Tidbits of Life & Stuff

• Our washer is broken. It was not doing well for a month or so (making a horrible noise when spinning), but it stopped spinning last Thursday. It's a plain Kenmore front-loader that will/would be 8 years old in February . The Sears repair person is coming on Thursday. I just hope we don't need to get a new one :-( . We're already buried in debt, but a washer is an inescapable need!

Parents in-law and brother-in-law's family are coming for Christmas. We'll be together for only 2-3 days, and that makes it more stressful, I think, than a more leisurely week spent together, but they can't come earlier. Maybe one of K's cousins from Brazil will be with us too (he's coming to NYC around this time). We want to travel to Florida after that, starting possibly on Christmas day, but we're still not certain we're going. I hope we do go.

• Obviously, as one of the greatest procrastinators ever, I still have to go Christmas shopping. Not fun :-(. We're doing a "secret friend" gift exchange in the family, so that will make things easier this year.

My husband heard something on NPR about a Chinese film maker and we're very intrigued about him and his films now. I've already placed the films mentioned in the essay in our Netflix queue. One the things I liked the best in the essay was the writing, which was really good (like in most of NPR's essays and reporting). The connections that John Powers (the author) made between the film's relevance given today's grim economic reality in the last three paragraphs is great.

• It feels to good to read well written things because I'm being subjected to reading absurdly bad writing in the online gig. I guess that's one of the countless problems with online education -- many students are so ill-prepared that they cannot, by their circumstances, take much from the class. It's so sad! And it takes me just so long to grade these bad assignments. This is one of the reasons why I've felt really overwhelmed by this class and the grading deadlines. This and the feeling that I can never ever relax. Good thing there's a two week winter break.

I have two sets of Christmas tree decorations: in typical colors (red, white and green) and pastel pink and green (I'll post pictures of them in another entry). I think I'm going to go with traditional this year because the theme of several decorations (including the chosen dollar store tableware) is snowmen.

• The boys urged me to hang lights outside tonight and, taking advantage of the mild weather, I did it with their help. I don't like all the waste of electricity energy, so I don't use timers and only turn them on when we're home, but I still wish I could replace them all with LED lights. Some other year when we have more $...

OK, more later...