Our new kitty friend! She is very sweet, likes to sleep with us and can be talkative. She hides under the sofa sometimes. Her fur is very soft!

This week I completed my first week at Empire College in the Travel, Hospitality and the Wine Industry program. What a big change for me! I am feeling a bit tired and overwhelmed right now, and sometimes I wonder if I am doing the right thing. Most of my courses now are ones that I am testing out of such as Introduction to the Internet and Basic English, and the one I find most challenging is Keyboarding, the requirement of which is to type 30 words a minute (without looking at the keyboard!). The one I like the most is Career Transitions, which is all about the mind, always interesting! There many ways that I stand in my own way and this class is helping me figure out how to bypass them. It also reminds me how far I have already come!



I haven't been in an academic program since 1981 (besides my anatomy classes in massage school) so this is a huge change for me! I am also accustomed to sleeping in the morning and having a lot of flex time to do whatever I want. I will be going to school full-time and working at my part time job in the afternoons, so things are seeming very full for me. Eventually I hope to get a great full-time job and then my life of leisure will be forever over! I will get to take better vacations and get Paid during them, which is a big selling point of this whole endeavor. Paid vacations! Well, I never! But I'm gonna! Yup! I am really looking forward to having a more "grown-up" lifestyle and enjoying the perks of that, such as: world travel, better clothes, fabulous DJ set-up, and end to the constant state of fear that a life of poverty has inculcated in me.



So on the one hand this new path is very challenging for me, on the other I was so frickin bored that I welcome it! I have also made a comittment to work more at my little job at Transmagnetics so I don't have to rely so much on the support of others sooner rather than later. That will be a good feeling!

Two weeks ago Mark and I went to the Edwardian Ball. We met our friend Jen (who we had turned on to Jill Tracy), and her friend Eric there. Christopher was also there with his lovely sweetheart Naomi in his splendid new reversible waistcoat (spiraling skulls on one side, black-and-whitestripes on the other). I really enjoyed having a goth gang to hang out with! The Great American Music Hall was beautifully decorated with wonderful black-and white striped shapes and edwardian drawings, Jill was wearing "That Hat", the ballroom swirled with dancers and everyone was resplendent in their Edwardian finery. Sitting right next to us was a woman with a really nice camera, and it turned out that she lives less than a mile away from us here in the outlands of Sebastopol. Here are some pictures she took:



http://www.floating-world.org/lifestyle.htm



Official site (with pictures as well: http://edwardianball.com/

We all had a great time at my husband Mark's Birthday Party on Saturday. Here are some pictures. Enjoy!