This is Ozzie and Harriet. You can guess which is which. I picked them up at Ikea the other week as kind of a birthday present to myself. I figured I'm officially killing off my late 20's now so I should give having kids another shot. That's how I refer to keeping plants alive - its like having kids practice for the bachelor. They require periodic attention and nurture. Yes, I realize they require less than a normal child. But the basic underlying precept remains the same: I and no one else am responsible for either their life or death. My goal is to keep them alive until I move, which I suspect will be some time next year, either for school or necessity of a newly married roommate - who knows which would come first, if either.

Well, the school part better come one way or another. When you work a 15 hour day and come home in time to eat, sleep, and start it all over again, you find about 2 minutes, somewhere around the point you're stripping out of the work clothes and changing into sleeping garb, to wonder why it is that you can't meet someone nice to come home to and bitch about your day. When the only thing that didn't go wrong, right down to the 15 minutes you had to spend looking for parking after driving home from work, is the fact that you didn't find out that you *didn't* get promoted. Or worse yet, why you can't meet someone to come home to and tell that you got promoted. (Pray Lord let it be.)

I find out in the next week or two.

Basically it will determine exactly when and how hard I start pursuing my enrollment in a school for next year. If I do get the promotion, I figure I'll sock it out for a year, and hit school next fall if things work out smoothly, maybe wait 6 months past then and start the following spring - basically get some experience at the next level on my resume. If I don't get it, I'll be filling out applications starting the following weekend. No point in staying somewhere that isn't going to put you where you should be, isn't going to maximize your potential. That's right, I said it.

So anyway, other things I got for my birthday (from people other than myself) included, from the fam:


Which I have wanted for so very, very long. And this:


Which Mom loved, along with the accompanying documentary. And from the grandparents, the best table game of all time:


Oink.

That's it. That's all the presents I got - parents and grandparents. This is what happens when you get old. I remember reading in the 5 Love Languages that gifts or giving gifts or something like that is one of the languages, and I'm like 98% sure that its mine, along with a small mix of one of the others - words of affirmation. Problem is, it hardly seems to be anyone else's.