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Excuse me, but there is vomit on my seatbelt.

"Ma'am, there is vomit on my seatbelt."

That's how my morning started. It is really the theme of the past couple of weeks for me. Not that things have been going poorly, things are usually working out as they did this morning. After informing the flight attendant of the disgusting discovery on the seatbelt which I had already buckled, and having to repeat myself three times, each time progressively louder until the entire 12 seat perimeter heard of my vomitous ordeal, the flight attendant informed me that I could move to the row in front of me to an aisle seat without a puke covered seatbelt. And yes I touched the puke, it was dry and flakey and easily mistaken for rust on the elder seatbelt that was to provide my safety on this morning's flight. So gross. Mental note - write a letter regarding seat 6F. Anyhow, despite the fact that my past couple of weeks haven't been moving incredibly smoothly, all of the little bumps in the road get resolved to an acceptable level.

Take for instance the GMAT which I took last Thursday. The morning started off with instructions to re-write a paragraph regarding the confidentiality of the questions on the GMAT. The instructions clearly stated, "Do not PRINT!" I can't remember the last time I wrote an entire paragraph in cursive. My performance on that task was an embarassment as was my score on the quantitative or math portion of the test. Due to advanced technology (read a program run in a DOS enviroment), one is able to immediately know their "unofficial" score on the GMAT. My math score greated me first. 51 % of people taking the GMAT do better on math than I did. I was below average. Ouch. Luckily, I kicked the crap out of the verbal portion of the test. Only 6% of people taking the GMAT do better on the verbal section than I did. That's right, all you mo fo's. I know most of the intricacies of the English language. Woo ha! It would appear that my careful attention to detail in the written analysis portion was unnecessary. Despite knowing how to use the English language well, I still had to be selective in my word choice as I ain't much of a speller. I countered that lack of skill by chosing synonyms to words I knew I was misspelling. Take that automatically scoring GMAT program! I also reread my paragraphs and eliminated all passive sentances. Not that there were that many, but I slayed them all, turning my responses into well-planned essays that accounted for a minimal portion of my score. Excellent.

The end result of scoring piss poor on the math section but rocking the verbal hiz-oss and spending way too much time on the written analysis portion is that my score is respectable enough to submit to most grad schools. Now all I need to do is secure some references, fill out a few applications and find funding for this next phase of my educational life. Joy.

A few of you asked for pictures of the house, and I really want to deliver on that, however uploading pictures on dial-up from a hotel room is just not in the cards. Maybe once I get back home for a few days, I'll devote a series of entries to the before and after of our recent efforts to make a 100 year old house inhabitable. This weekend's work brought forth the opportunity to inhale lead paint dust as we worked to refinish 100 year old baseboards. I know you are all jealous. I am embarassingly happy to announce that after more than two months, I finally woke up this morning and was able to turn on a light via this wonderful invention called a "Light Switch." I also plugged my alarm clock into a power outlet that was attached to wiring manufactured in this century. I did forget to use the newly installed closet light though, and am suffering from the fact that I grabbed my green dress pants versus my brown dress pants and will now have to wear my black capris tomorrow to my meeting to avoid a horrible color clash with my marroon colored sweater set. An innocent mistake, but one I could have avoided had I remembered that I now live in a home with modern conveniences such as electric lights.

Anyhow, I gotta run. I have to go to yet another business dinner. I'll try to catch up more on Wednesday!

4:50 p.m. - April 11, 2005

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