Well here's a nice surprise: Perfect World won in several categories in the Shadows & Dust Awards. The half empty here is that while searching for this awards site (their e-mail didn't include a link) I discovered that in a previous round they awarded no fewer than 11 categories to the Babyverse. So, yeah. At any rate, it's nice that they liked my story.

An even nicer surprise was the box o' goodies that was waiting for me when I got home from class. My friend Chad sent me a kick-ass Red Death Phantom sculpture from the San Francisco Music Box Co. It plays "Masquerade" when you wind it up. He also sent me a giant Homer Simpson Pez dispenser. I'll be going "HEE!" every time I think of these all day. Chad rocks.

A much less nice surprise was the puddle of yack waiting for me when I got upstairs. Looks like the cat knocked the remains of my Christmas candy stash on the floor, and Fizzgigg got ahold of my last piece of chocolate and then hurled it (and everything else he's eaten today) back up. Bleah. The thing is, I can't clean up vomit without coming very close to vomiting myself. So, that was less than fun.

I think I'm going to drop my Foundations of World Languages online course. It requires too much busywork and it's not leaving me enough time for the research I need to do, let alone for writing my own stuff or having some semblance of a life. Maybe I'll take it again in the summer. If not, I only needed it for my liberal arts associates degree anyway, and in the long run I think I'll be okay with not getting that. But that should mean more writing time, and also probably more time to talk to some of y'all on AIM. So yay for that.