Jumping fun!

Thanks for the great toys grandma and grandpa!

Reading list I

Books Read from August to mid December. The titles that we would suggest for anyone to read are marked by an asterix. Dirty Job, The Piazza Tales, Candide*, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance*, The Color of Magic, Spook, Kafka: the Torment of Man, My Freshman Year, Guards! Guards! (Discworld #9), Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead,Staircase of a Thousand Steps, Brave New World*, Clockwork Orange, The Amulet of Samarkand*, Introduction to Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literatures, Teaching composition as a Social Process, Diversity and Motivation, The Vocation of a Teacher, Teaching Literacies, Extras, Graceling, The Art of Literary Research, Goodbye Chunky Rice, Analyzing Prose, Specials*, Pretties*, Uglies*, Selected Stories of Katherine Mansfield, The Golem's Mighty Swing, The Metamorphosis*, Maus, Cairo, TheTruth (Discworld #25)*, Academic Literacies, Performance of Self, A Rhetoric for Writing Teachers, Theory and Practice for Writing Tutors, Hawthorne: a Life, Bone*, Devil in the White City, The Book of Mormon*, The Brothers Karamozov*

Christmas time is here. As always, we have been very spoiled. Here are some of the images from Christmas.

Snow

It finally snowed here in Winona. I think that the weather has decided to make up for lost time. After being promised snow on the ground for Halloween (there wasn't) and for sure snow for Thanksgiving (nothing) it has finally snowed. The snow waited for the very last day of November and then it dropped about two inches. Then it flurried December 1 and 2 than today (the 3rd) it dumped another two inches. It came faster than some expected today. So much so that local schools here were delayed two hours before starting.

In other news that is perhaps a bit more cosmic than the weather, today was my last day of classes of my first semester of Grad school (angels sing and crowds rejoice). Now I just have to wait a few weeks to find out how I actually did in my classes. I am hoping that I will pull out with no real battle scars. The school here doesn't give pluses or minuses on their grades, just the letter. I think I might be on the boarder in a class or two so I don't know how that will pan out. At the very least I will just be relieved that this semester is over. That means grad school is 1/4 way over as well (at least for the master's)