Current mood:	okay
Current music:	Paris Is A Lonely Town - Judy Garland
Entry tags:	end of the quarter, family, thanksgiving, the bug, tia

River, River, Won't You Be My Lover?
Thanksgiving went pretty well, despite all the planning hullabaloo. I got up to my uncle's and aunt's house in Pinole Wednesday night after four hours of being stuck in Berkeley/Oakland holiday traffic, and while my time there was brief, it was a lot of fun. Seeing Mom and Everett and the dogs was a very good thing, although Chico is on his last legs and I doubt I'll be seeing him again unless I make it up there during winter break. Mike and Matt made it without trouble on Thursday, and Matt managed to not get into a fight with anybody and there was a general lack of argumentation that made the evening pleasant (although at the end of things I think Mom was ready to blow a gasket over Aunt Pat guilting her about Chico's state of health and how oh my god he's suffering so much he needs to be put down--she knows better than anybody what his health's like and when he starts really having a hard time of it I think she'll do the right thing). The food was good, especially the oyster stuffing (HORF CHORF CHORF), and everybody seemed to like my pumpkin-bread muffins...especially my young second cousin Reuben, who is autistic and ran around the house making weird screeching noises while the rest of us were eating dinner. So there's that! Hooray for cheap Christmas food presents that can be made in bulk.

Not much to say about it otherwise. Tia's celebrating her 21st birthday today, so hats off to her for making it this far! We had a party Saturday night that mostly consisted of playing Taboo and "Girl Talk" Jenga, which was more amusing than it had any right to be. And now I can post the ADIML I took last Tuesday since she already has her presents!

Kischka and co have done me a favor by hiring me to work two mornings a week, and while I will have to adjust to getting up to be there at 8 a.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I get to bump my earnings up by $40 a week, which is nice for paying rent and all that sort of thing...especially since the Bug has decided to continue being contrary and expensive and needs new front breaks. Between that and the new tire (woo, best early Christmas present ever?) and the expensive go-over I had to have done before school started in order to get the title for it, it's racking things up. And it still needs new wiper blades, the windshield needs to be replaced because of the huge crack in it from the rock in Mexico, and the dipstick tube is borked and is spitting oil all over the inside of the car because there is apparently too high an oil level in there anyway. Fuh. Good to know Matt kept it up so well the whole time he was hanging onto it those years.

Anyway, my schedule oughtn't be too bad next quarter. Aside from working nine and a half hours a week, I've got Russian Modernism and the Avant-Garde, International Cyberpunk, and Reading Hieroglyphs I. I'm a bit leery about that last one, since I had Selden for Lit 1 and he was kind of a bore, but he's a very intelligent if somewhat scary man and supposedly drones less during smaller classes. Anyway, I'd rather take the challenge of Hieroglyphs than feel I'm wasting five units by taking that American Studies class on Mark Twain that is supposedly super-easy. All-Lit quarter, all the time! It will probably be tough, but I am looking forward to it nonetheless. Perhaps not quite as much as I am looking forward to the end of this one, however...this week will not end fast enough.

Ah, enough of that ballyhoo. Time to go see why der printer is not printink.