Of Courses, Not, Again

     This spring semester, I decided not to take any classes for my Master's degree program.  None of the classes that were offered appealed to me or fit my plans.  Also, I wanted to study for my exit exam.  I was waiting through February to get my notification to schedule my test.  I knew that the test was to be given in April, but I wasn't getting the email about it. Finally, I decided to email my advisor about it, since I had only a little of a month left to try and study.  I had to check the spam folder of my university email account to get the right address, when I found the notification.  It had been sent to the wrong folder, and I hadn't noticed it since I rarely check that folder and it didn't have a notice of new emails.  At least none I could remember.  I had missed the deadline to schedule my test by one day.  I sent the email any way, with the reason why I was late.  The reply came back within the week saying I could still take the test if I hurried to schedule it.  Unfortunately, that was when I started having problems with the account.  Some days, my university account wouldn't even acknowledge that I had an email address.  By the time I could respond, I barely had a month left to study, so I decided to put of the test until the next available time this November.  Besides, the test would be given on Good Friday, so I didn't really feel that was the right time.  Since then, I have not had any new emails directly from the university, even the automatic ones.  This is in addition to the times my email doesn't even show up.  That is why I didn't get the notification that is was time to register for classes for the Summer and Fall semesters.  I only found out by checking the school calendar the day registration was supposed to start.  Fortunately, I was able to look over the available classes and their required tests in plenty of time.  Unfortunately, the classes are again not exactly what I'm looking for.  There are three available classes that I can take over the semesters, with the possibility of a fourth.  For early summer, there is a course on contemporary fiction, although not of the books are really recent or 'contemporary.' Two of the works are by authors I do not like at all, and a third is one that I never even heard of.  In late summer, the course being offered is on early twentieth-century American fiction.  This one was offered a few years ago for the short Winter semester.  Three books, all depressing.  At least reading them in the summer might make them somewhat more cheerful.  There is also a second course on the teaching of writing.  I don't know if I would be able to take this course, as it is more in the education field than English, but it could count as an elective, maybe.  However, the text for the course doesn't sound like it is about teaching or writing.  In fact, I can't find out anything out about it yet, save that it is available at the university bookstore.  Finally, there is one course being taught in the fall that I haven't taken yet, topics in literature.  For this selection, the topic is environmentalism.  No.  While I'm not against the environment, I don't want to be reading selections about how the field is dealt with in literature.  None of these classes suit me or my plans for my degree or interests.  I don't see any way I could find a way into any of these classes easily.  If I can't find a way, I just won't be able to get through them.  That's how I was able to pass many of my other courses in graduate school.  Yet, for these four, I don't see a way.  It's making me doubt if I even want to complete my degree.  It isn't the one I was aiming for, a MFA in creative writing, and I'm not even sure what I would do with this one, if I complete it.  I just don't know what to do anymore, and it is driving me crazy trying to find a way out.

Three Hundred Posts on the Blogcast, Three Hundred Posts in All

     Today marks the 300th post on this blog, or blogcast as I prefer.  I'm trying to create a new word here, and it is taking awhile to make it accepted.  It has almost been six years since I started this little thing as a way to get back into writing.  Since I started this blog, I started a second blog for my store that was co-hosted here on Blogger (that blog has pretty much ended as I didn't have enough new material about my store to keep it going).  I started a third blog just for my literary pursuits.  That one is about halfway through my second novella/short novel.  Sure, it is just a first draft, but it is successful.  I had my store join Facebook, with my own joining initially secondary.  I now share my blogs with links there.  I also have my own YouTube channel.  I've posted over seventy videos there, shared with my pages on Facebook and LinkedIn.  I haven't created a social media juggernaut, yet, but the structure has been set up for it.  I didn't have a computer the first few years, so most of those early posts had to be short, as I usually only had fifteen to twenty minutes most weeks.  This is also explains why I'm missing the occasional week in my posts.  Other missing weeks are due to posting on the wrong blog and losing the posts before I could paste them in the right spot.  Those were replaced at a later date, so there still is about one post per week.  It took me some time to come up with the best topic.  Supposedly, this blog focuses on puzzles and games, but I am prone to digressions.  I have even posted many of my own puzzles.  Just last month, I ended a four week span of new puzzles.  Those last two weeks took extra time to finish, but those were two of the best puzzles I ever came up with.  I could barely stop with them, as I kept wanting to come up with more of them.  Even when I don't talk about puzzles, I frequently use wordplay in the post titles.  Puns are most common.  For instance, today's post title is to be sung to "Bottles of Beer on the Wall."  Sometimes, I place hidden messages, either in the title or buried in the main text.  I hid a message in the first letters of the words in a title just last December.  You just might find it, in the end, if you traffic luck, that is.  Entertainment is another common theme, mostly about what I find fault with, more so than what I really like.  I also talk a lot about animals.  One of my first posts was about an emu at house I drive by on my way to work.  Alas, the emu/s were sent away shorty thereafter, but that doesn't mean the animal fun has ended.  Just last week I mentioned bunnies, as part of an Easter post. I also talk about my own problems, probably too much personal information, but I can't help it.  This blog is a part of how I deal with and air out my grievances.  I rarely use tags any more.  It is just too hard to come up with new ones some weeks, or just rehashing the same old ones.  I don't post too many picture, either.  I just have problems getting them how I want them to look on the page.  Links are the same.  Cutting and pasting is just tiresome, at times.  I don't even have links to the posts I mentioned here.  While I now have my own computer, I still try to keep my allotted time to thirty minutes or so.  This keeps my posts tight and easy to read.  I have no idea how much longer I will keep this blog going.  I usually get my ideas a week or more ahead of time, so I currently have no plans of changing my schedule or discontinuing this.  Here's to everyone who has enjoyed my thoughts and words for the past six years, almost, and here's to many more.

The Rabbit Leaps Tonight

     I love rabbits.  In fact, the rabbit is my primary spirit animal. (I have a few others, but I usually keep those secret. Mostly as a test for those who claim they can know this type of thing.) This time of year just seems to intensify such feelings, seeing so many rabbits everywhere as decorations.  Sure, the living animals can be cuter, but I don't get to see them in the wild too often.  Then, there are the numerous videos.  Watch one short rabbit video on Facebook, and soon the feed is flooded with them for the next week or two.  I don't mind it though.  Anyway, Easter.  This was one of the first holidays that stopped being a childhood tradition with me.  Halloween and Christmas would last a lot longer as special, but once I was too old for baskets, the holiday lost something.  Things changed in the mid-to-late 90s though.  I started to get back into getting marshmallow Peeps and chocolate-covered eggs.  This was the height of the regular Peeps, when there were still seven colors.  This was just before the flavored marshmallow varieties debuted.  A few years later, strawberry- and vanilla-cream eggs showed up, with orange-cream soon after.  Then, the flavor boom took over, as regular Peeps were whittled down to just five colors.  Now, there are almost a dozen different flavors, especially when exclusives are taken into account.  Some flavors even stay around until early summer. This year, I only got one box of the "Sparkling Berry" bunnies and nothing else.   Many of favorites are no longer being produced, not even for other holidays.  For instance, a few years ago, Peeps had cherry marshmallows with a chocolate drizzle for Valentines Day.  They only lasted a few years, but they were great.  Peeps didn't even have Valentines Day varieties this year, although both Halloween and Christmas had full line-ups.  Then, there are the chocolate-covered marshmallow eggs.  About the same time I came back around to Peeps, I started trying the eggs again as well.  My favorite brand as a kid (maybe Luden's, I really can't remember after so much time) was no longer to be found anywhere.  I used to get boxes of them at a time, and eat my way through them fairly fast.  Each wrapper was it one of four colors, but I might be remembering it wrong.  I'm still looking for them, or any trace of what happened to them.  Anyway, I tried other eggs.  These were flavored, beyond just marshmallow.  My favorite was eating a strawberry and a banana one together, the eggs split in half and then taken together.  For a very short time, there was even a mixed chocolate and vanilla cream egg.  It was wonderful, but it was discontinued after just a year or two.  Even banana was stopped for a few years, before it returned as a whip filling instead of a cream.  Not as easy to mix and match anymore.  No one local even carried it this year.  I was lucky to get a few on a trip back in February.  I will be eating my last one this Easter, another tradition I started back in the 90s.  I would eat them in the afternoon while watching a favorite Easter movie, Night of the Lepus. TNT used to show it back when they aired movies that were over twenty years old on a regular basis.  Anyway, the plot of this cheesy, B- horror flick is fairly simple.  A town was being overrun by a rabbit population boom, threatening their crops.  A scientist was brought in to come up with a solution, basically bunny birth control.  The scientist's daughter wanted a bunny of her own, so she was given one of the control subjects.  However, she liked another one better and switched them out.  Before she could get the bunny back home, a mean teenage boy knocked the rabbit out of her arms, and it fled into the wild.  Flash forward, and the town is now being overrun by a stampede of giant rabbits, bigger than elephants. Close-up footage of slow motion domestic rabbits hopping were used for the stampeded.  The town's solution was to flood the way into town and take down the power line, thereby electrocuting the poor things.  Actually, I kind of liked the movie up until that point.  I just have a thing for giant growth. The final scene almost implied that the remaining regular rabbits might still have the altered genes for this to occur again.  TNT stopped airing the movie on Easters decades ago.  For awhile, they showed Bible movies, which were appropriate and fairly good.  Now, they don't show anything special, or it they do, I don't watch.  But, I still have Peeps and chocolate eggs.

This Is an Anagram!

     Last Friday was April Fool's Day.  One of my games, SongPop 2, had a new category for in-game purchase for the holiday.  The category is "Anagrammed Artists."  Like always, the player gets a sample of a song and has to guess the correct title or artist. (Occasionally, one has to guess something else, such as the year, but those categories are rare.) However, instead of guessing the correct artist, one has to choose from a list of anagrammed names instead.  For example, if "Wannabe" is played, the correct answer isn't Spice Girls but 'Pig Slicers.' For "Bad Habits," the correct answer is 'Sedan Here,' instead of Ed Sheeran. Many of the answers are funny, but it can be pretty tough trying to get the correct answer quickly.  At least one of my competitors pretty much swore in the conversation after playing this category the first time, hence the hidden expletive in the title above. This new category debuted in between two different award show, both of which could also be described by this same title.  First, there was the Academy Awards/Oscars.  Right from the start, I knew there would be trouble.  The first presenters had mic issues that plagued the broadcast.  The first performance sounded well-enough, but the appearance was troublesome.  The pre-recorded segment was on a yellow-green background matching the wardrobe of the performers.  At the time of day it was recorded, the brightness drowned all of the visuals out.  It would have looked better with a slightly different shade for either the backdrop or the wardrobe, or if it had been shot at a darker point.  Many presenters were missing their cues, probably because so many were non-professionals and were unused to the style.  The entrance music for many of the presenters were not quite suitable.  "Africa." "La Isla Bonita." "Beggin'" What?!?! The camera seemed to be all over the place.  I couldn't tell if a shot of J. K. Simmons instead of Timothy Chalamet was part of a joke or not. It could have gone either way.  While the hostesses were adequately funny, something seemed to be off all night, and this is before 'The Slam,' which I will not talk about.  I will talk about the 'Bruno' performance.  I wonder, how many parents were allowing their kids to stay up to see the actual voice actors singing "We Don't Talk about Bruno," only to have them drop out after the first verse, to be replaced by Meegan Thee Stallion rapping about the Oscars.  At least she didn't use any expletives, like in most of her own songs. Maybe the song will be performed at next year's Grammys, where it has a good chance at being nominated.  Speaking of the Grammys, they were on this past weekend, after a three month delay.  While many of the performances were good, I didn't really like any of them.  While I like a few of the performers, they didn't perform any of the songs I liked.  During some commercial breaks, some lesser known artists in non-broadcast categories got to perform.  Maybe the entire song was on streaming, but I only saw the start and ending.  Many of the biggest genres of music were highlighted, save rock and rap/hip hop.  The former had the unfortunate lack due to having the Foo Fighters dropping out due to the death of their drummer.  The latter was just part of the ongoing allegations of the Grammys hatred of the genre.  While many rap/hip hop artists are boycotting the proceedings, that didn't stop The Weeknd for getting a win as a guest artist on a Kanye West track.  The Grammys must really love Bruno, Mars, as he, or rather Silk Sonic, won all four categories they were nominated in.  Meanwhile, Jon Batiste won five of the awards he was nominated for, including 'Album of the Year.'  I still find it strange that such a niche artist had so much praise.  I hate to admit this, but I had a conspiracy theory that his network, which also broadcast the show, influenced some of the outcomes.  The memoriam segment was plagued by the same bad camerawork that the Academy Award had.  Some names couldn't be seen from such a distance.  Unlike previous years, where some of the deceased had a piece of their music playing, this year had a selection of Sondheim works performed throughout.  This included "Send in the Clowns," which wasn't one of his favorites, although it won 'Song of the Year.'   In all, viewers were down for both shows.  The Oscars just felt too diverse this year, so much so, that it couldn't appeal to anyone in particular, even when it tried. The Grammys were just too inclusive.  While they have always celebrated all forms of music, I doubt there is anyone out there who listens to more than three or four of the featured performers and/or genres on a regular basis.  So, basically, my title for this post sums up how so many feel about both.