Happy birthday, Dad

Aaah- I'm back again, with much to report. Finals are over (although I still need to get my grades in...). It was a harrowing few days there, including such exciting events as:

• A fire alarm going off in my building while I was trying to work. For an hour and a half.
  

and

• My laptop dying.

Yup... my laptop all of a sudden froze up when I was trying to work on it Sunday evening. I was able to force-quit out of things and try to restart, but when it was restarting, it wouldn't boot. It would just hang on the grey apple screen, with the little gear going 'whirly whirly whirly'. I spent an hour on the phone to AppleCare discovering that we weren't going to be able to fix it without doing a clean reinstall and reformatting... he did tell me how to retrieve the data, though, although it involved a frantic late-evening trip to the Apple store to buy an expensiver-than-it-should have been Firewire cable. Now I just need to sit down and pull everything I care about off the laptop and go about wiping it clean and reinstalling.

I was able to finish despite my computer woes, however, and I stand before you (write before you?) a free woman! At least until I have to work on my third-year paper and the course prep for Winter Quarter. But before that come the Christmas cookies.

Ari and I celebrated yesterday by... going to the library. Where we always go if it's not sufficiently nice out to go to the playground. She loves those fuzzy chairs. :) In fact, she mostly just loves the library. I *think* she tried to sign "library" today, but I'm not sure... she was just sort of waving her hand (library is an "L" shape that you move in a circle, so hand-waving is a reasonable approximation).

Today, we went to much shopping with that papa. Mostly Christmas shopping... including a very nice toy store in town, and the children's bookstore that we love. We barely managed to squeak our way out of the bookstore without a bunch of new books for Ari. :D


Here's Ari with something on her head. I'm not sure why she wanted to put in there, but she stuck it on her head and walked in circles, making these little hooting noises. Repeatedly. I love my little girl. :D

There was snow on the ground for the first time this season today. They immediately responded by dumping mass amounts of salt on the roads, though, so all was well.

Well, that's what you get... we stayed up very too late trying out the Dunwich Horror expansion of Arkham Horror tonight. It was awesomely fun... we all agree that it improves the play of the game immensely. We had a real nailbiter and ended up barely defeating Yig in combat.