School's out for the summer.

Man alive am I tired!! For several days I was going to bed before midnight (which is pretty early for me) and feeling good, and then I started staying up later (until between 1 and 2, generally) and wasn't feeling so good. Last night I had to let my moisturizer/self-tanner soak in before settling in to bed, so I turned on the TV with the intention of watching just for those two minutes, but it was a show about the man whose arms exploded, and I needed to see that, so I stayed up, only to learn that his arms didn't explode at all. Hogwash. The moisturizer, however, is working, and as keen as I'm not on fake tans and the like, my legs always stay deathly pale all summer and I look very strange when my arms and the rest of my upper body is several shades darker than my legs. (Saying several shades darker, by the way, does not imply that I get tan. I just get a little less ghostly.)

But today was my final final, so I am DONE with school until August! Whoopee!! Now. You know what that means. I said that when the semester was finished, I was going to ch-ch-ch-ch-change my life. So, tomorrow. Tomorrow I eat well and read and write and mother attentively and be overall productive.

I've actually been more productive than normal lately (aside from today and yesterday, when my mind was overrun with facts about Quebec. Quebec is a very interesting place, by the way. Did you know that a referendum was held in 1995 for Quebec to become a sovereign nation, and 49.2% of Quebecers voted oui? C'est vrai. Quebec almost became its own country!!) I've been doing a pretty damn good job keeping up with laundry, dishes, and general tidiness. And it feels good. Now that "summer" is here, I'm ready to tackle some bigger projects that have long been on the back burner.

So tonight I will go to bed right after Real Housewives of NYC...and LA Ink...I don't watch those shows, naturally, but, um, I have to stay up until they're over? Er...

Oh yeah, and I'm thinking about moving to Oregon.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes, take II.

So in my usual fashion, I said I needed to change my life and then didn't even attempt to follow through. That's how I roll. I'm still watching reality TV (although I will say that I haven't started any new seasons...I'm just finishing out the ones I was already watching before originally saying that I needed to stop), I'm still eating terribly, and I'm still...uh, well, whatever else it was I said I needed to do, I'm sure I'm not doing it.

But I'm going to throw out an excuse...it's the end of the semester and I'm busy laying around and thinking about how much I don't want to do things. That takes a lot of energy. So give me a few weeks and we'll try again.

Oh, and we got a puppy, too, so yeah, that's my other excuse. He's a cool little dog and I'm really happy to have him. He plays with the kids, which our other dog, Beatrice, does not. And he and Beatrice have a lot of fun together, which makes me happy for her, since she doesn't want to play with the kids. His name is Ezra de la Pound. He's super fluffy and cute.

Ezra de la Pound

Cute as he is, he is, of course, work. We got Beatrice in January and she was 4 years old, housebroken, etc. She's a totally chill dog. She's awesome. We adore her. She was so easy to bring into our lives. Ezra keeps us on our toes. We're trying to housebreak him now. He's pretty much crate trained, which luckily didn't take long, and he's doing really well in the house, but we still have to watch him carefully. And he's very energetic, of course, and bites, and steals the kids' toys, and all that other puppy stuff. Soon we'll have a fence, though, and life should be a little easier.

This summer I want to do some work on my house, especially the outside. I want to get a lot of writing done, largely in preparation for my fiction classes that are coming this fall, and also to prepare my grad school portfolio. I want to prepare for and ace the GRE, which I'm really dreading ever since I took a math boot camp last Saturday and was reminded that I'm terrible at math. I want to read a lot (for entertainment purposes, and to read some stuff that I feel ashamed not to have read). I want to start cooking real meals again and trying to get healthy. I did well last summer, but then when school started, it was just too easy to slip back into my old habits. And I want to not just sit on my butt moping around like I so often do.

Here's hoping.