Things have been busy and weird. I almost feel like I'm just kind of along for the ride sometimes... I'm also feeling kind of random.

One of my coworkers is a great baker, but her signature dish is this chocolate pie with a meringue that is WAY too sweet and doesn't even taste like chocolate, plus I hate meringue. Everybody else seems to like it, though. She brought some in today. I am supposed to be on a diet, and am generally sticking with that, but have had a few pieces of chocolate this morning. I blame it on the Benadryl I took last night--I've been really itchy from allergies, which has been keeping me up at night, but I slept through the alarm this morning so I need to halve my dose...

I am running a swap on the Cowls board on Ravelry. The other organizer is also a singer, an American who has a fest contract in Switzerland. The apprentice program at Sarasota is really one of the only programs in this country that works in a similar way (and even that is sort of a junior version). It would be really cool to have a fest contract. It involves moving to Europe, though, and that's not something we're prepared to do right now. We think we should be able to buy a house in the fall. There's this $8000 tax credit that we would love to take advantage of, but we were really hoping somebody would be able to loan us $8000 for the next few months so we could use it as part of our down payment. Unfortunately it doesn't seem like anyone in our family can do that right now. My parents are selling their house, and there has been a decent amount of interest; if they were able to close in the next month they'd be able to swing the loan, but that's a pretty unrealistic time frame. I have another family member to ask, but we talk rather infrequently so I feel pretty lousy about hitting her up. Mark has a few people to ask as well, but it's not looking so good. Bummer.