Hesitant, Hopeful

It's supposed to snow again tomorrow.  If it does, that will make it the fourth snow storm we've had this season.  Last night, when I mentioned it to Matt he said, "We've had 21 years worth of snow in one winter!!"  He wasn't kidding.  Before this, in my whole almost 11 years living in Texas, we've had snow twice, and I was in California one of those times.  I'm enjoying it, to be honest, it's nice to have snow once in a while.  I think if we had it all the time, the novelty would wear off and make me cranky at how cold it is.  The last time it snowed, on the 11th of this month, it was actually 60 degrees and sunny the next day.  The weather here is so unpredictable.  In years past, it was already starting to get warm by this time.

In the gloom of the last few days, I've found it nearly impossible to focus on reading for class.  I'm supposed to be reading The Book of Margery Kempe but I'm having a truly hard time getting through it.  I should have started last week, rather than reading for fun, but I don't regret the time I spent reading Bound by Honor instead.  At least part of the problem right now is that I'd rather be reading Master and so reading the Kempe book feel a bit like punishment.  I'm sure I'll get through it, but that isn't making it any easier to swallow.

I also have a paper over Tender is the Night due on Wednesday and an annotation for the Kempe book due Thursday.  Fortunately, the paper only has to be 5 pages and annotations are fairly simple once I decide on an article to write over and get it read.  I've been thinking that I might do the rest of the semester's annotations some time this week, that way I have that done and out of the way.  I always think I'll do things up ahead of time and then never get around to doing them until they're due.  I'm such a procrastinator.

In non-gloom, non-school related news, I had my first article accepted at Demand Studios over the weekend.  This is a big step forward for me.  I waited to do it until now because my bio was still under review with them until last week and any articles written before the bio is accepted go as anonymous.  I want credit for my work, so I waited.  My first article was over tourist attractions in Stephenville, which was a topic I surprisingly found in their database.  I chose it for my first for obvious reasons, given that I live here.  It came back for a few very minor edits and clarifications, which I fixed, and it was accepted.  I'm actually fairly excited about this!  Unlike Helium (a site I love, by the way), all demand studios articles are edited by copyeditors.  You can't just publish anything you want.  So, to have an article published through them is very affirming.

Additionally, I just found out that my first Suite101 article, Free Software for Writers, was accepted tonight.  At Suite101, the first article has to be reviewed by a copyeditor before it can be published.  Until it's reviewed, no other articles can be written or published.  It took me 5 hours to write that article this morning, which is a long time, I put a lot of work into it.  Once it was done and submitted, I was waiting to see if it would need edits.  It didn't, they accepted it on the first go!  Three cheers for me!!   So, I'm going to work some tonight on a few other articles I have planned for Suite101!  So, I'm off to a good start this week with my freelance writing stuff.

Anyway, I started writing this post about  3:30 p.m. this afternoon, but Matt came in and interrupted me.  It's 9:40 p.m. now and I'm just getting around to finishing it.  The upside of that is that I get to share with you the good news about my Suite101 article, which hadn't been accepted yet when I began writing this post.  Matt met with his dad today, went to class, and met with his statistics group for a group project, which gave me some nice time alone today.  When he came home he wanted to go to Hastings and since we got our tax return today I got two books, Wuthering Heights and The Lightening Thief, and Matt got me "Jewel of the Nile" and "Romancing the Stone" and we would have gotten "War of the Roses" but they didn't have it.   We also splurged a little and took our some of our best friends out for Chinese food, because we haven't seen much of them lately and we missed just hanging out.

Tax money also means grocery shopping, which I both love and hate.  I enjoy shopping but I hate making the menu and grocery list, and trying to get Matt to go with me is like pulling teeth.  Of course, he acts like a 12 year old in the grocery store, and wants everything he sees, so taking him is always a mixed blessing.  I'm just hoping we have enough food around here for a few days, especially since it seems like we'll be snowed in tomorrow.   Cross your fingers that it happens, I love the snow, even if it does mean being cold... which I hate.  Although, I think I already covered this.

So, I'm off to watch "Romancing the Stone" and work on some of the articles I have planned for Suite101.  Good night.