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In honour of my father-in-law, check out this new toon from Homestarrunner.com!
(be sure to wait for a minute after it says “The End”)

…to me, Happy Birthday to me, Happy Birthday dear me, Happy Birthday to me.

Well the day has begun right with me sleeping in! Then most of the day will be spent relaxing while re-reading No Great Mischief, for inspiration for my paper. Then I’ll make a short trek down to the University to return some books and maybe do some research if I’m feeling particularly psyched on that. When Bryce gets home we’ll go to Valvonna and Crolla for late lunch/early dinner/snacks. Nothing too exciting, but we’ve already had our dinner party.

Friday was good. I was awoken by the phone ringing: it was work, one girl called in sick and they wanted me to come in a few hours early. Thankfully the manager filled in (on her day off) so I was spared and just worked (i.e., ran around like crazy as it was pretty busy) five hours. Then I came home and my lovely husband had vacuumed, tidied the flat, and set the table for our birthday bash. We had the Hays and Randalls over for Greek food. Bryce made the Greek salad, and we also had stuffed vine leaves and moussaka. I’m glad it was yummy (since I had no idea how it’d taste), but sad cuz I didn’t know Kay didn’t eat lamb. After lots of food, we had Kay’s super rich chocolate and raspberry cake that we had to eat with ice cream or we’d have keeled over from hyper-richness. Jonathan and Sarah got us this great “I love 80s” 2 disk CD–it’s great! We love it and have been listening to it a lot already. It was a great gift as most of our 80s CDs somehow didn’t make it over with us.

Today was great. We slept in and ignored the dishes from Friday until later today. As it was a gorgeous, warm (that’d be around mid-50s), sunny day, we walked to Stockbridge and went to the charity shops with the Hays. We were walking around most of the day in short sleeves, isn’t that glorious? I got a cute jean jacket for 3.95 and we all had nachos at a restaurant/coffee bar in New Town before going to do our various errands. Tonight we ate leftovers and have been playing on the internet and trying to get some of our papers written. Good times, good times.

Bryce is great and spent a lot of his time tonight working on a forum for my little online book club. Go to the link here for the book club. On the forum, you’ll need to register (there’s a link at the top of the page), click on the only thread (i.e., discussion topic)–Alistair MacLeod, No Great Mischief–and then read posts, reply to posts, or begin your own thread on the book or on any other literary (or miscellaneous) topic you’d like. Happy reading and posting!

We just booked our one-week stay on the island of Santorini in Greece. We’ll be leaving from London Gatwick at way-too-early on Tuesday 18 May (right after Bryce finishes classes) and then coming back through London on the following Tuesday. I’m stoked! Sun, sand, olive oil, feta, here we come! We got a good deal (about 200 GBP per person which includes accommodation and flights for the week). So we’ll get some tickets from Ryan Air (or Easy Jet, some discount airfare basically) and we’ll have half a day in London before leaving for Greece that Tuesday. Bryce wants to get an international drivers license as his vision of Greek bliss involves his hair flying in the wind while driving a moped. I’m assuming I’d be on that back of that moped. Now, where in this sunless country do I go looking for sunscreen, beach towels and a new bikini?

But wait, I’m supposed to be writing papers…

I’ve been redesigning our site (in my spare time) and it’s mostly finished now. Let me know what you think!

Just found out that a conference abstract I sent out on a whim has been accepted! Since I hadn’t heard back about it by the projected deadline, I figured it hadn’t been accepted–which was fine as I have 2 essays to be working on now, and then another paper to polish up for a conference on the 30th of April. But lo and behold, a paper of mine which I have yet to write will be being presented by me at Trinity College, Dublin on the 25th of April for the Crosscurrents Conference. Crazy: what the heck am I doing in this stressful nutso place called academia?

Bits of Random Ramblings:
Is it a good discipline (perhaps with spiritual implications) to make yourself sit in front of a Word document of a paper you must write and watch the curser blink as you try to eek out a few hundred more words? I’m not so sure. I’d really just like to crawl back into bed. I wonder though, if it would be more profitable for me to crawl into bed or read something or another instead of writing my paper, banking on the fact that inspiration will come (and soon) and my fingers will be flying trying to keep up with my brain as the ideas keep on flowing at that moment of inspiration. The flow is not flowing now.

I’m feeling better than I did last night, but am definitely still “under the weather”. What an odd phrase. We’re always under the weather (unless in a plane, but still under most types of weather even then).

I even made myself some tea and some tuna for lunch but the energy is just a bit pathetic. I hope to be better (enough) by Friday for our PAR-TAY. I’m making Greek food for dinner (that’ll be interesting as I’ve never even attempted Greek food before) and Kay is making us some decadent chocolate cake. Yum…

I know a few of you have bought Alistair MacLeod’s novel for your next great read. Ideally, I’d love to get an online reading discussion board up on our website, but it’s a TON of work for Bryce. So that probably won’t happen. So right now, go to the link to the book group blog I’ve created on blogger. You’ll have to sign up with blogger, create a username, and then you should be able to post responses on that site. Oh and let me know if you plan to read the book as I will need to send you an email invitation from the blogger site–if I haven’t sent you one already. Happy reading!

Yep, we bought the Lonely Planet guide to the Greek Islands so now it’s just how to get to a Greek Island from Scotland cheaply…hmmm…any suggestions? We want lots of sun, quiet, and no kitschy tourist resorts. I’m sure we can find some apartment accommodation online but flights are a bit more tricky. Well in our internet wandering now at least we have a goal to be looking for.

We had a good time with the Crocketts this weekend. It was icky weather but we got to sit and have tea, chat, and watch movies (one of their DVDs, Oceans Eleven, and then we saw “Mona Lisa Smile” at the cinema). We like “Mona Lisa” but thought it could’ve been TONS better if there were some great lines. It needed a great writer behind the story. The Crocketts got us this cool antique box (it was probably an old tool box) for our birthdays and so now we have to figure out where to put it! We’ll get a picture of it up when we get all those other pics up we’ve been promising. Here’s what the kids thought of their birthday presents from us: Oliver upon opening a glass ball with bubbles in it, said–”What IS it? But, what does it do? This doesn’t DO anything…(he later decided it was a magic ball and slept with it that night); Marcet upon opening an illustrated version of RLS’s “A Child’s Garden of Verses”: “I’m gonna keep this until I’m 90, or 99″ as she gently fingered through the pages. Good company, conversation, and a little wrestling with Uncle Bryce made the trip great.

Plus we got my parents’ bday present in the mail for us: a gift certificate to a neat Italian wine bar/deli near us, Valvona and Crolla, so now we can have a proper date! Thanks guys!

Bryce is off at church for the evening service now; I’m home. I’ve gotta work on my paper for my Anglo Scots class and am feeling a bit sick (again!). Plus I’m working tomorrow at 8:30 (I know that’s not early for most, but for us on student sleeping schedule, it is), so gotta get things done now so I can sleep! Love you all. please comment. so we feel loved.