As Catherine mentioned, she'll be gone for most of next week, so you suckers will be stuck with me. I promise to increase my blogging output to compensate, but you'll probably still want to update your internet routine appropriately.

More self-servingly, Charles will be leaving for a week, too. Goodness! Jon will still be around (although busy entertaining a guest), and Mark is usually available, so long as the planned activity involves acquiring experience points. Still, an entertainment surplus must be coordinated! Let me know if ya'll are up to anything exciting.

the long national nightmare is over. tommy and i have taken the GRE with more-than-reasonable success. hurrah! we're about to sign a lease on an apartment with charles. hurrah! i go to the beach tomorrow for a week. hurrah!

now i can finally let that little ball of stress that was building up behind my eyeballs melt away. apologies if i've been a huge bitch to anyone this past week, but now i can go back to my normal, only stressed-out-and-paranoid-three-quarters-of-the-time self.

the GRE went as well as could be expected. tommy's appointment was a couple of hours earlier than mine, so we went in separately. they basically sit you in a windowless, camera-monitored room with a little gray cubicle and a crappy computer and say, GO! once again, i scored nearly equal on verbal and math, which continues to astonish me because i am VERY terrible at math. in fact, i basically guessed at half the questions on the math section. i would see time was down to 15 minutes and i still had like 32 questions or something to go, and i would say, okay, the area of that particular shape-y thing is...3 square root of 2! sure! makes sense. not that i actually did any equation to come to 3 square root of 2, but why not!

i thought verbal was a lot easier, and i wish i'd done better on it. i didn't quite break 1400, which was my goal, but i came awfully close and my verbal score was still like 80 points higher than the average of a journalism grad student at berkeley (the arbitrary standard to which i was holding myself) so i was satisifed with the results. tommy did significantly better than i, so no doubt he will go to The Best School Ever for Whatever It Is He Wants To Do (that weird cognitive science/neuroscience thing).

also compounding my happiness is the fact that we're about to sign a lease on a very cute apartment in d.c. it is kind of between the convention center and logan circle. it's not the hippest or most centrally-located part of town, but the apartment is adorable, with 15-foot ceilings, lots of exposed brick, great windows, and a neat balcony overlooking a "historic alley." now, based on what that alley looked like to me yesterday, you could call any alley with trash and cracked concrete "historic", but whatever. it's a great little street, with rows of well-maintained, freshly-painted houses and a grocery store right around the corner. frank ahren lives there now, we learned, who used to be the radio critic for the washington post but now writes for some other section. apparently a while back he wrote an article about his apartment and the neighborhood, but the wapo archives have not revealed it to us. weird. i'm going to be a dc resident. weird! i haven't been one since i was 9 years old.

anyway, i've got to get now to some mundane chores like cleaning out the carport and mowing the lawn, which i am extraordinarily happy to be doing, because they are not a) taking the GRE or b) looking exhaustedly for a place to live. amen.

TOM SAYS: So, like Catherine said, it was a productive morning. I ended up with a 1470, which I'm happy with, although I was hoping for a really amazing, boiling-ocean, rain-of-blood kind of score, given that my letter of recommendation best case scenario is currently "Dear Sir or Madam: Records indicate that the student to which this application pertains attended one of my classes." Math was a little too brutal for my girlish dreams to be realized, however -- too much probability stuff, too little geometry. Oh well.

If anyone's curious, here's a link to a map of where our new place is (note to internet perverts: no stalking, please). I'm apprehensive about moving out of Arlington, but anxious to be able to put a check mark next to "lived in the city" so I can flee back to suburbia's WASPy patrician embrace without qualms. Anyway, it'll be good to have a change of pace.