Phew...

It's been a crazy past few weeks. The last week of class I stayed up till 3 am on Thursday night finishing a project for a course I took, which you can now view online to identify dead moths that you find lying on your windowsill (or better yet, live ones you see at lights). The next day after putting all the projects online, we had back-to-back free food events (almost too much for grad students like me to handle) on campus, first to celebrate the coming into existence of the Arthropod Science Program at Berkeley, and immediately thereafter, a mixer for grad students in ESPM and Integrative Biology, held under the T. rex skeleton in the basement of VLSB. I was pretty exhausted at this point, so I went straight home, but apparently the party continued at a sketchy place called the Hotsy Totsy on San Pablo, followed by an attempt at drying rain-soaked clothes in somebody's oven, a hot tub at somebody else's place, and some vomiting, so I'm glad I took a rain check.

Last Thursday, Dan Grin passed through town again, and we went out for drinks with Zoë at Triple Rock before I took my only final the next morning and headed home at noon for an early Christmas in Los Gatos. (Mom and Johanna will be in England on Christmas.) That was a bit rushed (the tree got put up, presents wrapped, and dinner cooked all in one evening), but warm and fun. One of my family's odd Christmas traditions is to make a figgy pudding (as in the line from "We Wish You a Merry Christmas", "o bring us some figgy pudding"). The figgy pudding doesn't actually contain any figs, or mincemeat, or fake mincemeat (it has evolved substantially over the years), and as a general rule, only my dad actually regards it as edible. We douse it in brandy and set it on fire, but in order to actually get it to burn requires so much brandy that it still tastes very strongly of brandy afterwards. This year we forgot the recipie, and the replacement my mom came up with was almost edible.

I went back to Berkeley the next day for a Hanukkah party held by friends Wendy and Sam, who just had a baby in September. Baby Wally is usually asleep when I've seen him, but he was really alert and awake as we read him stories and his dad played guitar to him. Unfortunately, he seems to be afraid of me. The party also featured lots of cheese, and potato latkes, and a CD of cheesy Hanukkah music that included a song with the line "I am a latke". I went from there to a "Welcome Back From Ghana" party held by some other grad student friends in honor of who had just gotten back from three months in the field. Erica brought bottled Hinano, which I spent all summer drinking in Tahiti, and which wasn't quite as bad as I feared it would taste. Tropical beers don't really work in the temperate zones.

I spent most of today putting together a PowerPoint for a lab meeting I was invited to in the Integrative Biology department, and now I'm sitting at home, fully done with the semester and wondering what to do with myself next. Actually, I need to sit down and start studying for my oral exams, but I think I'm going to zone out this evening first.