Back from Hiatus

Where did the time go? Oh, yeah:

• Bar review [Sucktacular]
• Bar exam [No results until November, but I'm hoping/positive thinking I've passed. Why not?]
• Painted house which still hasn't been put to rights [But damn, can I blow through money!]
• New harddrive on computer [Buh bye, all info I didn't back up. Whoops!]
  
• New fan on computer [Also other screen type thingies and what nots. Including a new keypad housing. Nice!]
• New landscaping [What a monstrous pain in the ass. All around our small house, which is small, and yet still created a ridiculous amount of work. I even had 8 fucking yards of mulch delivered! EIGHT YARDS! Looks good, though! Except the girl is responsible for watering the plants, and she's not doing such a great job. So things are dying. Whoops again!]
• My 41st birthday!!! GO ME!!!!! I got a kick ass Canon Digital SLR that I'm afraid to use [thanks, graduation and birthday money!].
• Laundry like we're shedding skins
  

Today was the girl's first day of middle school. We used to call it junior high. I'm not sure what the difference is. The percentage of white kids? The median income?

She was WAY excited. WAY. Got up at 6am to get ready excited.

I'm glad. She loves school still and is excited rather than nervous, which bodes well, I think. She's in the middle school gifted program, which differs from her elementary school program in that the core classes [Lit, science, math, social studies] are gifted while the electives [I believe she is taking art, creative writing and shop? maybe?] are with the general student population. Her elementary was its own school, which I'm not going to lie, I LOVED. I hope she does well with the rest of the kids; they can be cruel to smarties. Or to anyone, really. Fucking junior high bastards.

Funny story: I ran into a woman I knew from the girl's preschool. Her son is a year older than the girl, and she and I were quite close for a while. But time goes by and we had little in common but the preschool and our kids, and so we saw each other much less frequently, until it seems like once a year I run into her in random places.

Anyway, the funny part is, her son is going to the same middle school as the girl, but not in the gifted program. When she found out the girl was going to be in the gifted program, she said, "Oh, no. Those kids are a mess. Not right. They don't know how to interact with people. They shouldn't be in those programs. They need to be out in the general population so they learn how to deal with people. Otherwise they don't know what to do." Um, kind of like you right now? What the fuck? Are you telling me my kid is socially retarded? Do you not hear yourself, you fucking twit? Yeah, so she's not invited to our Second Annual Holiday Boozefest.