And now back to our regularly scheduled life

 Happy new year everyone! We had a lovely break - it felt nice and long, for some reason, even though it was only two and a half weeks. It took me a few days to relax and unstress but I did successfully shake off the tension of the end of my first quarter, and we enjoyed having Christmas at home.

My Aunt Dorothy visited before Christmas for a few days, and Dad joined us for Christmas festivities, and then we hosted our annual Goodfellas New Year's Eve dinner, which is basically an excuse for Brett to spend a whole days makin' a meatballs and wearing a bowling shirt and fedora. Lots of fun. Also on the plate: Kate's wonderful Christmas eve party for the kids, our friend Amy's New Year's Day open house, several movies, a couple of playdates, and lots of lazing around.

I tried to do a lot of napping (didn't actually pan out all that well) and reading (which went better.) I plowed through a bunch of novels like a starving person sitting down in front of a nice plate of food. Guess I missed my books over the last few months.

Here's what I read:

• The Marriage Plot, Jeffrey Eugenides (loved it)
• The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides (hated it)
• V is for Vengeance, Sue Grafton (very good)
• The Revenger, Rory Clements (liked it)
• A History of the World in 100 Objects, Neil MacGregor (technically I’m still reading this; it’s awesome)
• Death Comes to Pemberly, PD James (loved it)
• Indian Killer, Sherman Alexie (liked it)
• Shadow of the Giant, Orson Scott Card (loved it)
• About half of a poetry anthology from the library
• A few pages of Scarpetta by Patricia Cornwall, decided I was all mysteried out for now
• A few pages of What The Dog Saw, by Malcolm Gladwell (will get back to this)
• A big stack of magazines

I don't usually read so many mysteries to the exclusion of all else, but they were just the right level of complexity for helping me destress from school. Nothing too challenging on this list after finishing up finals.

And now back to school tomorrow, starting bright and early by waiting (in the rain, undoubtedly) for the bus at about 7a.m. tomorrow. Bleah. I do love my program and I'm sure I'll be back in the swing of it within a few days, but I'm kind of bummed about starting back up again. This promises to be an especially brutal quarter, with seven classes and a schedule that keeps me there for much longer days than we had in the fall. It's going to be very challenging keeping up with an extra science class thrown into the mix, with all of my afternoon study time mostly taken up with classes, and with Sofie in daycare three or four days a week after school.

Nonetheless, in ten or eleven short weeks we'll be through it. And then I hear spring quarter is kind of easy in comparison.