I just installed the redesign of Dancing Lessons, and also posted the conclusion to my Spike on the moon story.

Aw. I really need to hook up my digital camera so I can annoy you folks with pictures of my dog. He's doing the cutest thing right now.

Anyway, now I'm going to start redesigning RJ. But I think first I'll clean my apartment, so it'll be a few days before this place changes.

Hee. From randomwhim's description of RJ: We thought there was a secret as to why cousinjean was called cousinjean. There wasn't. Her name is Jean Cousins. Where's the mystery in that?

Hey, I tried to come up with a creative handle, but they were all taken. At least this way there are never any numbers after my name.

Clay's in town! Clay's in town! Wheee! Not that I'll see him before he disappears again, but I got to talk to him. It was pleasantly surreal, and now I'm all nostalgic and stuff. I miss Clay.

We did not go see a movie. My friend Tess mentioned a couple of old Buffy eps that she still hadn't seen, and since I've been obsessively taping the syndicated episodes, we came back to my house and had a BtVS marathon, so I could save my money to see Lord of the Rings next week. But we did do some shopping first. I ended up getting this top I've had my eye on for some time now for $10, thanks to Tess and her knack for finding coupons for everything. So, Yay! for my new shirt!

I'm still behind on answering e-mail. Some of them put pressure on me to come up with halfway clever and/or informative replies, and I haven't quite worked up to answering those yet. But I'm getting there.

Um, and to those who wrote asking me how to get Ritalin: The way I did it was I went to a doctor and got diagnosed with ADD and got a prescription and bought it legally from a pharmacy. Beyond that, I can't help you. See, "Ritalin Junkie" is supposed to refer to my addled brain and to the spastic and unstructured nature of this site. It does not refer to any sort of drug habits I may or may not have.

So, um, yeah. Anyway. I'm in redesign mode. Working on Dancing Lessons right now (and by the way, check out the new domain!), and I want to design a new splash page for Joker's Realm, and when that's done I just might tackle this site. I like this design, but I'm getting bored with it. I'm thinking about going back to a front door index page with links to all my sites, and moving the journal to an internal page, so consider this fair warning. Then again I may run out of time and/or steam and leave it well enough alone. We'll see.

By the by, Terrence, I had trouble with posts getting eaten over the weekend too, so it wasn't just you.

I woke up this morning with the theme from "Ice Castles" stuck in my head. Not the actual song, mind you, but the high school marching band version. And it's still there. Yay.

*SIGH* I wish my saxophone still worked.

I'm going out to see a movie tonight. Don't know which one yet, but possibly "Not Another Teen Movie." I haven't seen most of the movies it makes fun of, but it's got that "Breakfast Club" segment that looks like a laugh riot (I just dated myself, didn't I? Eh, not like my age isn't in my bio), and I'm all for seeing something that won't require me to think. I'm so excited. I haven't left the house for anything non-school related in almost a month. Y'know, one of these days I'm going to have to get me one of those newfangled life things that the kids these days all seem to enjoy. I hear those are nice to have.

I have taken my final final, sold back my books, got all enrolled for next semester (I waited too late to get my first choice lineup, but it worked out. The bad news: I have classes every day except Friday. The good news: my earliest class is 11:00, so I get to sleep in every day. And I've got a much better balance of psychology and sociology this time around, which is good because psychology is fun and sociology is, well, not so much), and now I'm officially on winter break. Wheee!!!

I have so much to do that I've been putting off till after finals, and now I'm a little overwhelmed with trying to figure out where to start. But my first priority is to catch up on e-mail. I'm almost done weeding out the spam -- pages and pages and pages of spam, and some viruses too -- and then I'll commence answering the important stuff. So if you've written me and haven't gotten an answer, be assured that I haven't blown you off, and you should get a reply tonight or tomorrow (this goes for you and your class too, sissy).

Here's why I don't like Canadians.*

Look at me, not working on my paper that's due in an hour. Tra la la!

*Note to my Canadian friends: JUST KIDDING!!!

Oh yeah. Also, more of War! went online today. I didn't write any of that. But I did help edit, so yay for me anyway.

Just in case you were interested, here's my paper on school shootings. I just noticed some embarrassing grammatical errors, so just keep in mind that I didn't write it alone.

Gack! I thought I'd be through with writing papers today, but I just got all of the input from my group in this afternoon's class. Also, I've been spending the last few months researching cults from the psychological perspective, and the woman who was assigned the sociological perspective got confused and researched the psychological. This I found out last night, about an hour before the library closed. So I ran to the library and pulled up some research materials on sociological research on cults. Thank God for J-stor, is all I have to say. So we managed to cobble together a somewhat respectable presentation for our turn in class today, but the paper itself isn't due until Thursday. I'll be working on it right up until then. Once that's done I just have finals. Then I get a whole month off! Whee!

All of my work would probably be coming along a lot faster if I could just manage to keep myself out of the Spike forums. *SIGH* My Spike & Buffy obsession has reached levels that even I find disturbing. The, um, releasing of tension between them -- yeah, that's a nice way to put it -- only made it worse. I guess it's a good thing we've got a month full of reruns. Maybe I can actually get some stuff done once the semester's over.

One thing I'm going to do as soon as I'm done with school work is start peddling the last short story I had time to write. The last one that wasn't a fanfic, I mean. The one that the Scientologists rejected. And I swear I'm going to finish up my current fanfic commitments and then go to work on getting my novel ready to sell. I'm afraid to even look at it. It's sat in a drawer for so long that I just know I'm going to hate it when I pull it out and read it again. And I'm terrified of turning it over to my ruthless team of beta-readers. I'll have to really psych myself up for being open to criticism so that their feedback doesn't make me have to go get in bed and curl up into a little ball. Also, by God, I'm going to read a book! That has nothing to do with school! I may finally finish American Gods (so sorry, Mr. Gaiman, my life got in the way of that one). And maybe even Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister. And my nephew gave me all of his Harry Potter books, so I now own the whole series, though I haven't read a single word of it yet. I've big plans for my Christmas vacation, oh yes indeed. I might even find time in there somewhere to celebrate the birth of the Lord. Here's hopin'!

I moved Joker's Realm. It's here now.

One more paper to write. Then finals. Then I'm done. Hallelujah.