Whoa, man. Caffeine.

The world is full of details! Color! Excitement! Andeveryoneismovingtooslowly!

lol. I wish. I'm not that caffeinated, but I'm getting there. I try not to rely on it too much, but this week (and possibly next week?) I need it. I'm not going to make it through life without a pretty little stimulant.

I have a Latin midterm next week. During class yesterday the lecturer (they're not called profs over here) made it very clear that even if we started right then, it is impossible to teach yourself everything we've covered in the last five weeks. Insert silent panic attack here, because I'm so confused and so far behind that's exactly what I was planning on doing this week.

And you know how I got a hold of myself? It was a spiteful little bit of work, even though I (obviously) didn't say anything out loud. But I had a moment of, "Fine. Challenge accepted. I'll prove you so wrong you'll be too embarrassed to say something like that to your students next year."

So I've worked it out that I need to cover two chapters a day. (And by cover, I mean memorize the contents of.) Lots of memory work, but hopefully I'll be able to handle it.

Hopefully.

Other than my panic attack and general sleep deprivation, this has been a pretty fantastic week. Yesterday I received another congratulatory email from the Writer's Digest competition--which was thrilling enough in and of itself, but they awarded the only good haiku I've ever written FIFTH PLACE. Fifth place! I'm in the top ten of the non-rhyming poetry category!! Part of the rewards include fifty dollars (first time I've ever gotten money for my writing--Neil Gaiman was right, this is the COOLEST THING EVER), a copy of the 2011 Writer's Market (which is an immensely useful book if you're looking for places that might publish your work), and fifty bucks worth of Writer's Digest books. How fantastic is that? I feel so spoiled! :)

Handy-dandy wild girls

Today's been interesting. This whole week has been pretty fantastic, actually. All things considered. (The time taken to write this post is actually a major procrastination effort. =P) I received three emails this week from Writer's Digest, letting me know that I one of my short stories, Wings on Her Feet, won 31st place in their 2010 genre short story competition, and two of my poems (Morning Glory and Yesterday in the Sun) won 74th and 76th places in their 2010 non-rhyming poetry contest.

I was eating when the short story announcement came through, but I definitely screamed when I got the other two. Being in the top 100 for a contest of this size is just as immense as the competition. There were so many submissions that Writer's Digest is announcing 1,001 winners. (And as I told someone earlier, if I'd known thousands of people entered these contests every year, I probably wouldn't have.) But this is the kind of thing that will help me get published in other magazine and journals.

So, other than that, what else has happened this week? We had our first (and only) flat party. It got out of hand. I still had fun. :) Aaaand I got to spend today showing off my handygirl skills that I picked up a few summers ago while fixing up a house in Vegas, which was kind of fun. I tend to have a little too much fun with plaster. If I play my cards right, no one will ever be able to tell what happened. Which would be fantastic, because otherwise we're going to be charged an arm and a leg to replace a door.

Mostly, though, it wasn't such a terrible party. Quite a success, in fact, though later on in the evening was a bit more than I could handle. (I went to hide in my room after my friends left.) I had a healthy handful of friends show up, and I'm so, so glad they did. I had to disappear a few times to take care of different things, but it was wonderful to have people I knew to hang out with. And, of course, they kept me from completely losing my mind.

This is most of us (we should have gotten someone we didn't know to take the picture. Oops.):