[Travis Barker drum break]

"I am so glad you are a part of our profession!" I got that sentence in an email from my practicum professor after I submitted my final paper and evaluation yesterday. How sweet is that?! I felt all warm and snuggly. She had been apprehensive about me doing my practicum where I was because of the arson early on in the semester, but I said I wanted to stay and I learned a lot about disaster recovery in the practicum, and that's what I wrote about in my paper. In the end, I think my professor was pleased that I had still been able to learn things despite the arson, and even though it wasn't quite the education that other students had taken away from their practicums. Now I have a pretty clear understanding of what it takes to try to fix one guy's drunken rampage. That guy still hasn't been charged with anything. I guess they've found him mentally incompetent or something? I think he was actually just drunk and likes fire. Which...I actually went to girl scout camp with a girl who was a pyromaniac. I remember a few of us sneaking into the girls bathroom cabin at night and watching her set fire to the bathroom sinks using hairspray. That's the first time I ever saw fire actually dance. You could just turn on the faucet to put the fires out. It was actually kind of pretty as long as it was contained like that. Pyromania certainly wasn't on the Girl Scout camp agenda, but you'd be surprised what happens at Girl Scout camp. Someday I'll tell you about the shanking that occurred in my group during my final summer. 


On to more recent events, though:


Lots of stuff can happen in a month. Early November, I was waiting to find out if I passed my comps, job-hunting, taking care of Iris, and driving Tinker all over the place. Fast-forward to now and I'm prepping for graduation, have a full-time job starting the day after graduation, have Beatrix the fastest cat on four legs, and have a new-to-me car named Dewey. Dewey is a Mazda3 and he's awfully pretty. I drove 5 cars all over town and had probably the most patient car salesman ever. He only looked slightly annoyed one time when he got a car out and then I got in to drive it and drove it halfway around the parking lot and was like, 'No. This is not for me.' and parked it and asked to drive another one. Although it could also be that he couldn't get out of the car either because of some bizarre child-locking issue on that car, too. But, by the end of the sale, he was (of course) feeling much more positive and he even went and filled Dewey's tank up with gas for me! 
Here's a stock photo of the car via Google. Imagine it in a pale blue color and you'll understand how awfully adorable Dewey is:

That front grill looks like its smiling, doesn't it? What a cheerful, lovely car. 

I was kind of bubbly and excited getting the keys. I wasn't really looking forward to the entire experience because I felt like there were too many choices and I didn't want to waste anybody's time by test driving a lot of cars, but after doing research I decided that showing up and driving 4 would be the right thing to do. So, I drove 4 2010 models: Ford Focus (the one I wouldn't drive onto the road, only on the parking lot), Toyota Corolla (my second choice car. I really liked it. It was incredibly quiet. And the cheapest car, too.), Subaru Impreza (Loud, loud, loud. And Subaru redesigned the front seat to make it super uncomfortable. I like Subarus, but I'm not sold on the pricetag. I think other small cars are a better deal if you absolutely don't need to have AWD.), and then the Mazda3 (semi-quiet ride, comfy seats, roomy, awesome interior design, all-around the best of the 4.). Dewey was the second mazda3 that I drove. He was walled in by many other cars, so I drove an easier-to-get-out black one first. But, I'm just not that into black cars. And since I had a choice, I opted for Dewey, the blue one.


Also, my godmother is out of the hospital and at home! She's really interested in writing but has never been sure what to write about. Now she has something to write about and she's decided she will use this experience to start writing, so that's good. She's got a lot of hospital stories now. Especially Thanksgiving-hospital stories and they're all kind of funny as long as you don't have to actually spend a lot of time in a hospital. If you ever have been in one or have had someone in one for an extended stay, you probably already know how completely uninformed most of the hospital nurses and doctors are when it comes to patients. They never know what's going on because they have so many patients coming and going and they can't keep it straight. It's understandable, but kind of backward. You have so many different docs, nurses, techs, even the food people; nobody's really got a true idea of what's going on. Someone brings in a machine to hook the patient up to something and then they leave for a second to check on something and while they're gone, a nurse comes in and turns the machine off and leaves, and the tech comes back and gripes at the patient for turning off their machine. It's a comedy of errors, but if you make it out alive, it can lead to some doozies as far as stories go. Maybe my godmother will write a book about it now. She's got a killer wit, so I bet whatever she writes would be hilarious.  


I feel like I'm kind of back to neutral again after the last month. Things are different, but better.