I hate December. (*e*)
I especially hate December when I had to spend $700 on various teeth issues in the last half of November. The $700 spent does not count the 2 full weeks that were interrupted by J having to stay home because of his teeth issues--which means 2 full weeks of less than half a paycheck. So, all the $$ I'd been scrimping together for xmas is now gone and then some. On top of that, add three birthdays in December. J's, MIL's and O's and I'm quietly freaking out. I'm worrying about giving the kids a nice xmas and O a nice bday and J is adding $70 hats to his ever growing xmas wish list. It's nice to dream and shit but he's making me fucking nuts. Every time I turn around he's letting me know he's added something else. Me? I'm thinking I don't want anything for xmas. I don't need anything. I can't seem to come up with ideas as to how we're going to afford to do much more than the kids gifts... I have a $100 rebate card coming in the mail that I hope gets here soon and I'll get almost that much for my xmas bonus this year so... I'm thinking that I'll have to make that work for the kids. O's bday will likely happen from whatever from the paycheck that I get the Friday directly before his bday. The rest? Pffftt... whatever.
I hate this time of year. Every year I hate it more.
In school related news, I've decided that taking a math class online is really difficult. Somehow, this seems like a subject where it's really important to have that in class lecture time where you get to see and work with multiple examples. I mean, I'm *doing* it and averaging an "A" so far which amazes me--but it's just really crazy hard. I did find a website this week which really helped me figure out the things I was NOT understanding from my text. Namely that Z~N(0,1) or X~N(μ, σ) is a notation related to normal distribution and then what the hell you do with equations that are related to that notation... there wasn't much in my text and very little in the lecture notes related to this chapter. So I hit that half dozen of questions on my first exam take and just guessed. So I found http://mathworld.wolfram.com and there was some stuff in there that really helped spell it out and it's likely a site that I will really USE for the remainder of this class. At any rate, I figured all that out and actually understand it now--then did my exam retake and added 9 points to my grade which raised it a full letter grade--this felt like such an enormous accomplishment. Not just that... J laughs at me for even wanting to retake the exam but I needed to understand that stuff as the next unit starts up right there with Population Parameters, Sampling Distribution and Central Limit Theorom... so--I really needed to GET it. And since I got it, it only made sense to do the retake.
I found a writing exercise that I'd saved on my computer at work. I was doing computer house cleaning on Tuesday. It was titled, "exercise." & I was pretty sure I had written it but couldn't quite remember the whole story behind it. Everything is a serious blur from the last couple of years, really. Then it came to me last night that I had had a stack of books on my desk for processing and the covers were interesting and the titles were interesting and they were all lined up and started floating around in my mind and so I'd jotted them down and bolded them and worked them into this bit of writing I did. So in a way, it's an unusual form of reader's advisory. I wrote it on my birthday this year.
(*edit* adding the text... weird how it took me almost a day to remember actually writing this)

Grow still, at the city's edge.
Whispered prayer of the dragon.
Oh fickle god of luck,
be near me.

The 6 sacred stones, weighted precisely.
Invasive procedures I continue to shun.
A golden age it spills all around me,
the killing ground is wet with their blood.

No answer to this, how to save the world
from high crimes?
Lost in the spin of my revolutions
the pure in heart are no longer here.

down into darkness, I am deep in it
the wandering ghost, mute in my fear
this earth swallows all the beautiful children
bear witness, the quiet girl

At the city's edge I grow still.
Prayer of the dragon, it whispers.
Oh fickle god of luck,
be near me.