Whee! K, I wanna just ramble this off fast, but I doubt it’ll happen. I wanna work on something else soon but I wanna update too, so here goes! Friday was, as many of you figured it out, my birthday. I became 26, which isn’t really a huge deal, but it’s a year older than I was last year. My officemate did an awesome job of decorating the office with streamers, balloons and confetti (whee!), and she gave me a ton of loot: stickers galore, a big bag of M&Ms, a Mello Yello, a T-shirt of A Christmas Story, and a gift certificate for one “Get out of Advisement Free” session, hehe. Awesome! The rest of the department gave me a card, and our receptionist called and sang “Happy Birthday” over the phone. For lunch, Heather and I grabbed Jamie Smock and went to the Terminal. Fun!

That night, I got the present from the husband: The Complete Collection of Calvin and Hobbes comics! How cool is that! I love Calvin and Hobbes! I have already made it through the first of the three volumes. So cool. I had already gotten my gift from the older sis (A $25 gift certificate to Adagio.), but I got a card from her as well when I got home as well. I got e-cards from Sarah and George, and I got another card in the mail from Mom and Dad. They had given me a book while I was down for Thanksgiving: Chicken Soup for Cat’s Souls (or something like that; I’m so bad with titles), and Aunt Pamela gave me some stuff to be artsy-craftsy with (pics later if I think about it, which means I won’t, haha). Fun stuff. Thank you all! Oh, and Ian got me more M&Ms. Pink ones. They’re all pink. Every single one of them is pink. Pink pink pink pink pink pink pinkpinkpinkpink. Yup, all pink. Oh, they’re breast cancer awareness ones, if you’re wondering why they’re all pink. 🙂

So then that night rather than go out to eat at a spiffy place, I decided that I wanted another snail. I wanted one to bring into work again when we get back from winter break, so we went snail hunting. I got Cthulu at PetCo, and while we found everything else we needed (scrub brush, gravel, etc), there were no snails. The chick at the register said they hadn’t had any in the seven or eight months she’d been working there, and seeing as how I got Cthulu back in uh… Well, I’d guess it was like a year and a half ago or thereabouts. So we went to PetSmart. No luck. Went to PetLand. They had snails but most of their snails seemed to be either dead or not in great shape. I thought I’d try it; I figured I’d be giving the little guy a better home than here, so I bought one that the woman assured me was alive. I took the little golden, apple snail home and put him in the tank noting that there was something funny on his trapdoor but ignored that. A little while later, I confirmed that yes, the little guy was dead. I was sad, but then I noticed something crawling on him. Ew! Bug? No, but it was so pale, so small it was hard to tell what it was. Then the realization hit me: it was a baby snail! I got out a flashlight to get a better look, and not only was there the small gold one, but there was another one hiding just inside the shell of the dead snail. It was a little bigger and darker, the coloration looking a bit more like Cthulu’s, and eventually I decided to shake them both off the corpse and just keep them rather than worry about taking back the poor, deceased snail. So now I have a little one gallon tank with these two, tiny tiny little apple snails in it. Following in the vein of naming snails after Lovecraft characters, Ian looked up a bunch of names and I named the smaller, golden one Azathoth and the larger, bluer one Nug-soth. Pictures coming later. I can’t really connect to the @#$%^&* internet here yet on the laptop because of stupid programs that are retarded and I don’t have the FTP program on the desktop set up to connect to our server. Eh, I digress. Often.

So aside from the death of a poor, sweet snail, my birthday was fun and thank you to everyone who remembered. 🙂 Now, several hours after having started this post and several students later, I need to go do something productive. Maybe. I don’t have a lot of time left, really. Hehe.