Secondly, JD is still my joyous terror. Oh the twos can be such a pain sometimes! I just love him to death but sometimes you want to pull their arms out of their sockets! (I said come HERE!) It’s been pouring down rain here for over 3 days so outside everywhere is a muddy mess. Since he’s so active it’s more important than ever to take him to baby gym and swim class. However, after swim class my arms are full of wet towels and swimsuits etc and he wants to run out into the parking lot and jump in puddles. Would you hold mommy’s hand please? NO! Let’s see, baby gym is as fun as ever but (month two) I haven’t really met any of those mothers yet. Man, there are over 40 some kids there!! At swim class this morning since it was so miserable only those of us with active little boys made it – so there were only 4 moms - and afterward when we were all in the locker room trying to get naked little boys to quit throwing beach balls at each other and actually get into their clothes we had a wonderful time talking. Most of these women I see every Friday, so that was nice. Again, not that I have much time to talk as JD throws himself off the pool wall into my arms, but on the odd occasion when the children decide to throw balls to each other (instead of screaming and pulling things away from others,) or otherwise behave in a co-operative fashion it’s nice to be able to know their names and who the parents are.

Just last weekend as a fun event we took JD to the zoo. I don’t think John really wanted to go because we have to leave late in the afternoon (after JD’s nap and lunch and such) and it’s about an hour away in DC. But I was like, they’ll be huge walkways for JD to run around, and it’ll be easier than trying to keep him busy in our back yard. My idea was basically let JD run loose. Well, as soon as we got to the zoo it became “John’s trip to the zoo!” It was SO funny! Oops – John wants to see the Pandas, ahh, we only have 2 hours, I want to see the monkeys. . . etc. So instead of having JD run around John is carrying him (frantically) from place to place to make sure we saw everything. Awesome. And we did get to see many of the animals that JD loves – lions and tigers and Bears, oh my. And it pooped JD out anyway. He really liked the lions.

JD’s vocabulary continues to grow. He is still IN LOVE with his turtle and demands to take it everywhere. He says lots and lots of animals like lion, tiger, bear, this mumble sound for alligator, butterfly, bird etc. He now knows ‘up’ and ‘down’, and says ‘purple’, although I think he thinks it’s the dinosaur and not a color. Oh man, this is great – if I say mooooo he looks at me expectantly and we say “cow!” together. It’s really really cute. And he makes these indecipherable mumbling noises when he wants me to sing the alphabet. Another awesome thing is he says Thank You. I think he loves saying it because everyone in the world – even those jerks that ignore a 2 year old smiling and waving and saying hi (Jerks!) – every one automatically says ‘your welcome’ when someone says ‘thank you’ to them. So JD says that a lot. He doesn’t use words in any form of sentence yet, but he obviously knows commands and will follow them. He also know what you are talking about and will react violently against, say, “Time to change your diaper.”

Bad news. As you know, I didn’t pass my comprehensive exam in Macroeconomics. Which was an enormous disappointment and a huge personal blow. Excuse me, I have a 3.5 and a professor that wants to co-author a paper with me. . . how can I not deserve a degree from your dumb university? So I’ve actually managed to get accepted by a graduate school that I’m not smart enough to graduate from. Geez, I wish I’d figured that out BEFORE completing all my classwork! So I basically said, “I don’t care” –I’m NOT willing to put either myself or my family through that effort again if I’m going to get a test that has no relation to anything I’ve ever seen before. (65 % of us failed, and those that passed the comp. would have passed without taking the class anyway!) So I threw in the towel and didn’t sign up for this stupid 30-dollar extended credit class you have to take if you didn’t pass the comps and want to try again. Anyway, I got some not to subtle reminders from the Econ department that I needed to sign up so at the last minute I signed up feeling, I’m not going to try hard and if I don’t try and take it and fail I’m exactly where I am now. But, I vowed not to care. Right. SO that lasted about an hour and I started to care because, dammit, when I do anything (except maybe housework or spelling) I care. So guess who’s spending Thursday nights at this dumb class again? And going to the Sat. morning help sessions. And this doesn’t even take into account actually studying. So the first night when I didn’t get to put JD to bed I cried all the way home from class. I seriously hate this man – and get this, what we are doing this semester is not related at all to what we did when I took the class. Huh? So I hate that part of my life. And I’m not sure I’m going to pass the second time either. It’s a puzzlement. But I can die saying I tried my best. (twice, argh)

Finally, work has been really hectic. The big deal is that for whatever reason, both sides of the office (I work for the NLS, the other side is OERPD) have me do all the procurement stuff. So I research computers, scanners, printers, the newest ‘HOT’ stuff that our office (IE, ME!! So I have a cool computer and accessories at work) needs and then tell them why we want to buy it and from where. We’re talking around 100 thousand dollars worth of stuff, (!!) which I then track when it comes in and install etc. Well (ominoius music starts now) things have been trickeling it and it appears that everything is in, execept one large UNIX piece which costs over 9,000 dollars. I check my reciepts, and I don’t have it. So I call down stairs to procurement and they say, oh yeah, we have the recipets and it came in on Nov. 6 and that file is closed. So I’m trying to tell these people – no, it’s not here!! SO I call SUN and they tell me they shipped this piece back in September and that it’s paid for and everything. Man, so I have NO IDEA where this thing is. And it’s a big metal tray with 18 gig of UNIX memory in it, so it takes a cart to move it. It’s not like it was put in our office supply room and someone casually walked out with it. So I finally went to the supply department and showed them that the reicept they are saying is for the UNIX memory, is actually for a tape drive that was on the same requisition, and that this thing never showed up. It’s taken me like 6 hours over 2 days to get this straightened out. And (this is the fun part) we now have to convice SUN that we don’t have the part. And they are going to say, “Screw off” because we already paid them. Man, I have no idea what is going on. So next month I’ll tell you how the saga ends.