Today, I hate my job.

Ah, blog. It's been a while.

I've been busy lately. Working five days a week (and pining for the days when I was a student and had an excuse to only work fifteen hours a week), visiting Matt in Michigan (he had his junior recital and he was AMAZING! I'm so proud to be related to such a great artist/composer), reading and writing a lot.

Oh, the reading.../contented sigh. I'm reading a few classics, rereading Jane Eyre (one of my favorites)...but for the past week, I've been focused on The Wise Man's Fear by Patrick Rothfuss. It just came out last month--book two in his Kingkiller Chronicle trilogy. (The first book is The Name of the Wind. Friends reading this, you should get in on this series. Seriously, it's incredible. I typically don't even read fantasy and I'm in love with these books.) It's about a thousand pages long, which I actually love. If it were normal novel length, I would have finished it in one or two days and then been depressed that it ended so fast. (Plus my beloved Kindle keeps me from having to deal with lugging around a cumbersome book the size of a bible.) Anyway...great book. It's been demanding several hours of my attention every day.

Now here's something wonderful and sad. Patrick Rothfuss is coming HERE, tonight, to read in a bookstore downtown. Like most authors, he typically plans his readings months in advance. This was more spur of the moment, though, only decided a week ago. He's coming here to have his brain photographed, apparently for a study of the way creative people's minds work. He decided to try to do a reading/book signing while in the area, since he has no idea when he might be coming back to Iowa for anything. I read this on his blog two days ago. I only look at his blog once or twice a month...obviously, I could have easily read that post this weekend, after he had come and gone. The timing seems like a minor miracle, right? So OF COURSE I would be scheduled to work tonight. And OF COURSE the cafe opener today couldn't possibly swap shifts with me. And OF COURSE there was no one else who could cover my shift because only 4 out of 180 team members know how to properly work at the cafe.

So while Patrick Rothfuss is reading and signing and being generally delightful downtown, I'll be at Target...popping popcorn.

The good news is that Spencer and Jordan are going. Spencer is the one who told me I HAD to read The Name of the Wind a couple years ago, that it was the best book ever, etc. He hadn't heard about the reading tonight, either. When Jordan called to tell him about it and see if he wanted to go, he wouldn't stop screaming on the phone. He's ecstatic. So I'm happy that he gets to go and enjoy it. Jordan is just going to buy copies of the books and have them signed for me. He also claims that he's going to start reading them, on his breaks at work. That would make me super happy, since he normally hates reading. Yes, I married a man who doesn't like to read. Shameful, isn't it?

Well, it's about time for me to go to work and sulk all night. Oh, on a random note, if you enjoy the spicy deliciousness of ginger, you have to try Tazo green ginger tea. I've been drinking it as I've been writing this entry, and it's quite good. I believe I would occasionally choose this over a cup of coffee, and that's saying something for me!

MFA Freakout

So, lately I've been compiling a list of MFA programs that I'm interested in. There are fourteen traditional programs on my list. Five low-residency. To be honest, I'm probably going to scrap the idea of low-residency all together because the funding is so terrible. Low-residency=taking out loans and needing to keep working as I'm in school. As much as I would love to stay here and complete most of the program online, financially that's not so desirable. Traditional=probably being awarded an assistantship, having tuition waived and getting a stipend (at least at the schools on my list). So, yeah. We'll probably have to move and live in a different state for a few years...but totally worth it. It might be kind of fun to live somewhere else, temporarily. Jordan is all for it, as long as we don't move anywhere that's colder than Iowa (he wasn't too happy to hear that one of my top picks is in Michigan).

Even with forgetting about low-residency programs, I still have fourteen on my list. Not too thrilled about dropping $800 in application fees, though, so I'll probably narrow my list down a bit. I'm incredibly tempted to skip the ones that require the GRE...because I don't want to take it! Taking the ACT in high school was just awful, and I was really counting on never having to do anything similar in the future, ever. Obviously the most important part of all this MFA crap is making sure my writing sample is really good. I'm having a hard enough time with that--I don't need to add STUDYING for a stupid test to my list of things to do. There are six programs on my list that do not require the GRE. Is that a reasonable way of narrowing things down? Or should I just take the damn test, save up some money, and apply to all of them? I don't know!

In other news...it's 70 degrees out! Feels fabulous. Back to regular semi-cold April weather after today, though. Oh well. I'm hoping the warm weather will keep people OUT of the mall...out of Target, specifically. I hate busy Sundays afternoons. Speaking of, guess it's time to get ready for work. /sigh.