Thessaly's Tooth

97 days until the wedding, and less than that until I leave Chicago forever. For some reason, when I picture myself making my final exit from the city, I picture myself galloping south on Lake Shore Drive on horseback, waving my hat in the air and whooping and hollering with glee. But that’s just because I’m weird. In reality, of course, I’ll be in a plain old moving truck with the two cats in their carriers meowing loudly and plaintively next to me. They’ve been moved around quite a lot in their short lives. My college roommate and I adopted them our senior year, and they had to be moved around quite a bit during that year to keep from getting caught by the authorities. When I moved back to Nebraska they flew back with me, and we moved in with a friend for the summer. Between us we had three cats, one dog, two newts, a bird, and several tanks of fish. My cats didn’t care much for the competition. We moved two more times while in Lincoln, then moved to my first apartment in Chicago, and then to the current place. They like moving less and less every time. I think they’ll be happy with their new place, since it’ll be bigger and they’ll have an extra human to annoy, but they won’t like the moving part.
The ten-hour drive from Lincoln to Chicago was the worst from my point of view, since I had to listen to Teti meowing the entire time. I had a John Denver tape in the car and I found that singing along loudly with that quieted her to some extent, but that was really the only thing that helped.

It looks like the Assyrian gallery of the Oriental Institute Museum is getting ready to open again–I can see the bull-man smiling at me through the glass doors when I come into the building. They say those things were supposed to intimidate people as they came through the gates, but he sure looks friendly to me. They’ve been working on the museum at least since I moved here in 1998. Hey, that was a long time ago–how old am I anyway?

They say (“they” being, for example, my mother) that one is responsible for one’s own happiness. I found this difficult to believe for a couple of decades, but now realize that this is right, it

This weekend I visited Andy up in Michigan for Valentine

Very little to report here. I’m now halfway through my last quarter of classes. It’s this time of the quarter when I start to get worried about the amount of work I have to do in the next six weeks.
They are working on the roof (?) of the first story of the school building that’s being built across the alley from my apartment window, which means the construction guys are walking around on a level with my window. It’s a little unnerving to look up and see people walking around at eye level from your second-story apartment. I used to have this fear that I would someday look out an upper-story window at night and see an apparition floating outside, looking in at me. My fear came true a couple of months ago when they were putting some kind of metal covering over the electric wires that go down the alley outside my window–I kept hearing some kind of noise out there, and I looked out and there was somebody floating out there, looking back. Eeek! It was after dark and he was in one of those cherry picker things working on the electric wires. Actually, it wasn’t very scary…another fear faced and conquered I guess.

We’ve created a website with all sorts of info on our wedding and wedding-related topics. Check it out, and if anyone ever creates a trivia game about us, you’ll have the winning edge.
Things are quiet here. I’m reading about the pyramids this evening for an exam. My cat, Teti, was named by my college roommate (and currently my bridesmaid) after a character in an Agatha Christie book, but it turns out Teti was also the first king of the sixth dynasty and had a pyramid at Saqqara. I knew there was a reason why she acts so superior all the time.