My National Merit check came yesterday - yay, now I can pay my rent! (The other $2000 can come any time now, university officials... and so can my $77 textbook refund... it's only almost OCTOBER... any time now...)

I had my first linguistics exam this morning and it went, dare I say it, amazingly well. I knew how to do everything on it. I'm sure there'll be a few minor points off here and there - that professor is a perfectionist - but I'm expecting an A. Knock on wood.

I had to go to that stupid CPR class at work last night - there were only four of us there, though, and so it went relatively quickly. And the good part of it was that I got to meet some of the workers who are actually my age - N, M, and B. N works in the office and I always thought she was kind of mean, but now that I've gotten to know her, she's really all right. And I almost never see the other two because we all work in different classrooms, but B is short and red-haired and works with the two-year-olds while M is tall, thin, and blond - I never did hear which room she worked in. Anyway, it was nice getting to know them, and we'd all had the class a thousand times before so it went really fast.

And I discovered that everyone who works there hates our director, S, with a passion, which is reassuring, because I already had a bad vibe from her in the first thirty seconds. I was hired via e-mail by the owner - whom I still have not met - and I liked her a lot, but the director is something else again. C, who works in the infant room with me, had her house broken into (by her ex, as it turned out) and as she was flying out the door that afternoon, told S that she might be late coming in the next day because she couldn't leave her house if the lock wasn't repaired. S didn't bat an eye, just said, "Well, I'm sorry, but I don't have anybody to take your place - you have to come in!" C stared at her and just said, "That is my home, S!" And a similar thing happened when some of the workers were signing a 21st-birthday card for someone. S signed it, saying 'be good' among other things; then other people took their turns. Another co-worker said something like, "Forget S, just go party hard!" S ended up reading the card again - no one quite knows why; some of the more paranoid people insist she's spying on us - and she wrote, on the girl's birthday card, next to the 'offending' message from her friend: "Forget your job!" Now that I think about it, she probably meant "forget your JOB and go party" as opposed to forgetting HER, but the others didn't take it that way and they couldn't believe she'd written something like that on a birthday card. Neither could I, actually; anyone else would have known it was a joke.

As long as I'm griping, there's a double birthday party tonight in the courtyard for M, the new Dutch teacher, and S, my roommate P's best friend. And in my freezer are jammed six - count 'em, SIX - enormous bottles of vodka. Not counting the half-empty one on top of the fridge. I can't imagine the party possibly getting that big...

Anyway, I've got to go write something for TESL homework, so I'll be on my merry way now...