Well it’s been a crazy month-and-a-half since I last posted. Joel moved back to Michigan, I spent two-and-a-half weeks at home, then came back to WA for my next-to-last quarter at EWU. And it was straight back to work with thesis meetings, a new class (nonfiction workshop), and lots of Willow Springs work.

Sophie trying to escape my clutches in November 2008.

Being home was fantastic. I made friends with Sophie (!). She still barked at me every morning when I came upstairs, but by mid-afternoon she was jumping up on the couch with me. Other than my dog befriending activities, I spent a lot of time relaxing. I think I did five 1,000 piece jigsaw puzzles. I also got hooked on Dollhouse. For Christmas I got so many books I couldn’t bring them all back to WA. And a sweet digital camera that I can’t wait to start using.

Back in Washington, the end is looming. My thesis looks way closer this side of Christmas. In nonfiction workshop I’m facing my fear of writing essays meant to be read by other people. For Willow Springs, we launched our new blog, and it took way more work to have ready than I’d expected, but it’s going fantastically well so far. I post on Mondays, so you should all go check those out. This week I talk about Amazon’s decision to pull all Macmillan books from its site. You can still buy the books, but only through third party sellers.

My original intention was to use this blog to track my progress through my graduate program at Eastern Washington University. However, after my blog was hacked back in October (September?), I had to take it down, not having written one post about my program. With the workload I was carrying (15 graduate credits, a 20-hour-per-week job, and lots and lots of homework), I kept bumping the blog maintenance back until today, over four months later, I finally got around to doing enough maintenance to put it live again, though without any of the original content, which is actually fine with me, since I didn’t have a clear content-related plan before. And woah. Long sentence there.

So anyway, this blog is going to contain posts on things such as my MFA experiences, pieces I’m writing (and trying to publish), books I’m reading (or have read), my reactions to and analysis of popular culture, and probably a few random posts about my two cats. And, when I find the time, I want to work on tweaking and personalizing this WordPress theme. But I’ll be honest; that might take awhile.