The Serenity Prayer

God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.

Living one day at a time;
Enjoying one moment at a time;
Accepting hardships as the pathway to peace;
Taking, as He did, this sinful world
as it is, not as I would have it;
Trusting that He will make all things right
if I surrender to His Will;
That I may be reasonably happy in this life
and supremely happy with Him
Forever in the next.
Amen.

--Reinhold Niebuhr

I can be positive about this. I mean if I lose my job I'll have more time to write, I can eBay it up, I'll apply for teaching programs, find another job, it'll all work out. It has to.

Dear yuletide author;

Ohmigosh thank you for being so awesome and doing this! Seriously, already winfull.

The first thing you need to know about me is that I'm really freaking easy. There's very few things I don't like when it comes to fic so if you want to go and stick some Jack/Fi or do some whatthefuckery with Alberich and Skif then I say go for it. So when I go on to list my favourite things just know that really what I'm saying is these are the things that I like slightly better than all the other things I highly doubt you can do anything that I'm not going to love.

( onwards and upwards )

I hope I didn't get too specific in my details, those were really more just random musings and if you take all, none, or some of them matters not to me since really the only thing you needed to know was before the cut.

Thanks again wonderful author and I can't wait to gush all over you come December!

So I spent the last...5ish hours catching up on this season of Top Chef and I have to say I adore it. Granted I should hold judgement to catch up completely but at this point I'm adoring the Brothers V and Jen and Kevin I absolutely love OMG I want him to win it all so badly. Doesn't hurt that lookswise he reminds me of a ginger Pat Rothfuss, but he's just so wonderful.

Had today off of work for Veterans Day (thank god) and headed to Chicago to see dad and littlest sister and to get my car looked at again since the check engine light has been on since oh June despite having already spent $400 on it and getting it looked at twice more. Turns out the other O2 sensor failed right after the first one did so I have to drop another $300 to get that fixed. Luckily he's not charging me for labor because he feels bad about not having caught it the other two times he's looked at it after the initial fixing which saves me another $300 but still, damn car sucking my money and now I can't replace my ipod.

Still debating about adding another request for yuletide it's just I have no idea what I want as much as the other 3. Still I'm in the middle of refilling out my signup since I want to offer some more fandoms. I'll think on it some more.

Still desperate for some single friends. Went with some of the other teachers from work to a Taste of Home cooking show last night and that just reinforced that idea. I mean I had a great time and I like spending time with them but gosh it gets draining being the only single person sometimes. Everyone will get on the subject of their husbands and I'll sit there like umm yeah sure whatever.

Definitely need to get cooking and writing again. Things with school are getting into more of a rhythm so I think I should have more time to do that. I haven't written any fiction in ages and that's too bad. I might try and do like a half NaNo thing with the rest of November since I have a few ideas running around my head.

The wonderful bergann posted this in her LJ for me but I should ask here too. Does anyone know of a Big Bang Theory ep with lots of technobabble so I can justify showing it to my physics class? (I really don't want to start a new chapter the day before a 4 day weekend since that's kinda pointless and well...Leonard and Sheldon are physicists so it's related right? right?)

My life = ridiculously boring other than the panic this morning where I woke up at 7:11 when I have to be at work by 7:10 and I live 40 min away. That resulted in panicked calls and a bit of crying because ugh that was a huge fail.

I'm still on a quest to find friends and things to do in the area. Ugh it's times like these I wish I was a sociable outgoing person, my sister seems to have no problems making new friends. I just have no idea where to start although next week I'm going to check out the open skate with the roller derby team in town to see if it's something I'd want to do. But really? I need some friends, or a friend, this is getting ridiculous.

One of my kids asked me if I believe in global warming today.

I told him global warming isn't like god, it's not something you believe in or don't it's something that's happening to the Earth.

He told me there was no scientific proof of it and that the earth raising a couple degrees wasn't a big deal to the Earth.

I started talking about CFCs and Ozone and drawing out the mechanism showing how CFCs block the production of ozone and then said yeah it's not a big deal for the Earth but it kinda really is for the humans living on the Earth. He started asking why and the other kids started yelling at him to shutup because he'd been doing this in all his classes.

Then the bell rang and I was blessedly free of him and the other kids came up and were like man Miss M you are a beast at science. I was pleased with that at least.

Last night I laid down to take a 2 hour nap, alarm set and everything. I woke up 12 hours later just in time to get ready for school and get there with none of the things I wanted to get done for today done. Whoops. I shall have to work extra hard this weekend to make up for it.

HAPPY OCTOBER! I LOVE this month so much, best weather, best holiday, best food, it's just such a lovely month.

Never going to be caught up on TV ever. Pretty sure that's been decided. Sad but true.

Possibly going on another baking spree this weekend if I get work done. I shouldn't but since when does that ever stop me?

Sitting at Barnes and Noble grading Biology assignments. The assignment was to create your own analogy for a cell (such as the post office or factory one that is often in the books) detailing how the role each organelle is assigned matches the description/function of the organelle. This is what one student wrote.



I started cracking up in the middle of the cafe. I also started laughing out loud while I was typing this up. Sadly it didn't actually follow the assignment plus he only did half the organelles he was supposed to do so I had to give him a 5/10 (and that's being generous) but oh man the entertainment value is priceless.

Twittered throughout NCIS: LA mainly because I could...oh ok I didn't realize how much I missed live blogging shows.

Anyway thoughts in general.

( not really spoilery )

Wow it's been a long time since I've done a post like that. I'm glad I woke up in time to catch that and I'll have to try and catch up on NCIS this week so that next week I can have NCIS Tuesdays. I don't think I've seen a new ep of NCIS since like February.

Donating a bunch of my old books to the school library so I'll have bookshelf space for all the books that are in piles in the guest room at the moment. I was in there today after school talking to Connie and some kids came in and checked out some books and I noticed those were books I read when I was there age and that I had a lot more by the same author at home just taking up shelf space and a bunch of other books from when I was maybe 10-13 that they'd like (and that I felt like parting with. After that is when I really got into sci-fi/fantasy and formed a huge attachment to those books and I actually still reread some of those).

So I was reading Malinda Lo's Big Idea over at Scalzi's blog for her new book Ash and the book looks cool (Lesbian Cinderella set in a fantasy world) but one line struck me as odd.

I had never read a single fantasy novel in which there were any queer characters."

Umm...I'm pretty sure I spent my teenage years reading gay fantasy. Immediately Mercedes Lackey's Last Herald Mage series came to mind. Robin Hobb's Farseer trilogy was another. Lynn Flewelling's Nightrunner series. The simultaneously awful and addictive and totally Marysueish Black Jewels Trilogy by Anne Bishop (and I know it was awful and totally Mary Sue like, but I adored those books when I was 14/15 and read them many times) had tons of homosexual overtones not to mention all the incest. And I'm sure I read plenty of others although I also tend to just ship people so some of them may not have actually had queer characters. (ETA and ohmigosh I can't believe I forgot Steven Harper's Silent Empire series. Those books are awesome! For about 2 years I'd reread them every 4 months or so and now I'm thinking it's time for another reread.)

Luckily other people took exception to that and started listing off books in the comments including this link which I'd seen and probably bookmarked before but had forgotten about it so I'll probably be making my way through some of those once my schedule gets less hectic. (The book that is my name is on that list! Adams, Richard. Maia (bisexual woman in a decadent Nero-esque society) I think that's how I found it in the first place although like a failure I still haven't ordered a copy to read.) Anyway, if you have a rec for queer sci-fi or fantasy do share!

Whee my drabble won first place for creativity over at wholand! ANDANDAND kefira won second place for creativity because she is just that awesome. Three guesses on the pairing of my drabble and the first two don't count.

School is getting better. I've had to do some reteaching in bio and physics and regular chem we're moving through conversions at snails pace, but I think I'm getting the hang of it. I'm at least getting most of the kids' names down. Advanced chem is my savior because we can move at the pace I like (for now since it's review) and it's material that I know but it's not so instinctual that I have a hard time explaining it (like in regular chem where it's conversions and scientific notation and in physics where it's vectors, both of which are really simple once everything clicks but before that it's hard to think in that way).

I'm so excited that I get a three day weekend. Like honestly I can't remember ever being so excited for weekends before. I think my mind just needs that mental holiday for a bit.

Flist, how do I get a .gif to work in a powerpoint? /failure at microsoft office ...oh, it works when it's in slideshow mode, just not when you can edit it. Duh, I'm a silly goose.

I DESPISE making powerpoints. I honestly cleaned the entire kitchen and living room, did three loads of laundry, and made a run to the salvation army to donate stuff this morning just to avoid having to make the powerpoints for tomorrow. Very productive, just not in the way that's relevant to my job. I don't get it, I mean I took all the notes for the things I want to cover this week (well ok, through Wednesday, I'll do the rest of the week once I see the pace we're moving tomorrow) so you'd think transferring that into a powerpoint would be easy but it's SO NOT. I think I'm just too anal about them.

ANYWAY, I SURVIVED MY FIRST WEEK! I'm very excited about that although I kinda sucked at it. I gave my bio class a quiz on basic chem stuff and they all failed it so I have to reteach all that. I have to find the balance between moving too quick and slow with my advanced chem class since what we're doing now is review. I have to make sure I can actually do and explain the problems to my physics classes without having to backtrack and confuse them and me. And I have not not get too frustrated because we're moving slower than I want.

Still behind on Psych and Monk and Leverage. IDK I feel so disconnected from everything that's not related to school and even then I feel disconnected, just in a totally immersed way. I don't think that makes sense, but it's how I feel. Anyway instead of watching them yesterday I read some fic for the first time all week and then went shopping and bought a new dress, a couple new shirts, a pair of new pants, and a silicone baking sheet which I broke in with these which are AWESOME.

Anyway yes, .gif in powerpoint please!

I'm trying to find a good laptop since mine has been dying for months now and since I have a job I can afford it but I've only ever had Sony Vaio's and I'm not in the mood to wait for a good deal to come around for a new one of those since that's the only way I buy them 'cause otherwise they're not worth the price. Anyway, I don't know other brands. I'm not going to spend more than $900 but I'd really prefer something in the $6-700 range.

Thanks flist!