Random Good Things

MGM over at Diss Dat and Diapers recently wrote a list of random bullets about the early semester. Since I have a bunch of random stuff on my mind, I thought I'd shamelessly copy.

• Today J and I interviewed potential babysitters for Little Man. Yay! He goes to daycare on the weekdays, but we haven't had a real date night in the 17 months that he's been on the outside. We talked to three very nice undergrads, and although it was ridiculously difficult to decide between them, I think we have a winner. This means that in the next week or two we might actually get a grown-ups night out.
  
• Which is good. Because I've wanted to go to the local Beer and Chili Festival for the last two years, but first I was pregnant and then I had a baby. Maybe this year....
• Finally finished the wreath I was planning on making. The pictures don't really do it justice:
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• I love fall. Love it. Love it. LOVE IT. I love the crispness of the evenings and the way the leaves are starting to crunch. I love going to the local orchard and getting an apple cider donut on the weekends. I love that Little Man is going to get to pick out his own pumpkin this year and he's going to get to help carve it. I love that it's starting to be pumpkin pie season, and I just so happen to have an extra homemade pie crust in my freezer right now. I absolutely love fall.
• I hate our local electric company. Sure, they sent us a nice rebate check for upping our power rates, but our electric has gone out THREE times in the last month. BOOM- some transformer or something keeps blowing out in the back of our house. Two of the times, Little Man has been in the bathtub when everything went black. Once, it was still literally 90 degrees at 9:00pm. I have things to do at night. I can't sit around mooning over the day by candlelight.
• I was not looking forward to teaching Rhet this semester, but my class is actually fairly amusing. I have them all Blogging right now as one of their writing assignments, and it's going pretty well. It's amazing how well students can express themselves when they don't think there is someone to impress. Plus, I'm enjoying seeing more of who they are.
• I finally changed my myspace profile a bit. Originally, under occupation I said "perennial grad student." As part of my new effort to transform myself into someone that someone else might hire, I thought that I needed to update that a bit. At the very least, I think I've finally gotten to the point where that doesn't define me anymore. I've been working too hard lately, and enjoying the work too much, to not recognize that I'm something more than just a student now. It now reads "Scholar, Mother, Lit/ Writing Instructor." It may still change, I dunno. But I feel like that's how I want to be described right now--at least professionally. Ok, maybe not the mother part, but damn, that's definitely a full time job even when your kid goes to daycare. I just don't feel like I want to be or that I am a student anymore. The whole dissertation thing is plugging right along, and for the last month the work has been more enjoyable than painful. I think I've finally gotten to the place where I can see myself as a professional.

Ok- enough for now. I'm off to find some apple cider.