Contested and Exhausted

*beep beep beepity beep beep beep!*

We now forestall this blog post to bring you a contest of epic proportions!!!

Kara decided yesterday to give me a word of the day to work into my blog post. I did, and now I've decided to make it a challenge for you!

So hidden somewhere in this blog will be the secret word of the day. You can try and guess what the word is and the first person to 100 (either you or me) will win a fabulous prize (dreamed up by Kara.)

Points go thusly:
1 point for a correct guess
2 points to be the first person to guess correctly.
1 point for me for each day that no one guesses correctly in a row. (So the first day no one guesses correctly I get one point. The next day if no one guesses correctly I get two, the next three, ect-- but anytime someone does guess correctly my counter is restarted.)

Only one guess per blog post. Everyone keeps track of their own points and only comments made on the actual blog post count. (It's way too hard to verify points if facebook comments are also allowed and there is no way to track them.)

Every day I will announce what the secret word for the previous day's blog post is so that you can keep track of your points. Tomorrow I will make the announcement for both this blog and yesterday's blog. (You can make a guess both for today and for yesterday in the same comment if you want. Melissa, you can't vote in yesterday's since you already know, obviously.) No guesses count if they are posted after I've announced the word- duh.

The secret word could be just about anything. It could be tennis shoe. It could be handshake. It could be stir-fry or laundry or giggle or English or ponder or seestor, even though that's spelled completely nutso.

I will promise that it will never be an article (a grammatical article, not one in a newspaper or of clothing) and it will never be a pronoun... but other than that the world is your oyster, or clam, or a ladel..

We now return you to your regularly scheduled blog post.

*beep beep beepity beep beep beep!*

I am trying very hard not to take a nap right now.

Being a grad assistant will be fun I think.

For one, I think I'll be good at helping people learn to use Blackboard. I get it pretty instinctively, and others apparently do not. And they *want* to learn it... it's useful to them, and gosh darn it if I don't like being helpful. Plus, it's a little like whoever I'm helping thinks that I'm magic.

Also, I'm not yet overwhelmed with classes and things that have to get done so it seems totally do-able.

And I feel productive.

And it's so nice to have co-workers who go to the same place as me and who have desks near mine and who I can say hello to.

That said, I'm super tired because I went to the mall after work to augment my dress pants selection. Not that I mind that I had to buy dress pants because my other ones were too big....

And after I left the mall I realized I'm completely exhausted. I've not slept well or enough for 3 nights in a row now... which I'm hoping makes for a much earlier bedtime tonight, considering that I'm going to have to be on a "normal" schedule for several months.

When I got home I changed into pjs but then decided that I was going to order pizza and decided my pj shorts were a little too short for opening my door to a complete stranger. So I'm in jeans but I've promised myself that the pjs are coming. Just like the pizza.... and the British.