Had fun at the party last night. My gift (the felted bag) got "stolen" once (we play that game where you take numbers, and each person in order chooses to unwrap a gift or "steal" a gift someone else has already unwrapped) so I count it as a successful gift. (Also the fact that people handed it around and exclaimed over its cuteness).

I wound up with a "gift basket" featuring some cute but possibly-not-diswasher-safe Christmas themed mugs, some mini marshmallows (the good kind, not the dehydrated kind) and hot chocolate, and also a little box of Gevalia coffee. (As I am not a coffee drinker - which I did not mention at the party to avoid hurting the feelings of the giver - I'm going to take it home with me, if I can fit it in my bag, and give it to my folks, who are.)

(Funny, that. I have lived here 5+ years and I still refer to going to visit my parents - who do not still live where I grew up - as 'going home.' But you know what I mean.)

The gift also had some excellent little tree-trinkets on it, and a nice bell, and a big wide red-green-and-gold ribbon that I'm seriously considering using as a hair ribbon on a day when I'm dressed more festively.

I love this time of year. I know there's some gnashing of teeth among other academics at this time, and I don't know if I'm lazy or just lucky in how I work out the due-dates for student papers or projects, but honestly - once I write two more exams, I'm essentially done (except for the regular showing-up-to-teach and prepping-before-teaching part) until exam week.

I love the way you can see the semester winding down, the way committee and departmental meetings give way to departmental potlucks and get-togethers-for-cookies.

(And yes, dammit, for me the season does partly revolve around food. And no, I don't abstain from anything I like, no matter how calorific. Considering that my adult weight has been mostly stable or down since I took up an exercise regime, I figure that a couple pieces of fudge now and then, or some cheese ball and crackers, isn't going to make that much difference in my longevity. [what's the crack about the people on the super-restricted-calorie diets? that they don't live longer but it just seems that way because it's so tedious?])

But anyway, it's a pleasure to see the responsibilities end, one by one, as the season hurtles on. Next week, two of my three classes involve just presentations by the students - so although I have to show up and grade, I don't have to talk.

I did write the one class - the mathematically-based one - exam(S) this week. I say examS because it's a take home, and I have a suspicion that the last take home I gave resulted in some, erm, collaboration between a couple individuals. I can't prove it so I can't but them, but I did make up four separate (but equivalent) versions of the exam (which included making four separate grading keys and working all of the problems four separate times to make sure I didn't make a bonehead mistake on one of the data sets and give them an unsolvable problem).

The next problem will be ensuring that each of the suspected collaborators gets a different version; I'm not sure how to work that without being garishly obvious about it.

As for my other two classes, I have taught essentially the same topics in the same way as I taught last semester - and I don't hand finals back, so I think I can do some serious question-recycling and pretty much be done with them.

There are few feelings better, in an academic's life, than having your final exams written.

Worked on the ongoing projects (Clapotis and the Mosaic scarf) between coming home from school and going to the party last night.

And this weekend, I hope to get a lot of knitting done: once again, the ABC Family Channel - which I normally avoid like the plague - is re-running many of the good old Rankin-Bass Christmas specials from my youth. (This is about the only time I engage in an extended wallow of television; most of the time it fails to hold my attention for more than forty-five minutes or so at a time. And that's even WITH knitting).