You Got to Know When to Hold 'Em

The weird warm snap is over, and it's unmistakably November again, which is a-okay with me. I made beef stew in the crock pot Friday, served with homemade rolls. Dinner may get better than that, but I'm not sure how.

This was a wonderful weekend all around (despite the heartbreaking Steelers loss to the Colts yesterday). Soccer is finally over, so The Boy and I spent Saturday and Sunday at my parents', where we baked and ate and watched football and hockey and played board games and knitted and just made my parents very happy by being there.

The Boy and I were scanning through radio stations on the way home last night, and I made him stop to listen to Kenny Rogers sing about The Gambler. (What? Everyone should know that song!) He said, "Is he talking about poker but referring to life? Because those are some good tips." I'll make an English major of him yet. We also discovered, in scanning across the radio dial, that the stupid station that plays nothing but Christmas music through the holidays has already started. Too soon! Too soon! The Boy doesn't think so, but I do. I'm a firm believer in No Christmas Until After Thanksgiving, which means that the radio station and Hallmark (who can stop it with their noisy, creepy No Peeking gift bags and Sheryl Crow's very first Christmas album) and Garmin (with their damn commercial sung to the evil Carol of the Bells (I hate the way it's so frantic: "Here come the bells! So many bells! Oh, God the bells! I hate the bells!") and all the other stores who are pushing their Christmas crap need to shut up and leave me alone.

Or else I need to avoid everything but PBS and NPR for another few weeks.

Oh, also: I spent a little time working on some GRE sample questions, and guess what! I'm not stupid! (Or, at least I don't think I'm any dumber than I was when I took the GRE a million years ago.) That's the good news. The bad news is that while I have a decent vocabulary and grasp of the English language, and still remember how to do much of the math I learned in high school, I continue to have the terrible habit of rushing through exams and making stupid mistakes because I haven't read the questions carefully enough. I blame my friend K, who used to race with me in grade school to see who could finish everything first. Damn K!