duck-shaped pain

1. My cousin E. and his wife just had a baby, the first baby born in my small group of relatives in nearly forever. It was born on March 17, and instead of naming it something appropriate for the day (I suggested Erin, not so that it could be named after me or anything, but just because of the whole birthday thing), they named it something else, something uber-girly that starts with a K. I am very happy for them. This happiness has not translated into me actually seeing the baby, since I have been busy (notice the lack of updating here), and since they also moved into a new house at the same time they had the baby and do not have a phone or any sort of way to reach them. I have been assured by others that the baby is cute, and looks like Winston Churchill.

2. I had a week-long midterm in my Civil War class, which is really over the top. The first day was okay. The second, I did even better. But by today, I was just sort of fading, and I was really sick of answering my question (we had to spend the whole week on just the one question). I filled up three blue books, although I ran out of cogent things to say after the first blue book. Nevertheless, I kept on, and hope to stun my professor into giving me an A out of respect for my prodigious output. Will it work? Probably not.

3. Remember my fretting last month about filling out scholarship applications and dreading that all that work and personal-essay writing would come to naught? Well, I was wrong. This week, I won a full-tuition scholarship for my final year of school, which is the second-place award in my school's most prestigious set of scholarships. I had to interview with the foundation that sponsors the scholarships last Tuesday, which was sort of odd. Almost everyone on the panel was oddly familiar, in the civic-leader-who-I've-seen-a-lot-on-TV-I-think sort of way. Which is a common feeling here in my town: everyone looks like someone you sort of know, if they're not someone you actually do know. Anyway, they asked me a lot of questions about my goals and things I want to do, and quite a few specific questions about my interest in food history, and then I was done. Some of the awards are named after now-dead important people in town, and my award was named for a well-known attorney in town who (ironically enough) was my lawyer when I was eleven and was trying to collect money for injuries I suffered in a car accident. These injuries included the knocking out of my front teeth, the same teeth which are causing me problems now, and it was the cost of fixing these teeth that spurred me to apply for the scholarship in the first place. So there's some sort of odd story there. Anyway, I am very pleased to have won it, and the fact that I won't have to worry about earning tuition this summer will make me a happy person when the time comes.

4. I discovered emusic, joined, and have downloaded many, many good things to listen to. My best find so far is Brigitte Fontaine and the Art Ensemble of Chicago's Comme la Radio, but that was just on the first day. There is much more finding to be had, I'm happy to say.

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