My Name is Nikki...And Other Stuff.

Last night, I saw 9 Parts of Desire. Beautiful. It's basically monologues of Iraqi women, but in the end, all the stories seem to cross into each other and you have a hard time separating yourself from the characters. I was near tears numerous times and really thought I was going to totally lose it near the end. It really left me speechless. Definitely see this if it comes to your area. I may do another blog post later on this, but I think I will need a few days to gather thoughts on it, and I'm not sure if I will ever come to any conclusions.

The fall schedule came out at school, and looking at classes, I was a bit worried because a couple of the studio classes I needed were scheduled for the exact same times, and I'm to a point where I can't afford to just slowly take them in, since 90%of what I have left is studio work. It made me worry about the drawbacks of being in a small art dept. that simply doesn't have enough students to fill classes each semester. I was brainstorming all these other options, like taking classes at another school at the same time, and then transferring in some studio work. Anyway, my worries were cheerfully resolved after I met with the dept. head. She basically registered me into my own little section and will let me work on my stuff outside of the normal scheduled class times. After the meeting instead of worrying about being at a small dept., I was extremely happy with a small dept. who can afford to know me by name (actually, let me get to that later), and bend over backward to accommodate me. I would never get that kind of flexibility at a bigger school. Just another reason I am loving this place compared to the institute. It's a whole other culture. I just highly doubt many other schools would be so accommodating and individualized.

Anyway, about being known by name at a small school....well, it's sort of true. The dept. head keeps calling me "Nikki". I am not sure how to correct it. I've said my name to her before, but I know that she hears the "Nikk" part in my last name, and then also sees the spelling, and in her mind, it registers as "Nikki". I don't really care, as long as she knows who I am, but it could be embarrassing for her to be calling me that when everyone else knows my real name... I've been trying to find a good time to correct it, but it's not come up yet, and I'm worried the longer it goes, the worse it could get. But, I don't want to correct her in public and embarrass her...but then I'm not really sure what to do. And I totally understand where she got "Nikki" - I've got N's all over the place, and a "Nikk"...visually and audibly...so I can see the mistake. But, I'm just not sure how to correct it. I feel like I already should have corrected it long ago the first time I heard, and now it's all gotten out of hand. But, it's one of those things where the first time or two I heard her say it, I was listening really hard, thinking "Did she actually just call me Nikki or did I mishear?" And like I said, I don't really care if she calls me that. My name gets so butchered anyway and I'm used to not being called by my real name, but I'm more concerned about the embarrassment factor that could happen to her. And now I just don't know what to do!

Anyway, with all this spring in the air, Jesse and I both get an itch to do home improvements. We got a new oven. New to us, that is. It's a used smooth top, but with some elbow grease, baking soda, and ammonia, it cleaned right up. We sold our old stove, so now we have all white appliances in the kitchen, which looks much better than the random black stove in the sea of white. We also have made back all of our money from the screen doors we bought at the auction. Sweet. The auction is becoming a slight addiction for Jesse, and he has thus been banned until all of the crap is out of the garage. He came into the office this evening and declared to me "I've become Papa!" (Papa, his grandpa, "collected" lots of random items...) His most recent auction purchases (and I don't even know all of them) are these two huge fan units, a couple ladders, a box of honeycomb-like plastic (I asked "What is that?" when he showed it to me, and he happily replied "I have no idea!" - in his defense, he does have a couple ideas of what he is going to do with it), and some other random stuff, I don't even know what all is out there. Anyway, so Jesse is banned from partaking in all auction-like actions until further notice.

The pergola is up, just needs to be painted. And do you know what else is up? My daffodils!!!! In just a couple weeks, I'll have full on tulip/daffodil/jonquil mania. Plus, once the pergola is painted, I can plant a vine to grow up it. I'm still anxiously awaiting the sprouting of my seeds. Nothing yet, but it hasn't quite been a week, so it's still early. None the less, I am anxious. Spring is finally here!!