Today is the first week of Advent and I've been thinking about waiting. Waiting for Christmas. And how appropriate waiting and -- is this year and deferred gratification. We've been waiting, we all have been waiting and waiting and waiting for freedom, freedom from fear, freedom to move, freedom to see our friends. Anyway, I've been thinking about waiting. Yesterday I got my tooth pulled. Now, I need to wait with these annoying stitches to heal, hopefully in a week. Hey, I'm an expert at waiting, I can do this. And then I have to wait like an expectant mother, for nine months for total healing of this tooth and the replacement implant to be finally in place. I wonder if I'd be free to see my friends with my new tooth.

What are you grateful for this week? Has anything been particularly difficult this week? I would say I'm just being a student in general is really difficult right now because mentally I'm checked out, but I can't be because we still have assignments and stuff due. I still have to teach my class tomorrow, and then I still have conversation hours. So I'm not really done until the last possible minute on Wednesday. But mentally I'm just not -- checked -- I'm just not here anymore. I want to be done. I'm ready for the semester to be over. It's been really really draining the past couple months. But in the same light, I am so extremely grateful that I've been able to stay busy and to still pursue the thing that I love, which is teaching Spanish and Linguistics. And I'm just really grateful for the opportunity to be with my family because if I had been at school or if things had sort of been whatever type of normal or if the university hadn't canceled classes and I was looking to come home for Thanksgiving, I wouldn't necessarily be able to do that by not putting my parents -- with not putting my parents at risk. So I'm extremely grateful, that I am home that we are all -- that we are all healthy, that we will be able to spend Thanksgiving together.

We had been in our apartment building in Boston, we just moved to Lansing. But, when we were still in our apartment we moved in right before Christmas last year and I put in -- we had a like a mantle and a fake little fireplace -- It didn't work, but it looked pretty. And I put in some hooks for stockings for myself and my spouse and our cats, we had three little hooks up there. And when the pandemic started in March, mid-march, basically by the point that we started collecting multiple face masks. We used those hooks to store our face masks. And so it's been kind of a almost Christmas stocking feel on our fireplace for the past nine months. And I was running into the question of what are we going to do with Christmas decorations? Where we going to put our stockings? Cause we need, we still need a place to put our masks. But that question actually is gonna end up being pretty moot because we just moved. So we no longer have our stocking hook-masks set up in place.