The Semester is Officially Over!

Big sigh of relief! My grading is done. Or, for my English-majory friends, to take it out of the passive...I am done grading!!! I finished yesterday at 1:00 p.m. to be exact. I had no problem getting through the Hawkeye portfolios. The papers were shorter and fewer students actually made substantial revisions. The UNI revisions much more time. The papers were about 5-7 pages, with the exception of the overly ambitious student now and then who would think that s/he'd have to write 8-10 pages to get that A. Ugh. Anyway, more revisions on all 5 papers meant those suckers took way too long for me to grade. But I finished 1 hour earlier than expected and was able to start handing them back to students who were still hanging around campus on Thursday of finals week. Today I finished everything by posting my grades online.

Of course, we had a major snow storm come through here last night. We even had "thunder snow!" Apparently this is when it's like a thunderstorm outside so you hear the rumbling, but no rain. Instead....snow and lots of it! I believe we had a total of 8.5 to 9 inches around Waterloo. Here is a picture looking at our driveway.The entire end of the driveway was covered as high as the piles you see on either side. Thank you Mr. Snow Plow. We live on a hospital route so our road is always pretty well cleared, but we pay the price with terrible icy frozen snow drifts.

Hawkeye's classes were, of course, cancelled as is the case there so that meant a snow day for me! Ken stayed home from work until about noon so we could dig ourselves out. There would have been no way he would have made it out of that driveway by 8 a.m. We started by using the shovel, but soon realized our efforts would allow us to leave the driveway sometime next Tuesday at the rate we were going. I seriously began to question why we had NOT purchased a snowblower for this year. I think we thought global warming would have us receiving little snow. Fools. Neighbor George offered us the use of his snowblower in exchange for using it on his driveway as well. And so in a mere 3 hours we were all cleaned out! And just in time as our next storm is supposed to come through on Sunday. Ah, Iowa.

And so, after posting grades and then digging us out of snow, it is actually sinking in that I am officially done for a few weeks. I'm not quite sure what to do with myself. I wrapped a couple of presents and determined that I'm a little short on what I need to purchase, so that will mean a trip to the store in a little bit. I'm also tasked with making Zuppa Toscana for Christmas at Melissa's on Sunday so will need to get a few things at the grovery store. I did manage to start my very first load of dishes in our new dishwasher which we have had for a week or two now! (Ken ran the first load.) Isn't she a beauty?!

I've been meaning to get this picture posted for a while. This is a picture of my friend Lynsey and me from our Thanksgiving meeting in Cedar Rapids. She, her husband Jeremy, and son Jack were back in IA from WI visiting family over the holidays, so Ken and I took a short drive to CR so we could see each other. It was a great visit and a lot of fun to just catch up. Before we knew it, almost 3 hours had passed and we figured we should probably let Lynsey get back to her family.

In other pictures, here's one of Tucker. On Black Friday, Menards had pet beds on sale for $5 and now that I'm feeling slightly better off than I did as a grad student, I decided to splurge and by the boys (Tucker and Artemus) each a bed. Tuck warmed up to his within a few days and now is a petbed "regular", but Arty has turned up his nose and deemed the bed no comparison to our bed witht he down comforter or the back of the couch in front of the window.

Oh, and yes, Tucker really is that big! That and the bed was actually made for a small dog. Shame on me thinking that a bed made for the size of a small dog would fit my cat!