Sometimes excitement is good; sometimes it's not!

This has been a crazy 24 hours around here. In chronological order:

• Sabrina made her first "catch and release in the house" catch last night - a garter snake about a foot long. It was easier for me to catch and re-release in the wild (aka front yard) than the furry rodents Clancy always favored, since it didn't really have a chance to "run" away and hide - but, alas, the little critter didn't make it as it had been tossed every which way before I managed to separate it from Sabrina. She was predictably a little wound up when I let her out of the bathroom and her prey had vanished from under the shoebox (yes, I keep one special for the catch and release program). I have to admit, in a weird sort of way, I was pretty proud of her. My baby's growing up!

• I switched homeowners insurers (my renewal offer this year was over $2000!), and saved over a $1000 in the process. Well, I switched auto insurance to the same company, so that's with the double-insured discount and represents the total savings over renewals for both with the old companies. Hard not to get excited about that much money! Although it does make me kind of mad I didn't figure this out before. I'm more than 5 miles from a fire station, and when I bought the house every company used that cutoff for a huge rate increase - I checked several, but at some point I must have assumed that this was industry standard. Well, either it's not, or my new company has changed in the 6 years since, but they use a 10-mile cutoff and I'm well within that. With the discount, and since I'm not commuting to Stillwater right now, the auto insurance was also less by switching. And since I'm a new customer, I got a cute little gift bag full of company-logo stuff - an atlas, a car cup, a calendar, and a little book of financial tips (mostly relating to insurance of course).

• On the way to finalize all the insurance stuff, I got to participate in a fun little neighborhood calf wrangling. I was driving out of my neighborhood, and ahead on the road a couple of cars were parked on the road at weird angles. We have a big field next to the housing addition where some people keep cattle, and it turned out one of the babies had managed to escape and was wandering the road. So I added my car to the temporary coralle (which was really ineffective since the calf could escape through a drainage ditch on the side that none of us could effectively block) and played like a cattle dog with the others. That calf was quick, let me tell you, but we at least managed to scare it back through the fence to join the others.

• And, when I got home I had an email from school asking if I might be "willing" to teach SOC 4443 - Sociology of Law and Legal Institutions next fall semester! Our poor senile prof has finally decided to retire, so they needed someone to take the couple of classes he'd already been scheduled to teach, and when none of the full profs wanted this one, they asked me! :D In full disclosure, I'm the only current graduate student who has passed the Crime & Deviance comp, so it's not like there was a ton of competition. But they could have opted to just cancel the class, or look for an adjunct, or twist the arm of a junior faculty member - so at least it means they decided I'm sufficiently competent to take on a senior level class. TAs teach or assist on 2 courses in our department, so they said I'd be teaching an Intro section as well, which I have really missed doing this year. So now I'm REALLY excited for next year, both to not be banished to Tulsa and to be back in the classroom. This course fits one of my exact interests in sociology, and now I get to have the experience of developing it and the accomplishment to add to my vita for job application purposes next fall. The only drawback was that this managed to conflict with both courses I'd been considering taking next fall (one stats class literally overlaps, and another is TR which would mean having to drive in to school 5 days a week), so I had to rethink that. Now I'm taking nonparametric statistical methods this May (3 weeks, 5 days a week, 3 hours a day!) when I had planned to take dissertation hours, then either straight dissertation hours next fall or possibly a seminar in Organizational Deviance - it's a class I've always wanted to take but could never fit in, so even though I have enough classes to graduate I might take it just for the information. That will depend, of course, on where I'm at in my dissertation.

• I lost Aubry in the refrigerator. She is always trying to jump in when I open the door, but today somehow I missed her doing it. So I'm making my lunch and I put a little scrap of cheese down for her and called, but no Aubrey. This is the one that is constantly underfoot hoping for something whenever I'm in the kitchen. So I called a few more times, then headed off with lunch in hand - and just as I'm heading out of the living room (to eat at the computer, my usual spot) I hear an odd rattling sound in the kitchen. It stopped, I started to continue on, then it started back up. Good thing I decided to check, because it was Aubry, trapped in the frig. Maybe this will cure her of jumping in in the first place?
  

• Finally, I tried to burn the house down tonight. OK, not really - I put some greenbeans on to cook (frozen - I didn't boil dry canned green beans!) then got totally distracted in the other room. I thought I'd set the timer, so I wasn't really paying attention. Apparently I hadn't or didn't hear it (the microwave timer just goes off once, but I usually use the stove that keeps going off till you turn it off), and by the time I smelled that the beans were past done they were really black and it was pretty smelly and smoky in the kitchen. Fortunately, at worst, I only ruined a pan - and I think even that will clean up fine with some soaking.