All's well in the land of Denmark

So... it looks like HSBC has finally gotten its facts straight. This week, I received a letter confirming the Robert Osborne agreement. Which is a good thing, since I found some folks to rent the house to, who seem like the type to actually take care of it (unlike the last tenant disaster). Also a good thing.

I also finally finished building the main database for my work. FileMaker Pro is fairly user-friendly, if a bit tedious. I am, by no means, an expert; but I do feel like I'm becoming marginally competent. I tried reading the manual first, but talk about mind-numbing. Instead, I just dove in and used the manual as I hit road-blocks. Clearly, I'm a learn-by-doing kind of girl. I just hope that it turns out better than my first memory of learning-by-doing:

When I was a little girl and it was just my mom and I living in a trailer in rural southeast Arizona, mom was doing some weeding and ended up disrupting a fire ant nest. She had to go inside rather quickly, but told me in no uncertain terms to stay away from the ants, or I'd get hurt.

I smiled. I nodded. And as soon as the door closed behind my mom, I squared my shoulders, hunkered down and pedaled my Big Wheel as hard as I could, determined to destroy the invaders.

Helas, I woefully underestimated the enemy and before long my mom had ran outside, swooped me up and all but hurled me into the tub, where she ran the shower on me - fully-clothed - until not a single ant remained.

Hopefully my FileMaker Pro interlude will end on a better, less painful note.

The dissertation is still a work in progress, but at least, this week, I felt like I was making some really good progress. I changed my sleep/work pattern, to relatively good success:

• I go to work from 8:30-5:30/6;
  
• stop by the garden to harvest greens, cukes, eggplant and/or squash (and let me say, I don't know WHAT I was thinking when I planted two zucchini plants, spaghetti squash, butternut squash, acorn squash, summer squash and TWO pumpkin plants);
  
• go home for dinner and phone calls;
  
• then to bed by 7:30 or 8 for a two-hour nap;
  
• followed by two or three hours of late night dissertating, before heading to bed for 6 hours of sleep.

It sounds insane when I write it out, but it works. Fridays are my dissertation days, when I don't go in to the office. Most days, it's a combination of dissertation and household chores, but yesterday it was sweltering misery all-around, since it was 84 degrees inside the house, triple-digits outside the house and my roommate has a strong antipathy to air conditioning at home (have I mentioned his room is for rent?). Needless to say, yesterday sucked. And both today and Sunday will be in the triple-digits. Yay. My roommate and I may well have to have a chat about that air conditioning attitude.

Well, gotta go: chapters to tweak, cold showers to take, and all that. But before I go, I must share the one thing that tore me up this week:

Hamlet on Facebook (courtesy of the folks at McSweeney's)

This is just...too...funny!! It is, IMHO, funnier than Long, Singer and Winfield's "The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged)" (1, 2, 3, 4)