I’ll get it out of the way: I haven’t updated my blog in forever, and this makes a terrible human being. I’ve been pretty busy the last several months trying to finish my thesis, so I haven’t had a lot of time for personal blogging. And what time I have spent blogging has almost all been over at Arrant Pedantry. I’ve also been writing a column on grammar for Copyediting newsletter. Look—I even have a bio on the About Us page.

Last week I gave my thesis committee the final draft of my thesis, and I’ll be defending it this Friday at 8:00 a.m. (ugh). I’m eager and terrified at the same time. I don’t think there’s a real risk of me failing, but there’s a fair chance that I’ll pass with revisions, and those revisions will be due less than a week after defense. The end is in sight, but I’m definitely not done yet. Then it won’t be until late April that I actually graduate. Don’t ask me why the thesis has to be done a month and a half before graduation. It doesn’t make any sense to me. I’m just happy to finally be close to done, though now I’m once again facing the daunting task of finding a decent job.

Meanwhile, the kids continue to grow up. Lego is turning seven next month, and Duplo will be five the month after that. El Guapo is obsessed with cars, and he loves doing whatever the two older boys are doing. He loves to watch Lego and me play Lego Star Wars, and he’s pretty good at singing the main theme. It seems like every day he’s picking up new words, and he’s stringing them together pretty frequently. Now when I leave for work in the morning, he says, “Bye-bye, Dada!” Tonight we were watching Star Wars: Episode IV, and when the Jawas captured R2-D2, he said, “Uh-oh, Boop-Boop!” over and over. I guess that’s his name for R2.

I’ll try to get back to posting more frequently here once I’m done with school and life starts to return to normal. I’m sure I’ll have a lot to post about over the next few months with graduation and jobs and moving and all that.