Life at the Welge's: interesting, stressful.

1) usual refereeing between family members. worse this time than previous visits, but got better later today.

2) talked with Sam. thank goodness for him, he keeps me sane. miss him a lot, can't wait to see him again in just a few days. :)

3) dogs are great :)

4) saw LOTR: Return of the King today!!! First reaction - generally good. Though I dearly wish he could've spent the 5 minutes to develop the Eowyn-Faramir love story. :( I was sitting there waiting to see what he'd do with it, and he blew right past it! Kinda disappointing, especially since he watered down most of her lines in the scenes he kept. -sigh- Ah well. He did a fantastic job on so much of the rest - the charge of the Rohirrim was *incredible*. Go see it if you haven't!

4) spent a few hours in email correspondence with Brown, Princeton grads. Peter Brown and William Jordan sound like great mentors, but the institution's not so great about teaching you how to teach. Hmm... if I'm accepted to both, it may be a toss-up between Princeton and UCLA. We'll see, I guess. Don't have my heart set on any of them yet - trying to avoid planning and having my heart broken when I don't get into my favorite. Will figure out that crossing when I come to it.

5) Weeded out Harvard! McCormick responded to Brown's tentative email, derided my high school Latin skills and attempts to review it ('she won't be competitive with other young scholars from around the world without a rigorous college classical latin training') and implied that he'd be willing to take me on only for his biology-history project with labwork on aDNA of plague victims and rats (note that I got into history because I couldn't take the biology anymore... I'm not about to do it in grad school!). He may be a brilliant scholar, but I think I'd rather not work with someone so... pompous. I liked Geary MUCH better. So Harvard's out, and that's $100 saved in application fees. Hurrah.

So the grad school list is down to 5:
UCLA, Stanford, Princeton, UT, Notre Dame.

Here's to hoping some place wants me... and is willing to pay for me, too.

6) Also eagerly anticipating the arrival of the first goods I've ever purchased online. Hoping I'll have time to fix them up before I get back to tech/before everyone else gets back to tech, since they're supposed to be Christmas gifts. ;) Hopefully everything works out; we'll see.