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Quarantine is over!
1. The kraken has been released! The girls are really happy to get back to school today. I got tested again just to be sure because I'm having an autoimmune flareup that's making me feel really tired, and it was negative.
I know it was hard on Josh, but I think this is a testament to how well he isolated from us.
I'm ready for things to get back to our normal around here.
2. Emma got accepted to Georgia Southern University! I fully anticipate that she will be accepted to all the schools where she applied, but this is an excellent start. So proud of her.
3. I got a beautiful card from![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
goss decorated with lines of Maya Angelou's poetry. <3
4. McFarland finally listed the book with my chapter on Ouida and technology: The Rail, the Body, and the Pen.
5. My JetPens order arrived! I haven't played around with the inks yet (seven bottles of ink! hurrah!) because I want to write my pens dry before I change the ink, but I messed around a little with the Tomoe River paper notebook I bought, and OMG, all the hype is true. I tested all my currently inked pens plus other pens like fineliners and gel pens. The only thing that bled through was the Penmark marker. The truly exciting thing is that I have seen my first sheen!!!! The Pilot Parallel takes proprietary cartridges, and it's got a purple in it right now. I had no idea that ink is sheening, but it has a lovely green sheen. I literally squealed when I saw it. Can't wait to dig into the inks.
6. Talking Meme
likeadeuce asks: What got you interested in studying literature?
I only ever remember wanting to be two things, an astronaut and a college English professor (well, okay; that's a slight lie; while in undergrad, I briefly toyed with getting a master's in library science, and I briefly toyed with changing my major to geology after I adored a geology class, but I fortunately came to my senses). The desire to be an astronaut was first.
My family is so nerdy. I was raised on Star Trek and Star Wars. We watched every sci-fi movie in the theaters (which was huge because my parents were super cheap at that point LOL). Our house was full of sci-fi books. Astronauts were heroes, and we watched every shuttle launch on TV. My parents woke us up in the middle of the night to sit out on the lawn and watch eclipses and meteor showers. When I was a kid, we had virtually no neighbors, and there was almost zero light pollution. We went to Florida when I was a teen to watch the shuttle launch and toured NASA. Enormous space nerds.
But I was in glasses by seven, realizing that I did not like math by about the same age, and also realizing that I possess negative levels of risk-seeking. Like, I actively avoid adrenaline. LOL Going to space is scary. So I abandoned that desire.
My mom was a professor of nursing at an R1 research institution; when she retired from there after 30 something years, she taught nursing and worked as an administrator in a private institution. My dad was a junior high industrial arts teacher before they phased that out and replaced all his shop classes with computer literacy classes upon which he shortly after retired. So lots of teaching talk, lots of visits to my mom's office, lots of going to plays and performances and camps at the university.
I decided at about 7 that I wanted to be a college English professor. Reading and writing were (and are) my main hobbies; I excelled in those areas at school as well. I decided really early what I wanted to do with my life, and I have been working steadily toward that goal since then. I think having such a single minded focus is a bit unusual, and it's also meant that I couldn't be as helpful to Josh as I would have liked when he was uncertain about his educational and career goals, and I can't be as helpful to Emma as I would like now that she is struggling with picking a career path.
I know it was hard on Josh, but I think this is a testament to how well he isolated from us.
I'm ready for things to get back to our normal around here.
2. Emma got accepted to Georgia Southern University! I fully anticipate that she will be accepted to all the schools where she applied, but this is an excellent start. So proud of her.
3. I got a beautiful card from
goss decorated with lines of Maya Angelou's poetry. <34. McFarland finally listed the book with my chapter on Ouida and technology: The Rail, the Body, and the Pen.
5. My JetPens order arrived! I haven't played around with the inks yet (seven bottles of ink! hurrah!) because I want to write my pens dry before I change the ink, but I messed around a little with the Tomoe River paper notebook I bought, and OMG, all the hype is true. I tested all my currently inked pens plus other pens like fineliners and gel pens. The only thing that bled through was the Penmark marker. The truly exciting thing is that I have seen my first sheen!!!! The Pilot Parallel takes proprietary cartridges, and it's got a purple in it right now. I had no idea that ink is sheening, but it has a lovely green sheen. I literally squealed when I saw it. Can't wait to dig into the inks.
6. Talking Meme
likeadeuce asks: What got you interested in studying literature?I only ever remember wanting to be two things, an astronaut and a college English professor (well, okay; that's a slight lie; while in undergrad, I briefly toyed with getting a master's in library science, and I briefly toyed with changing my major to geology after I adored a geology class, but I fortunately came to my senses). The desire to be an astronaut was first.
My family is so nerdy. I was raised on Star Trek and Star Wars. We watched every sci-fi movie in the theaters (which was huge because my parents were super cheap at that point LOL). Our house was full of sci-fi books. Astronauts were heroes, and we watched every shuttle launch on TV. My parents woke us up in the middle of the night to sit out on the lawn and watch eclipses and meteor showers. When I was a kid, we had virtually no neighbors, and there was almost zero light pollution. We went to Florida when I was a teen to watch the shuttle launch and toured NASA. Enormous space nerds.
But I was in glasses by seven, realizing that I did not like math by about the same age, and also realizing that I possess negative levels of risk-seeking. Like, I actively avoid adrenaline. LOL Going to space is scary. So I abandoned that desire.
My mom was a professor of nursing at an R1 research institution; when she retired from there after 30 something years, she taught nursing and worked as an administrator in a private institution. My dad was a junior high industrial arts teacher before they phased that out and replaced all his shop classes with computer literacy classes upon which he shortly after retired. So lots of teaching talk, lots of visits to my mom's office, lots of going to plays and performances and camps at the university.
I decided at about 7 that I wanted to be a college English professor. Reading and writing were (and are) my main hobbies; I excelled in those areas at school as well. I decided really early what I wanted to do with my life, and I have been working steadily toward that goal since then. I think having such a single minded focus is a bit unusual, and it's also meant that I couldn't be as helpful to Josh as I would have liked when he was uncertain about his educational and career goals, and I can't be as helpful to Emma as I would like now that she is struggling with picking a career path.
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He's doing okay. He still feels rotten, but he was never seriously ill. I think it's going to be awhile before he feels perfectly normal again.
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Congrats to Emma; that's awesome!
Oh goodness, being an astronaut was something I wanted to do as well and also knew pretty early on that my eyesight wouldn't allow it. But I still want to go into space.
My sister was sort-of like you: she knew she wanted to be a librarian when she was in high school and she says to this day the only reason she went to undergrad was because she needed a bachelor's to get into grad school.
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I think being an astronaut is a really common childhood desire. It's just so cool and heroic.
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And I loled at your reasons for not being an astronaut.
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It's interesting because as much as Emma and I are alike, we are very different in certain ways. I was so type A, competitive, driven, ambitious at her age; and she's not. She's honestly way more mentally healthy as a consequence, LOL.
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Also great to hear that Josh didn't spread COVID to the rest of the family. I hope he's feeling a lot better.
I wanted to be a pirate. Yeah... :D
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I don't know which she'll pick. She's already said she hopes she doesn't get accepted to all of them because she wants the decision to be easier. LOL I can almost see drawing a name out of a hat in our future.
You would have made an excellent pirate. :)
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I loved old swashbuckler films they used to show on TV when I was a kid and read Sabatini's books so my vision of a pirate was a very sanitized one.
Still, I did try to stowaway twice.
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*dies laughing*
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*hugs*
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*boggles*
Congratulations to her!
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The time just flies and flies.
Thank you!
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I'm also really glad to hear that you've tested negative.
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I am very happy on both counts. :)
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Wow -- I definitely took a much longer way around to get to where I'm going than you did! 7? I'm not sure I had career goals at 7.
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I wanted to be lots of different things, but I also was really interested in being an astronaut (well, actually I wanted to be Captain Kirk, but I figured that was as close as I could reasonably get). We used to be a very NASA city here. Everybody visited there, everybody watched the launches. Then I watched Challenger explode, and we found out that it could and should have been prevented. And the whole city's relationship with NASA changed; there's a sadness and anger there that's never quite gone away. Now it's just a place we take tourists. And I couldn't see Starfleet there anymore, so I moved on. I do actually like math and adrenaline, though.
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I remember watching the Challenger explode in first grade. As I'm sure you remember, a shuttle launch always preempted network TV, and we always watched them at school. It was so deeply upsetting. I will never forget that moment.
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Go wild!
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"HUGS"
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*all the hugs*
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Josh is pretty much back to normal. He's a little more tired than usual, but that's it. I'm so grateful.
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(Not gonna lie; a silver lining of quarantine was postponing going into the office for a week LOL)