I have been working on cleaning up the house although if you walked in the house you wouldn't know it! I've been doing laundry, dishes, and picking up, but wouldn't you know that there are already more clothes and dishes to wash and stuff has already found its way out of "its place". I'll continue to work on cleaning it so that we'll be ready for Christmas time. We are hoping that we'll be able to see some of our friends, and I want to the house to be decent so that I won't do too much work (otherwise, I'll feel too anxious and exhausted to fully enjoy the time with our friends). We are so excited to spend time with our friends because my illness and Andy's work and school have prevented much of our freedom.
Andy and I have been working on his graduate plan; on Thursday, he also met with several professors. The plan was that he would graduate in 2013; I don't know about anyone else, but that seems like forever to us. This spring he has to take the second part of a course, but there is also a "really cool" special topics class that his thesis adviser is teaching. So, now Andy is going to take 2 classes this spring; life will be insane!! If he can survive doubling this spring and one other semester, he'll finish in 2011.
Update on the kitty: I took pity on him yesterday and took the cone off. He was so happy to be free! He promptly scratched, shook, and licked. It's been fun watching him play - running and jumping.
We've also been working on our Italian a little more; right now we are mostly expanding our vocabulary. There are a bunch of was to say "the" because it changes with singular, plural, masculine, and feminine nouns; we are trying to get our il, i, la, le, lo, l', and gli articles right.
I finished Machiavelli's The Prince. It was really good to be reading this while working on Italian; I had lots of names to practice on. I had also watched a documentary about the Medici family so I had a great history lesson that leads up to and includes the time in which Machiavelli was writing his book which was dedicated to a Medici. It was also fascinating reading his ideas and examples of great rulers and lands. It is true that he does take morality and ethics our of the equation a lot of the time. I started thinking about some of his recommended methods like getting rid of your enemies, aka kill them. He lived in a world where information wasn't as easily dispersed; if you kill all of your enemies and the witnesses of their deaths, who's to say that you are guilty of murder? I think terror was used in a way than most of us can't imagine. Now days, someone would have a camera phone, pictures would be posted on You Tube later that day, and there would be a world wide outcry on the next news broadcast. Anyway, I simply read through the book, but I look forward to reading it again and taking notes on my thoughts. I'd recommend it to anyone who hasn't read it before, but you probably should have a fun, light book to read too. One great thing about the book is that it is short, under 100 pages!
Second update on the kitty: He just got the cone put back on him because he started licking his wounds which aren't fully healed. Unfortunately, he also wouldn't stop licking even when I told him no.
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