Totally awesome phone call:

A little background: my roommate has two chinchillas. One of them had been losing some weight, so she took them both to the animal hospital while she was out of town. This resulted in the following phone call:

Roommate: I heard from the vet about Jasper and Jeffrey.
Me: How are they?
R: Well, Jeffrey hasn't been losing weight, Jasper has been gaining weight.
M: Really?
R: You know how I know that?
M: No...
R: Because Jasper just had a baby!

We did know that she was female, but she is pretty old to be popping them out, and my roommate had thought she was done. But apparently not.

So apparently I'm a great aunt or something.

Update of sorts:

I know, I've written nothing about my trip, even though I've been receiving some awesome pengin-rlated links from friends, and this email won't change that.

I've been sick and insanely busy at work since I got back, so I haven't managed to do any updating. I did put the Romania pictures on snapfish and sent out an email to that effect over the weekend. If you didn't get this and would like to see the pictures, send me an email (kathleen -at-alumni-dot-uchicago-dot-edu will get you a faster response than anything else). I will attempt to load some of the good pictures onto web space for those of you who don't want snapfish accounts, but that is at best several weeks in the future.

I did write one very long post about how unhappy I was with the Church's selection of the new pope, but it took too long and blogger crashed when I tried to publish. So look for that in the near-ish future (this weekend should be a bit more relaxed so I'll try it again then).

Back:

Made it back a couple of hours ago. Sorry no updates, but I had slow to no internet access most of the time. I promise that I will sort through the pictures and put stuff up later, but I'm tired and have some phone calls to catch up on.

But my trip was really fantastic and I definitely have a lot to say about it.

Off to Romania:

Yes, I know, long time between posts and all that. My mother was in town last weekend and Friday I was busy with some other people and it's really hard to find time during the week between having to finish my taxes and do some prep for the trip and, you know, go to work.

Anyways, I'm off to Romania tonight. I'll be back Saturday the 16th. I will have email access at least some of the time, but I'm not sure where we are going or how good the internet access there will be, so I may not be so contactable.

Nothing much to say about the Pope except that, whatever you feel about his politics, he was a deeply moral man. And I'm not too excited about anyone who seems to be on the short list to be the next one.