Oh, What a Day...

So, I finally finished up the linguistics class that I've been taking. On the last day of class (yesterday) our professor gave us our exam to take home and send to him via email today. This was on top of another 4-5 page language paper, and an 8-12 page research paper also due this weekend. (Wasn't the class supposed to be done- done when we walked out yesterday?!). 


Anyway, the exam was impossibly hard and took close to six hours to finish. 
1. If it hadn't been a take-home, I never would have passed. 
2. If it hadn't been a take-home, I never would have finished in time. 
3. Did you know that disestablishmentarianism has 7 morphemes? It contains a free root and 6 derivational morphemes which have been circumfixed.
4. Is this knowledge ever going to matter in my life? 


Yes, this is the kind of thing we had to do on the exam- 33 of these words. We also had four essay questions, and we had to use a tree diagram to analyze sentences like, "Some of my most deserving students will have been teaching this course to similarly situated ELL colleagues next summer."
A. Who talks like this? 
B. This sentence took an entire page to diagram using the "complementizer" and "AUX" rule (we're not talking nouns and verbs, people)- I teach language arts and never knew such things existed! 


So, I finally finished the entire exam around 1:00am- I was determined to finish before Friday so I could "enjoy" my day off. 



Right around the time I was finishing, I decided to go ahead and try to sell my text book on Amazon. When I logged in to my account (the first time since early July), I saw a huge warning message telling me that I needed to ship my orders in a day or they would be cancelled. What? What orders? I thought I had cancelled these orders... when I first listed my books from my previous class, I instantly got two messages saying- "Order is now closed. Book is out of stock. Would you like to relist?" Since this was my first time selling, I had no idea what this meant, so I innocently clicked "yes". Little did I know that the books had already sold (closed = sold) and I was now listing them for the second time. I checked my Amazon account the next day and got the same message... hmm- this was confusing, so I decided just to scrap the whole thing and cancel all the listings I had posted until I could take time to figure everything out. I thought since I had cancelled everything, I didn't need to keep checking Amazon, plus the email account connected to my Amazon account is one that I never check (I know- not smart, but I thought I'd just check Amazon regularly!). That was all at the beginning of July. 


So, late last night (early this morning) I realize that I have sold my two books to four different people, and the orders were placed on July 2nd! I spent the next 30 minutes frantically emailing these people and apologizing profusely for my mistake and asking if they still wanted the books shipped out. Two people did, and I was able to run to the post office this morning to ship them out- $25 later, the books are gone. I know, I know- that is WAY too much for the shipping, but by the time I got to the counter, there was no going back. I just needed to be done with the whole situation! Plus, I get nervous in these types of places and just grab whatever looks right and do what the people at the counter say to do. 


If you're still reading this, I'll go on to share (briefly) about the next experience of the day... working with  the US immigration office. So, on Wednesday we finally got our notice about our 1600A form, and we received our fingerprinting date- and, it's during the time we will be on vacation with Don's family. Not good news. We waited a month for this form, our date is a month out, and we can't make the date. They tell you that if you can't make the date, you need to resubmit the form and wait for them to give you another date. This does not sound like a good option to us, so I try to make some headway by contacting the agency directly and pleading with them to have mercy on us and reschedule the date for before we leave. Of course the person that I talked to (after navigating through a million different pre-recorded prompts) wasn't able to do anything, and of course, there is no phone number to directly contact the person who can help (?), but I did get a strange email address to try... so, we'll send that email out today and see what happens. We can't move forward with our adoption until we get our fingerprints taken and receive this last form, so we feel pretty urgent about getting this processed! 


And this was all before 11am on very little sleep. Plus, our house is a mess. The laundry has piled up, and we haven't had milk (or any other food) in the house for days. This summer has made the normal school year feel like a piece of cake! 


On a happier note, we also found out today that the first round of our t-shirts have printed, and we'll be able to pick them up next week. I'll post pictures as soon as I can, and then we'll open the Paypal account for people to start ordering.

Happy Friday!