – considering that it is supposed to be about 70 inches, I only have 33 more to go!

Accomplished: purchased book for a friend’s birthday – gave it to her and then took it back.  She has a propensity to read too quickly and I decided that this book should be her vacation book, and since our vacation does not start until Thursday, she wouldn’t get it until then.  :- )  But I did purchase it for her.  Happy Birthday Lee Ann!  Whew!

Finished: all reports and things that I needed to turn in to the Financial Aid office at Trinity.  Whew!

Progress: working through the reading for my other class.  Ugh.

Reward: purchased season 4 of The Closer and watched the first episode.  Yippee!

It has begun.  Amy (my roommate) and I are officially ridding the apartment of the little buggers that have decided to make our home their home.  I am of the strong (very strong) opinion that bugs in general are not allowed welcomed in my house.  After all, they have the entirety of the out-of-doors to live in and play in, why do they have to invade my space, what little of it I have?  I usually give them fair notice and when that does not work – well, let’s say that they have no time to plan their funeral.  So it was, last Tuesday, that I let it be known to the dozen or so fruit flies in my house that they were going to be condemned over the weekend and if they would rather not DIE then they had best to leave.  Forewarned.

Fortunate for me most of them seemed to leave.  Amy and I spent some time yesterday totally cleaning the kitchen and the bathroom (the 2 places of highest concentration, although I’m not sure why the “fruit” flies would think that there was fruit in the bathroom….) – totally cleaning, I’m talking scrubbing the floor on hands and knees…etc….  We even set up a nice little trap for them and put draino down the drains to kill any breeding grounds down there.

Hopefully we have heard the last of ‘em.  The pesky little buggers!

Here’s something that you probably didn’t know about me.  I’m a scaredy-cat.  I admit it.  There are many things in this world that given enough time to think about them make me want to run and hide.  Nuclear war is one.  And as unlikely as nuclear war may seem to you let me remind you of September 11, 2001.  No one thought that would happen either.

I’m also scared of riots.  I can remember sitting in the living room of my Grandmother’s house watching the East LA riots after the Rodney King trail.  I distinctly recall my blood running cold and wanting to cry.  I understand anger, especially when it is aimed at injustice, but what I don’t get is mass destruction of whole neighborhoods because of it.   Martin Luther King Jr. made much bigger statements about injustice by being silent.

So the thing that scares me today is the possibility of the nation falling into a Depression (notice the big D – this would not be a little-d depression).  Part of it is selfish – I certainly don’t want to lose my job or be poor and have to go through the struggles that my grandparents did.  What scares me is the lack of hope for the future that it might bring.  You see, I have plans, and those plans don’t include a Depression.   Please pray for our government and legislatures that have to make big and profound decisions these next few days as they try to keep us from going down the path of 1929.

The reports are done.  Finished.  Fini (French).  Beendet (German?).  I could go on, but you get the picture.  Now I just have to study for my mid-term next week.  One thing after another….the never ending work/school/life load.  To celebrate the completion of the reports I purchased 2 new books yesterday. (There are some who would argue that I don’t ‘need’ more books and that I have not read all the books that I currently own, but we will put those people aside for the moment and pretend that they aren’t here, or reading my blog.)

The one the I’m most keenly interested in is called Moral Theology: True Happiness and the Virtuesby William C. Mattison III.  It is a book written from a series of lectures and classes taught as 4 different colleges over a period of 6 years.  It sounds like it will be a good post-modern discussion of morals and virtues.  Can’t wait to dig in.

On other, more knitterly, news, I finally arrived at the end of the first hank of yarn on the SSMO.  I am truly surprised at how far I got with that one hank (420 yards).  I’m still a few inches away from being about half way done. 

The balance scales are returning to level.  ’bout time.

Okay, it’s been a week since my last confession post.  The only exciting things that have happened are, well, not that exciting.  I’ve been knitting away on the SSMO and am about 5 inches from being 1/2 way done.  I am about 2 rows from the end of the first ball of yarn.  I can’t believe how far 420 yards of fingering weight yarn will go.  It’s almost a miracle!  But I have realized one thing: as far as 420 yards goes, 2 balls will not be enough.  I’m going to have to break into the third hank.  Perhaps there will be enough there to produce a pair of socks?   Hm?  I’m trying to picture my mom in the SSMO with a matching pair of socks……nope, I’ll have to wear the socks – they’ll look better on me, I think.

I had my first quiz yesterday in Carson’s class.  Can I just say UG?  I knew it would be tough, but honestly?  How much harder could it have been?  Well, now I’ll know for next time how and what to study.

In reading news, I finished the Friday Night Knitting Club.  So, the ending was not exactly “happy”, and it ended a little “quick” (don’t you hate it when the story has been moving along at a nice slow, steady pace and then BOOM, there’s the ending?  I hate that…), but given where she took the story I thought she ended it well.  One word of caution if you decide to read this: it is not a happy chick book.  That’s all I’m going to say, but it was worth the read.

Oh, one last thing.  I’m turning in the final report that I’m doing contract for Trinity and then I’m DONE!  Yeah!  No more reports!

I LOVE a good story.  I’ve been entranced with good stories all my life.  As a pre-teen/teen, I could easily spend all day in our living room (which was rarely used except by me), lying on the very comfortable love seat reading.  In those days I read only mysteries – Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys and the like.  As I’ve grown older and more, *ahem*, mature, I have learned to appreciate good writing no matter what it may be.  One of my all-time favorite books is Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden) simply because of the world it took me to.  In more recent years I have loved books like: The Kite Runner, The Time Traveller’s Wife, and more recently still, The Inheritance of Loss. 

The point is, I’m constantly reading.  I’m reading The Friday Night Knitting Club right now, and if you have not read it yet and plan to, OR are in the process of reading it and are not half-way through, then you probably want to ***STOP READING MY BLOG NOW***  ’cause I accept no liability for what I am about to write.

I love the characters of this novel.  Georgia the self-sufficient one, Anita, her mother-like mentor and Dakota, the daughter who seems to be very ambitious.  All the women in the club are interesting and each are facing interesting life challenges.  The book is set in New York and I’ve enjoyed reading about that city as well.  But here’s my question.  Why does the story have to go where it’s going?  It would have been a great little book had Georgia not been diagnosed with cancer.  I haven’t gotten to the end yet, so for those that have read this please don’t speak of it until I get there (fingers in ears chanting “na na na na na na na” to prove point), but I think I can see where this is going.  Not good.  While I love a good book-cry, I’m really not in the mood these days to cry, so I suppose that I’m going to have to put this away until I come upon a day where a good book-cry is necessary.  Sorry Kate, your book may be a while yet.

Time.  That’s what I wish I had more of.  Unfortunately, as we all know, we can’t add to the number of minutes that there are in a day, so there is nothing that I can add.  I was slightly dazed yesterday (Monday?) when I blogged about being unbalanced – and so soon after feeling (and blogging) about being balanced.  Most of you know that I used to work for Trinity, doing various odd jobs for both Admissions offices, the Records office and Financial Aid.  One of my jobs was to write reports for the Financial Aid office – of which there are many.  Some of them Federally mandated, some of them State mandated and some of them simply obligatory as an institution of Higher Ed.  I left Trinity nearly 2 years ago and the Financial Aid office has yet to figure out how to run the reports themselves.  To be completely fair, the reports can be quite complex, and I had developed a system of queries and such to be able to pull the data that I needed.  Knowing how to write SQL queries is not common knowledge and most people’s eyes glaze over when I simply mention the word “database…”, so I completely understand that no one would be capable of just stepping in an writing these reports.

So, me being of the helpful nature and not wanting to leave people hanging, have gone back to work on the reports – on a contractual basis.  It is a relationship that has mutual benefits and I’m not knocking the relationship at all.  But this semester, only 2 weeks into the semester, is starting to look, well, shall I say, busy?  The good news is that one of the reports will be “handed off” today and the second one should be done by next weekend.  The second one is the one of greater importance, that being if it does not get filed by October 1 (September 30 to be safe), then Trinity could lose their Title IV funding – something that could – literally – criple the institution.  No Pell grant, no work study, and more importantly, no loans.  It is a report of great importance and great pressure to pull data accurately and timely.  No pressure or anything….I can do this.

I keep telling myself to invest the time now and just get it done, then I won’t have to worry about it at all.  Then a little voice in the back of my head says, no, moron, there will always be something else to do.  Finishing the reports won’t be the end of it.  Arg.  I hate the deamons in my head.

I have a quiz in Carson’s class on September 29 and a mid-term in Vanhoozer’s class on the 30th.  La – ti – da…..I have no small amount of work to accomplish….la – ti- da.  Don’t you feel like singing?

Okay, focus.  I’ve mentioned the Trinity work….the quiz and the mid-term…oh yes.  Knitting.  Going well.  I knit 4 whole rows on the SSMO yesterday and I might even get to work on it some tonight.  It is getting to be just shy of half way done.  Yipee!

Oh, I need to talk about my BIG purchase on Saturday.  Kate and I went to the Wisconsin Sheep and Wool Festival.  I did NOT purchase any yarn, thank you very much.  But I did purchase a swift.  Tutorial.  Yarn is sold in two ways.  You can purchase a skein, which comes pre-wound and can be knitted/croched with immediately.  No additional winding into a ball is necessary.  Or you can purchase yarn in a hank, in which case you must wind it into a ball.  This is more of what you remember when someone holds the yarn on their arms and a second person actually winds it into a ball.  The first person is necessary otherwise the yarn would become tangled – and let’s face it – who would want to untangle 500 yards of yarn?  Enter the swift.  It is a contraption upon which you stretch out the yarn and the thing rotates as you are winding.  It totally keeps the yarn from tangling up.  Case in point.  The first hank of yarn for the SSMO took me the better part of an hour and a half (while watching a movie) to wind into a ball.  I had to splay the yarn out on the floor and then pay very close attention to keep it from gathering and subsequently knotting.  1.5 hours.  I just did hank number 2 for the SSMO and I did it in 8 minutes flat.  8.  90 minutes vs. 8.  Which would you choose?  Yeah, me too.  Well worth the money.  Guar-un-teed. 

Edited to add:
I found this profile of Dr. Carson online.  I am truly humbled and honored to be able to sit in this man’s class, even if it is a basic, fundamental, beginner’s level theology class.  The man is truly amazing and surprisingly enough, humorous.  Clicking this link will open a new window.  I actually can’t wait until that first quiz – it is always good to be challenged.

There it is.  Almost as soon as I started to feel balanced and good, things started to go the wrong way.  Do you remember the sea-saw on the playground when you were a kid?  Inevitably there was always that one kid who could sit on the thing and keep you suspended in the air indefinitely.  Well, that’s how I feel right now – I’m suspended up in the air, legs flailing about, screaming at the top of my lungs…waiting for the dude to get up.  Only problem is the anticipation of the **crash** when he does.  Why does life have to be a roller coaster?  I like fun.  I even like a little adventure.  But this is ridiculous. 

I keep telling myself: It will all be over by September 30.  It’ll all be over by September 30.  (join me in chanting) It will all be over by September 30…It will….(okay, that’s good, you can stop now).

Sigh.  Just keep telling me that.  Please. (oh, and if you’re the dude holding me up, please let me down gently.  I’d appreciate that.)