wink     ; )

Happy New Year

I've been a little under the weather, and Spark is starved for attention after being at Grandma's house where there were 7 adults who did nothing but play with him. So there is a certain amount of crankyness at the wink household. But despite this, we've been having lots of fun. Some of our friends are in town, Spark loves the toys he got fro Christmas, I got to see Enjelani while we were in CA, and our travels have been smooth.

We were wondering how to keep the spiritual aspects of Christmas alive under the crushing weight of secular Christmas. We decided to dodge the bullet instead of facing it head on. We'll be celebrating Christ's birth on New Years instead of on Christmas. New Years is a much calmer day, and seems more appropriate anyways seeing as we base our calendar on Christ's birth. We'll see how this experiment works.

Happy New Year!

Merry Christmas!

God handed over his Son to us, his enemies, so that we could kill him. All in order that we, his enemies, could have long life, peace and harmony.

That's pretty messed up, but I can't say that I'm not grateful.

Relief!

I'm finished grading, I managed to get an A- in Hebrew, and I'm in California. WooHoo!

Cibo Matto can clog dance??!!?

The music video linked to in this post is simply awesome. Totally mindbending. I've watched it 4 or 5 times now and just get a kick out of it each time.

[Note: the title of this post has nothing to do with the actual video except that it is a Cibo Matto video. But bonus points to anyone who gets the reference.]

Meetup in Oakland?

Tree, Spark and I will be in Oakland from Dec 22-27. Anyone in the Bay Area up for a meetup?

Naptime

Normally, Spark takes a rather lengthy nap starting around 1 PM. This week, not so much. (Note: when Spark doesn't get an adequate nap, he is cranky for the rest of the day.) On Tuesday, I was running some errands. It was only noon so I figured I could make one more stop before having to go home for lunch. Spark then fell asleep in the car. He remained asleep during the entire errand. When we got home, he had been asleep for about half and hour. He refused to fall asleep again after we got home.

On Thursday, I took Spark to a playdate. We started driving home at 12:20. He was asleep by 12:40. He slept in the car until 1:00. He again refused to go back to sleep.

On Friday, Spark woke up 3:45 AM and refused to go back to sleep. I needed to go grocery shopping that day. Tree and I agreed that I should go fairly early in the morning in case Spark fell asleep early again. So I went to the store at 9:30. I pulled into the parking lot at 9:40, turned around to look at Spark, and HE WAS ALREADY ASLEEP! I tried to wake him up--he just opened his eyes halfway once, saw it was me, and just went right back to sleep. I almost burst into tears right in the parking lot. Instead, I just drove home and hoped that I'd be able to get him into bed without waking him up.

This time I got lucky. Spark stayed asleep and took a nice long nap.

Today, we put Spark down for a nap at 1 PM. He's been babbling in his crib now for an hour and a half, and shows no sign of letting up.

I don't know what's gone wrong with his sleep schedule, but it is seriously messed up right now.

Shadows

Shadows. People who suffer from cluster headaches call the all-day, non-stop extremely minor cluster headaches "shadows". Regarding intensity, they are about as bad as a medium normal headache. But they don't go away, they respond poorly to oxygen (or at least they respond poorly to oxygen in my case), and they have the characteristic pain behind one eyeball.

Right as I was coming into the final two weeks of school, I got my first shadow in 6 months. Shadows often are precursors to full blown clusters. But sometimes they just remain a series of shadows with no serious clusters. That first night I was terrified. I couldn't sleep out of fear that a cluster was immanent and would destroy the remainder of my semester. It had after all been about six months since my last cluster. I was pretty much due.

Luckily, it never progressed to full blown clusters. I've had shadows pretty much every day for two weeks now, which is pretty annoying, but is absolutely nothing compared to clusters. Advil, extra sleep and occasional quiet times were able to keep them under control and amazingly, I was able (thanks to Tree) to get all of those things during Finals. And with any luck, this bout of shadows may restart my clock and I might get another 4-6 months pain free once the shadows are gone.

Thank you God.

Done

I'm finally finished with the semester! Now I just need to finish grading exams. Sigh.

My term paper was easier to write than my first post-Spark paper, even though it was required to be longer (20 pages vs 15).

Tree isn't the only one...

My brain has its own glitches.

Tree: Give so-and-so a call today. It's his birthday.

Me: It can't be his birthday. His birthday isn't until December.

Tree: This is December.

Me: What??!?

Tree: Look around. See the decorations. The Christmas tree that be put up weeks ago. The holiday music currently on the stereo. This is December. What month did you think we were in?

Me: I dunno. March or something.

Groping for words

Tree may be more of a morning person than I am, but that doesn't mean that she doesn't have occasional difficulites too. Here's a snippet of an early morning coversation:

Me: What container is it in?
Tree: The...uh...one that's long...in the...uh...upwards direction.
Me: You mean..."tall"?
Tree: Yeah! The tall one.

My first post-Spark paper

I turned in my first major paper since Spark came home. Suffice it to say that it was not my best work. I had to learn an entirely new way of writing papers. Formerly, I would spread all of my books and papers out on the floor and desk and work for concentrated periods of time over the course of three or four days. This is simply not possible with Spark around. Now I must work in spurts of a few hours (while Spark is sleeping), and I must clean up all of my materials when I finish each session if I don't want my work strewn about the house.

Basically, I had to write my 14 page paper as a series of 7 two-page papers concatenated together. Non-ideal.

My paper was due the day before Thanksgiving. On the Sunday evening before Thanksgiving, the Professor that I TA for calls me up saying that he can't make it to the Tuesday night class. Can I teach it for him? I responded that I had a paper due the next day, so, pretty much, no. He countered, "What if I call your other Professor and get an extension for your paper. Could you teach then?" I love teaching, so I said "Sure". He got me my extension, and I taught class. I finished my paper 20 hrs into my extension.