And I love Fluttershy.
Put 'em together and you get something adorable.
This is from Saber-Panda on DeviantArt. She says it's okay to use it if you credit her (here's her page)
I'm now using it as my ravatar on Ravelry.
(And yes, I know, being another reality, the Ponies don't actually have Christmas, they have Hearth's Warming Eve, but still....)
***
I decided to say "heck with it, it's December" and I switched over to the "Classical Christmas" channel I have on Pandora. Because I need some cheer right now.
***
I'm trying to remain cheerful after receiving five fewer papers (on the absolute, don't-have-it-in-late-don't-even-ask, I've-been-telling-you-this-since-September due date) than I have students in my class. The upside is fewer to carry home and grade tonight and tomorrow; the downside is that I did have that "if it's late, it's points off" clause, which I suppose implies they can be turned in late, and I never quite have the intestinal fortitude to say "no" if it's a day or two late. But by golly this year, I'm gonna say, "Well, because of time pressures, it won't be graded before this weekend." (And if any come in after Friday, forget it.)
I never know if this is something I'm being unreasonably inflexible about, but I always learned growing up that due dates and things were Important. (And how does a person function, really, in the work world, if they miss deadlines? Any granting agency in the world would laugh at someone wanting "three more days" to get their proposal in...I don't even KNOW what would happen if I became violently ill the day before grades were due and could not get them in (I always submit them as early as I have them ready, just in case). I suppose some people DO grow up in a milieu where that kind of thing is not taught as important....but I'd hope that was something a person could learn. (Once again, I'm grateful I had the parents I do. I learned so much from them about how to navigate this world successfully that it seems a lot of people don't know. Even if I never received that Manual of How To Be An Adult I was always expecting would show up around my 18th birthday, I still manage pretty well.)
And yeah, it's possible some of them had emergencies....but I had someone show up to my office with the aftereffects of what sounded like anaphylaxis (they were asking to hand in their paper and go home without sitting through the day's talks, and I consented) and I had another person show up late for class and hand me their paper and said they had to run to the hospital afterward because a relative had been taken in by ambulance....so there are things a person can do (And I allow e-mailed papers).
I don't know. It's one of those old, "Every action you do has ripples, good or bad" things. Someone handing stuff in late to me means I don't get it graded as fast, they don't get the feedback as fast. Maybe it means I put off doing something I WAS going to do in order to make time to grade them. And it does wear down on my good will - it seems to be quite one thing to take, say, fifteen papers home to grade over a night and the next day, quite another to get two or three a day over the course of a week. I like to be able to mark stuff off as "done" and having late papers means I don't get to do that as soon.
I also had someone claim they didn't know they had to sign up for a presentation time.
Again, this was something I mentioned MULTIPLE TIMES. I wonder if I need to go to engraved invitations next year...
I admit this is another one of those "don't understand" things where maybe I'm being "too rigid" (I don't know, I really genuinely don't know). I was super-paranoid and super-compulsive as a student (part of the secret of my success) and I listened attentively and wrote down every announcement the prof made, and if I was at ALL unclear, I went and checked with them early on. But a failure to plan means that everyone else winds up having to scramble at the last minute, and I DON'T LIKE SCRAMBLING AT THE LAST MINUTE. I like things planned out and organized and ready to go, and when someone drops something like, "Oh, are there any times left on Friday? I didn't know we had to sign up." I'm left standing there with my mouth kind of hanging open, not knowing how to react, and being kind of in conflict, because on the one hand, part of my brain (perhaps the part influenced by my Prussian ancestry) is going "BUT THERE ARE RULES!!!!" and the other part of my brain, probably more influenced by my Christian background, is going , "But you also need to show mercy sometimes!" And so, I wind up confused. And sometimes not responding as graciously as I might nor as firmly as I could...
I also have one student who's been AWOL for weeks and I don't know what's going on with them. I have some students who "drop without dropping" (i.e., they give up on the class and accept the F, which sometimes is the better strategy for Financial Aid reasons than actually dropping the class - and yes, that makes me crazy that it is that way) but I've also had people disappear for a month, I assume they've dropped, and then SURPRISE! they're back. And needing to take the final that I didn't make enough copies of because I assumed they dropped...
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