I have a long long long to-do list today, as well as work, lunch with a friend, and the Wednesday afternoon line-up of study group, then bells, then class, then choir. I’ve knocked a few things off my list already, but it is still very long.

This is good. Someday I will be old and bored and lonely, looking back on these busy times with nostalgia.

That is probably not true. The old people I know are not bored and don’t seem lonely, but are in fact extremely busy and continually having trips and parties and things. But I like to look at current difficulties and tell myself that I will miss them in the future so I ought to appreciate them now. It hasn’t been true yet. I enjoyed my college days, and the time I had with my babies, and all that, but I wouldn’t go back for anything.

I went to class last night without my homework, and lived. Then I came home and #2 son and I unpacked the boxes of Pampered Chef swag. He is great at this. He gets excited about things, and helps me test them, and helps to decide which things we should keep for ourselves and which should be gifts and things like that.

Pampered Chef, I told the boys last night, is a lot like World of Warcraft. You have these quests, and if you succeed, you win cool stuff. I have never played WoW, but all of my kids do, and I see it going on. They do things like go fishing for an hour and then they get a cloak or a hat or something.

They did not see the similarity.

Among my quests for today (not Pampered Chef; I am back to my to-do list here) is to figure out permalinks, trackbacks, and pings. One of the troubles with the SEO aspect of my job is that the terminology is way too cute and way too specialized. It is easy to get lost in the jargon.

That’s true in education, too. I’ve just been in that long enough that I can assimilate new buzzwords with ease. I remember, in my first week at the store (and I had been teaching for years before that, but in college, which is different from the vocabulary standpoint), someone came and asked, “Where are your math shelves?”

I, shell-shocked from terms like “Punkydoodle” and “boo-boo tape,” figured there was an object called “math shelf,” and toddled off to ask about it. The customer wanted the shelves on which we kept math materials, but I could no longer understand normal English.

Back to the list!