Where Things Are

No, no, not the wild things. Maybe Zorak things. Or maybe just things. Regardless...a bullet list for your Thursday edification:

• I have tentative approval to do my doctoral study at the school where I teach - the IRB there says they have a 3-5 day turn around. I'm hoping for 3, as that would mean I should hear today or tomorrow. If not, next week for sure. Once I have that, then I can turn around and re-re-re, well you get the idea, submit to my school's IRB and then, maybe, if the stars align and the angels sing, I can actually, you know, DO THE STUDY.
• Mom's surgery yesterday went super well. The doctor feels he got all the visible tumors and some of what he thought were baby tumors (I think the technical word for these are "nodules" but I'm not positive, so don't quote me) were actually not. He biopsied it just to be certain but he's not pessimistic. That said, she'll still need to start chemo within the next 3 weeks. That won't be fun. But on the other hand, it's better than dying. (Well, I'm not positive she'd agree, honestly, as she's been saying "Come, Lord Jesus, Come" for the past several years whenever she thinks about the handbasket the culture is currently zipping along in. On the other hand, she does enjoy being around to see her grandchild.)
• They need to standardize money orders. I got 2 from the post office and they don't have to be signed. I got two from Safeway (Western Union?) and they, apparently, do. How do I know this? They (along with our applications) got sent back to our social worker by CPS. Now honestly, it's a money order. That's even better than cash, isn't it? So why could they not just sign it themselves and move on? I have no idea. Regardless, they've now been signed and resubmitted. Because I guess nothing should be easy.
• I un-friended my uncle on Facebook the other day because he allowed one of his racist friends to take over the comments on his status message but chastised me for being offended by it. His estimation of how it went down may differ, but as far as I'm concerned, anyone who believes that a person - any person - should be treated differently (positive or negative) because of their ethnicity is a racist. I'll probably refriend him at some point, assuming he'll agree to it, and then just not pay attention to his statuses. But honestly, it still just makes me so mad I could spit.
• No movement (other than the money order/CPS check debacle) on the latest adoption attempt. But that's to be expected. Honestly, I'm not expecting anything until the April/May time frame. That would be roughly equivalent with the timeframe for kiddo #1.
• Given mom's cancer, I'm going to talk seriously with my doctor the next time I'm in about the possibility of a prophylactic hysterectomy. Cause it's not like all that junk is doing me any good (one could argue that, given how screwed up my ovaries already are from a hormonal standpoint, they actually do more harm than good at this point). We'll see. It may be a hard sell, but I'm going to do some research and determine how hard I want to push, because honestly, I don't think I care to deal with ovarian cancer in the future and mom let slip the other day that there's actually a history that goes back at least one more generation (and on into cousins as well) - so it's not like this was just a random event.
• Apologies to any male readers whose heads just exploded.
• I bought the kiddo a pop up tent with two tunnels today. You'd think I got him his own personal amusement park. Never spent a better $30. (Kinda like this, but with 2 tunnels and another little "clubhouse" thing in addition to the tent.) I crawled through the tunnel and remembered why I avoid small spaces like that. Hello, claustrophobia! The dog is not particularly amused with the whole thing.

And there you have it.