It was only $355! It’s a one-way ticket from studentuniverse and a week ago it was $435 so isn’t it great that I waited for no reason? I’m leaving Sep 14th.

It looks like I’ve posted three times today, and I guess I have technically, but I wrote that dog post last night, so it doesn’t really count.

American Girl’s Long Journey to the Lower East Side

(She’s not up on the website yet. I looked. Neither are her tiny things. But the NYT article has a good picture and there’s another here.)

(Also, am slightly dismayed because I cannot find any tiny lunches or tiny schoolthings on the site and those were always my favorites. Have they discontinued them?)

I made my mom help me compile a list of their nicknames today:

Boris:
Bobo, Bobolo Binsky, Ginko Bolobo, Bonofrio, Bonomo, Borachio, Boris Gudanov, Bory, Boris Wattis, Bojangles (lots of these can be combined for nearly endless variations)

Otto:
Otto Botto Spotto, Otto Binsky, Otto Binsky Boy, Bobby, Spiggy (from Ottorino Respighi), Oboy, Foo Fido (that’s just my mom), Lil Otto, Mister Otto, Monsieur Otto, and I sometimes call him Small One (because he is smaller, though not actually small)

(It helps to sing them.)

work done this week and then I kept on being sick. So here is something to make you laugh:

Texas Constructs U.S. Border Wall To Keep Out Unwanted Americans

(If you look at the image you can see they’re going to keep all the Austinites in too.)

on foreign language materials design in June and with that in mind I’m trying to figure out what my classes will be like in the fall. I don’t know if this job will be drastically different from the last one. It sounds like I can assign out-of-class work which opens up huge possibilities. I know the groups will be about twice as big. And there are certain things I want to do differently from the start, like 1) get their e-mail addresses (which I think everyone that age has at this point) and 2) take attendance seriously. I’m writing to my boss, clearly, but it’s trickier than I thought figuring out exactly what questions to ask.

Is v. annoying. Has been going on for like a week.

I’ve been sitting around in San Antonio since Saturday reading about transfer and borrowing for my masters report. (It is really interesting but I am not sure where to go with it; it seems like there are a hundred different possible directions.) My mom has broken her foot so occasionally I also pick things up and carry them to/for her. We bought these highlighters that are armed with post-it tabs of the same color. They are really exciting except that I can’t highlight in any of these library books. We’ve also been watching some of my mom’s discs of Star Trek TNG. It is awesome but I forgot how campy it is.

It looks like we will not be doing Christmas in Paris after all. That means at some point I’ll have to decide whether to come home or do something else and if I come home, when.

I got an e-mail from R, the Swiss assistant I worked with during my assistantship year, and it is so nice to be able to tell people definitively that I’m coming back, at least for the year. There were people who didn’t believe me when I said it and people who never doubted it and she, from what I can tell, was one of the latter, which I find interesting—maybe because she herself moved to France.

I just have a (low-key) presentation to give tonight, a paper to turn in tomorrow, and then a final next Saturday that I’m not really worried about. I’m going home to SA with my mom tomorrow after some potential shopping. I’ve saved up $60 in tips and I need to decide what I want to spend it on. I’m hoping to line up a masters report advisor before summer kicks in so I can get started in July.

I’m trying to figure out what kind of funds I’ll need for moving to France and I’m also trying to figure out a flight date. New boss says I don’t need to be teaching before October so I should arrive mid-September (also a good idea given there is still some possibility of foot surgery in July). So I’ve sort of settled on leaving Monday the 14th to arrive Tues the 15th so I’ll have a few days to look for housing before the weekend shuts things down. I can’t quite decide where to stay when I get there—there’s a foyer that I could buy two weeks at but it’s on the outskirts so that’s kind of a drag. There’s a place much like where I lived last year except it’s private, right next to the gare. But I don’t know if they would take me since I’m technically not a student. And I think I want to try looking for French roommates this year. I’ve loved (LOVED) living alone in Austin but I don’t know that it’s a good idea in France. I’ve put myself on appartager but it seems silly to pay too much attention to it till I’m in town. People keep contacting me for rooms that are open now which I find kind of annoying since it says in my profile I’m not looking till September. So probably what I’ll do is settle on the foyer for a couple of weeks and hope that I find something quick. I just want to avoid paperwork.

Well I should go, I have a meeting and then my last class of the semester, woot.

hired to work at the engineering school for next year. So now I can start thinking about buying a plane ticket and looking for temporary housing and whatnot. This is, sort of astonishingly, the first time I’ll have to find my own housing in France.

Otherwise, the semester is winding down, I’ve wrapped up my three papers that are due this week and now just have to turn them in, and I’m still working on finding a masters report advisor. I’m heading home to SA on Friday to play with the poodles. The semester is so close to over I can feel it. But I’ll only really have a two-week break (boo hoo) before I begin an intense month of six hours of class a day. Also, I need a place to live June 25th-July 8th. Sometime in there I turn 25. Every year I’m pretty much ready to be older, possibly because people mistake me too often for a 19-year-old and I hate that. (Seriously why do people not get that? Younger ≠ better)