Well, this week ended a lot better than it started. So no curling up in the corner eating my hair:

1. I e-mailed the student whose paper I lost. She is cool about it; she is going to bring me a new copy today which I will then grade IMMEDIATELY.

(And what do you bet I find the original lost paper some time next week?)

2. I was discussing the pick-through method to try to find soil arthropods with a colleague who has done similar research involving benthic organisms. He asked how many additional ones I was finding. When I told him, he said, "Great googly moogly*! Why are you bothering? I would do 1/4 of the total samples, and then, if you're only finding those few, conclude that additional sampling does NOT contribute significantly to diversity or abundance metrics."

Which means if I examine two more samples and don't find tons of stuff (I do not expect to), I'm done with that part.

(*OK, he didn't say "Great googly moogly" but I am euphemizing for the blog)

So I get some 20+ hours of my life back that I had already imagined would be spent staring at mud through a microscope.

3. The furnace seems to be fine now. (Charles, I've had that issue before - I had oxide buildup cleaned off last year. So I am somewhat familiar with the stuff that can go wrong. And I smelled very carefully for a gas leak before doing anything, and all I could detect was the usual dust/old books smell that my house has anyway. If it happens again I'll get the guys out, but I've also had times when I panicked, spent an afternoon waiting on them, just to be told, "Ma'am, all we had to do was reset it." But seeing as I had the furnace inspected and pronounced perfectly healthy less than a month ago, I figured it probably wasn't any of those problems).

4. Several people about whom I care who have had health problems recently are doing better, including someone who had their gall bladder out (successfully) yesterday.

5. When I got home yesterday afternoon, there was a big box from Amazon on my doorstep. That surprised me, as I hadn't ordered anything from them, and the package my mother told me to be expecting (for my birthday next week) had apparently already come (I haven't opened it yet; I've decided to "save" what birthday gifts come for me and open them on the actual day). So I decided to open it, on the off chance something was sent to me by mistake.

It was, in fact, a big wrapped hardcover book. (I do not know what book; I didn't open it). I didn't even know Amazon did gift wrapping (My family and I are cheap that way - when we mail order stuff as gifts, we never pay the $5 additional or whatever to have it wrapped). It was from one of my aunt and uncles.

Which surprises me a lot - my understanding was that the rule in the family was, after you hit 18, no more extended-family birthday gifts. So I guess they either decided that since this was a "landmark" birthday they'd send me something, or else they found something they decided was just so perfect they would have to send it to me.

Either way it's a nice surprise. (And yes, I will send them a thank-you card after I have opened it).

6. Progress on the sleeve continues (slowly). I'm already contemplating next-project status. (Lord knows I have enough wool packed away). Right now, I'm torn between the Burma Rings pullover (you will have to scroll down)and Rosedale. I bought the yarn for Burma Rings from Yarn Forward last year as my birthday present to myself (also Yarn Forward was having a good sale at the time). The benefits of this project are it's all knit round, so the vast majority of the sweater will be a simple, knit-while-you-read type of thing. But Rosedale is pretty! And it's Kureyon! And I think I've had that in stash longer than the Burma Rings yarn.

Of course, I also have the Airy Cardigan packed away. I have a tiny bit left to do on the body but I kind of stalled because I need to alter the pattern to lengthen the sleeves (I do not like 3/4 sleeves on myself - for one thing, it makes me look like I'm wearing my little sister's sweater (and I don't have a little sister) and for another, you can't wear a 3/4 sleeve sweater over something long sleeved without looking like a sk8r girl wannabee, and it's more practical for me to have a sweater that looks good with both short and long sleeved tops.

And it's not even that HARD, I think, to figure out the alterations, but it will require sitting down with a pencil and paper and some gauge calculations and figure the thing out, and I've just not had the energy to do that.

Though maybe I should re-start the Airy Cardigan; we are coming into the time of year when it would be ideal.