Keeping busy.

Do you ever wonder how you spend your time? Time passes so quickly. So incredibly quickly. But, for me at least, when I try to quantify how I am spending my time I am often left wondering what I am actually doing in those spare few hours between work and bedtime, or on those weekends at home. I often feel as if I have so little time, but maybe I have more time than I think. Because all it seems that I do is work, school, cook, and take pictures of the cats looking silly. That can't possibly fill a life, can it?

Case in point: this past week or so.

Cooked: Corned beef and cabbage dinner, in honor of everyone's favorite Irish holiday, St. Patrick's Day. It's on St. Patrick's Day (and also Thanksgiving) that I am so glad that I am not a vegetarian. The salty-beefy flavors of this festive meal are just too good to give up.

Schooled: Wrote my first research paper in about six years. Actually, probably longer than that. Seven or eight years, since I don't consider a lot of the papers that I wrote in library school real research papers. I had to reteach myself Chicago style citations, though I could have used the MLA format. Is all of this coming back to you, too? I had to pull all of this stuff out from so deep in my memory banks. Too much other useless info has crowded its way into my brain.

As mentioned, this paper was a case study on Sara Baartman, the Hottentot Venus, and the drawn out debate over the repatriation of her remains to South Africa. Museums can cling so strongly to what they consider their possessions, but I find this somewhat offensive when it comes to human remains. How does someone "own" Sara Baartman's skeleton, her brain, and her genitalia? Unless she willed these parts of herself to the museum, then they don't really own them. And she didn't will anything to anyone. And she's not a science experiment.

So that right there, in one or two nice and concise sentences, was my whole paper. If I had just handed that in I could have saved myself a lot of work!

Silly Cat Photos: Sherman is often a photogenic cat, though no cat is as photogenic as Sasha, just as no cat is as soft as Sasha. Sherman, however, isn't always lounging around on the bed looking cuddly and sleepy. Sometimes he's laying on the floor crazily grabbing at some random piece of string, or sometimes he's sitting on his favorite chair with his tongue sticking out.

I don't really know what to say about Sherman. He's darned cute, but he's also just so darned vacant. I really do believe that when he had his neck surgery the vet went a little too far into his neck with the scalpel and took out some of his gray matter, too. Sometimes I am amazed at the things that he does. But, we can forgive him most things, because he's just such a dope. And dopes are cute. And we like cute things. So therefore I guess we like dopes.

I, however, also like flowers. Like, really, really like flowers. I have little interest in putting the work in to grow them, but I certainly do like them when they sprout up in my yard. So, I guess I can now add to my list of things that I do to waste spend my time is "look at flowers." Spring is officially here, but even still, we have had an unseasonably abundant and early crop of flowers sprouting. This photo of some of the lovely purple crocuses in our front garden was taken a week ago, and you can see that already some of the blossoms had gone by!

Today when I went out to the front garden to look at the crocuses I was saddened to see that all of the blossoms look like those wilted ones. Now what do we do? What will bloom next? Without cookies and ice cream all I have are flowers to get me through my days. I suppose there are worse habits.