Wow, I sure got snowed on this morning. But now I'm here in this cubicle to do my extra teaching hours and 3 (of 6 scheduled at this writing) students have already missed their appointments, so I'd say the workload is pretty sweet so far. I'm getting paid to write in my journal! I'm living the dream of so many bloggers.

On to the important stuff: a poll. Now that we've had a couple new episodes of Veronica Mars, who's the for now still-MIA character from previous seasons that you're most anxious to see back on the show?

Poll #843186 a poll about television
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 4

whom do you miss most so far?

So! exciting news—I agreed to take on a few extra hours of teaching this quarter. I know, it's weird to be excited about having more work, but I'll be earning a bonus $1500 for this two months' work, it's only a few hours per week, and it doesn't require any grading or other additional labor outside the actual contact hours with the students. And, wallacecat says I can use most of the money to buy myself a new laptop. I knew I'd need to be getting a new one at some point pretty soon (my faithful, well-beloved but somewhat obsolete iBook will soon be celebrating its 4th birthday and is about due for another logic board failure), but I figured I'd have to wait either until the iBook actually died or I got a "real" job. The former of course could potentially happen at any moment, the latter, with luck, not until next summer; but now I don't have to wait. Well, I've agreed to wait until at least some of the money is in our bank account, but I'd say by next month this old iBook will have been put into well-earned retirement.

And I'll need to knit a new laptop cozy to fit my new, bigger screen.

I'm so glad this quarter is going to be over soon—not that I haven't enjoyed the teaching, my students have been great, but I've been teaching two sections and the grading has really been killing me.

Anyway I have to speed off after class tomorrow to go pick my mom up at the airport. She's coming into town just for one day on her way back from a trip to Taiwan. She's never been to visit us in Chicago before so we were trying to think what we should do with her. And I was like, ooh, we should go get some dim sum in Chinatown, because I think of that as a special thing we don't do that often, but then I realized that somebody who just got back from three weeks in Taiwan maybe won't be that excited about getting Chinese food in America.

Oh well. I need a new pair of jeans, too; perhaps her buying those for me could be just as special a mother-daughter experience as, you know, chicken feet in little dish being pushed around on a wheeled cart.

I was talking to my students about two important concepts, those being the conjugation of -re verbs and the quirks of prepositions, and said this:

"'Attendre' means 'to wait for,' so if I say 'j'attends Godot,' I'm saying 'I'm waiting for Godot.'"

Poll #272534 what would your reaction be?
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 11

j'attends Godot = I'm waiting for Godot

( My students weren't very impressed by it either. )

After two whole days of it, I've decided that teaching until 5:30 really sucks. At 1:30 I'm sitting in my office thinking, This time last quarter I'd already be done and free to go home if I wanted to, but instead I have to stay here for two more hours and then go teach for two hours. And that's not even taking into account the sun setting at 4:30 as it will be within a month or so.

The other thing is that I teach consecutive classes in the same room and I hate sitting in there watching the students slowly trickle in as we all stare mutely at each other. So I was thinking of taking up smoking so I could step outside and have something to do during that ten-minute break in between the two classes. What do you think?

Poll #187162 smoking as a time-wasting activity
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 10

a good idea?

It looks like we're going to see The Two Towers in English, with French subtitles. The students decided they couldn't handle three hours of French coming at them, since most of them have taken less than a year of the language. But it should be fun anyway. They're a cute group of kids. I was sent on this mission to Paris to watch over them, since the group that came on this program last year was a rowdy bunch, but these students don't seem like troublemakers. So if they stay good all quarter I'll go back home in a blaze of triumphant glory, taking credit for keeping things running smoothly.

Now, which play would you choose to see, if you were going to the theater in Paris?

• Les Papiers d'Aspern, the first production in France of the theatrical adaptation/translation of Henry James's story The Aspern Papers, or
  
• Dogface, a new French translation of the Thomas Middleton/William Rowley play The Changeling. (No, I don't know why the title of the French translation is in English.)

Not that those are the only possible choices.