Happy Christmas to All!

Merry Christmas, everyone! I have been awake since 6:30am and as we are not allowed to wake anyone up to open stockings until 8am, I've been wasting time on the internet, catching up on emails and making plans for the coming week.
I've never been one to sleep in when there's exciting stuff going on- if I wake up at 4am on a travel day, I am up and that's it. So I will probably have a nap this evening after crashing for a sugar high, and the lack of energy from chasing my cousins around my grandparents house (I cannot wait!) With this level of excitment, you would think I was the four-year-old today.

And yes, I'll buy into the Christmas spirit and say I think we DO try harder to be better people at Christmas. After a week of frostiness between Maggie and I, we were actually talking and working together
at both the communal stocking stuff (new Secret Santa tradition at our house) and the Globe and Mail's Holiday crossword last night. She knew how to spell 'Sojourner'. I found out she breaks the words down into smaller ones to count the letters, as I do.

Clue: one's own clan (8 letters). What can I say, but that I cried at It's a Wonderful Life again this year. It's tradition.

Whine

1.5 pages. 454 words. 34 lines.

No matter how I look at it, it is not the 15 pages I am supposed to have ready for Wednesday. My stomach knots itself further into a little ball as I think how impossible those 4,100 more words are going to be. And I am not really sure I know exactly what I am supposed to be writing about in this chapter...

It has been a long semester. I should be on holidays now.

How about a Miracle on my street?

Ribbons and bows

The advantage to having a room full of clutter is that no one is going to be able to find their Christmas present. That is, if they even attempt to search. In it's current state, I'm even afraid of what's in there sometimes...

Most of my day was spent consuming junk. Be it cookies, hot chocolate, chocolate chips, the Quality Streets that appeared out of nowhere today (and will disappear just as quickly) or the Antiques Roadshow, SVU and Degrassi episodes I watched this afternoon and evening, I have not had a healthy day.

Blame it on being home with work to do. These are the days when I wonder how stay-at-home parents do it. I've been home for ONE FULL DAY and I'm already antsy. And I still have stuff to do.

Oh, well, I did send off my first graduate studies application today. Mom asked if I felt relieved, but I'm too busy looking at the pile of un-marked exams, half finished assignments and thinking of ways to avoid them to actually enjoy my day. Good thing she made sugar-cookies yesterday. Another gold star? Don't mind if I do...

TGIF

Is it that things seem to exist in extremes, or is it the fact that, like a pendulum, we've swung so far in one direction that any shift back in the other is always going to seem like a major change?

Friday was the end of a very long week, and a rather long night, consisting of three hours sleep and about twice as many bouts of tears. I'm calling it my 'distraught phase' - in the vein of Picasso's cubist phase, but not nearly as creative- and I can see it lasting for another few weeks, if not into next year...but somehow I scrambled things together and raced out to UPEI at 11:30 to make my noon deadline.

Now, have you ever been part of a crisis as it's happening? It's not the same as opening the morning paper to read the headline Fire on Campus and have the whole story right in front of you. When you're there, it's a matter of piecing things together as you go- at first, I thought the fire alarms in Main were another drill. Upon seeing the utility shed, I had trouble picturing what had been there so I thought it was a controlled fire that was on the beach volleyball courts. (Why the need for another drill three weeks after we had campus wide ones wasn't questioned, or how I seemed to think that firefighters would be setting things alight on a snowy Friday morning during exams just shows how naive and unobservant I really am.) Luckily, it's a small campus, and after talking to a few professors and taking a walk from the Student Centre, to the cafeteria, around by the library and up to the Classroom Centre, I ran into Ann, who was first on my list. She took my paper, and, not being allowed into Main to get her other papers, promised to read mine while she waited for her afternoon meeting. I took that as my cue to leave and try not to panic further....

Back I went to the cafeteria, in the falling snow and arrived completely soaked to sit down at a corner table with a few other professors. By now, I had met another student on campus who had been writing his morning exam in Main and I realized this was NOT a planned fire. It was an accident, and one that had filled Main and other surrounding buildings with foul-smelling, black smoke. Most students had been evacuated to Wanda Wyatt to finish writing their exams. Since the next thing on my to do list was to pick up the Anthro 101 exams for marking, I realized my brief hope that their 9am exam might have been interrupted and need to be rescheduled probably had not happened, I prepared myself for lugging those home with me. But first, I spent two hours having a very comforting chat with two of my favourite teachers; catching up on their family news, talking about hockey, discussing research plans and enjoying a free lunch thanks to some exchange students in the department who were leaving on the weekend. Pizza and french fries over French philosophers have never been so tasty!

I left campus mid-afternoon and had one more errand downtown before going home to begin marking. Thursday afternoon, just before heading out to work and trying not to freak out about the yet-to-be completed paper, I had a phone call from AIDS PEI about their 12 Days of Christmas fundraiser. After having purchased a last-minute ticket from the Women's Centre, I was the winner for Day 2 of the draw! Again, my assumptions got ahead of me, as I guessed the prizes would increase each day and I would be on the low end. Wrong again! My lowly Day 2 prize was the equivalent of $1400 in gift certificates and a few prizes (including a fire extinguisher from Cooke Insurance. Timing is everything, indeed.) After being almost speechless reading over the list I had received, I dragged it all out to my car and then ran from Prince St to Queen St, in my jeans and dress coat, through the snow and the slush, jubilant indeed.

So as I sit here, mulling over something due tomorrow, my last minute panic and my tears from Friday seem so unnecessary. I know I put too much pressure on particular moments, and invest too much importance in things that may snatch the control right out my hands in the end. Sometimes I just have to deal with it; pick up the pieces, work around it, change my mind or compromise. Other times, and probably more rarely, those little surprises may make the rest of my Christmas shopping disappear, or just provide a little smile so I can forget for a moment what thing I have to worry about next.

Ian took this picture for fun about about a year ago, but it sums up my feelings quite nicely. Pulling out my hair and banging my head on the computer table have both been attempted this evening.
Running away to join the circus is a definite option right now.

Pashing

"A great mind even in the most unfortunate of circumstances, knows how to bring everything it encounters into relation with its passion"
~Hegel

"Passion persuades" ~Anita Roddick

I'm going to need a boat-load of passion to get through the next 14 days; finishing five assignments, writing two 20-page papers, marking 50 intro exams, and preparing one graduate school application. Let me know when you lot are all finished of exams and ready to pitch in, okay? I'll make you cookies (but only when I'm done...which now looks like it might be sometime in the New Year..)

*Sigh* Then again, reserve your pity, because what do I do on one of the craziest days of my semester, after about the shortest night of sleep? Agree to workshop another course! (How was I supposed to say no to my pregnant supervisor? I mean, I'm busy, but she's got bigger issues to deal with...) So, yes, next semester I'll get to lead both the second half of Sociology AND Psychology 102. I will be ending my undergraduate career not only with 8:30 classes, but by keeping students in class on Friday afternoons. Does it really get any better?

Ask me in another week.

Somewhere out there

I can hear my mother sitting the dining room, laughing as she reads from a bundle of letters she received 26 years ago. There are notes from her father, cousin, sisters and friends, her grandmother- even her boyfriend, but she has those hidden somewhere safe- who all wrote to her when she spent a year in France. Monday is the deadline for sending anything to Australia and the Pacific through Canada Post so I sat down to my first Christmas cards this evening. December 2 makes it 10 months since I was weighing my bags for British Airlines, and just over just five months after I returned from Oz. Five months after my five months away, and I would be happy getting on a plane again- not sure quite if its the thought of impending exams or snowstorms, or both combined- but the idea of December on the beach is rather tempting right now...

To the whole crew 'down under' and those down south (of the border)- I miss you!