oh hai

so, running in the winter is not as bad as i've always envisioned it to be. it's even kind of good in a bitingly cold sort of way. as long as you wear the right shit (read: underarmour) you really don't get that cold. sometimes my lips go numb, but i could buy a face mask or something if it ever got too bad. i think i have found my limit, though, which hovers somewhere around zero degrees fahrenheit. with little to no wind. that's really the deal-breaker for me. which is unfortunate, of course, because madison seems to have a god-awful percentage of days that are windy as fuck. and it's always exponentially worse by the lakes, which is also unfortunate because it is almost impossible to make a good route that doesn't encounter a lake. you know, that whole isthmus thing. 

at least i'm no longer scared of tidal waves. i used to think that they could happen in any body of water, so when i was a kid i would always get super freaked out whenever we drove over the bridge that crosses the puget sound. 

in other not-exciting news, i finished grading portfolios last night, and for the most part it's been fairly easy. i basically flip through to see whether they either fucked up royally or did something surprisingly awesome, and then proceed to give them the grade that i knew they were going to get before i even opened the damn thing. 

except for this one kid. before the last portfolio, he was hovering somewhere between a and ab, so i had to read a little more carefully in hopes that he would wow me with his revisions. so his final draft of his final paper is okay; he could have done a bit more but he did make a lot of improvements from the first draft. as i'm thinking i could probably give him an a ('cause, whatever, i like this kid), i flip to the back where he has his 2 other papers (from earlier in the semester--papers i've already seen, commented on, and graded) and WTF MARGINS. his margins on these two papers is not even the stupid word default 1.25--they're like, at least 1.5 inch margins, and they're that big on all sides. okay, i know this must sound excessively trivial, but you have no idea how many times i told them how much i hate hate hate margins that are not 1 inch (not to mention that 1 inch margins are in the syllabus across the board for all english 100 classes). i've told them in class, on their paper drafts, in email, and in their portfolio comments. i would say that on average it came to their attention in one form or another at least every other week. i even went so far as to compromise my image as a fair, objective grader in order to tell them that when i sit down to grade a paper, and the first thing i see is fucked up formatting and fucked up margins, i get grumpy. and when i'm grumpy before i even start reading the thing, i am much more nitpicky and much more inclined to grade low. maybe it is stupid and ocd of me to care about formatting so much, but goddamnit this was, like, the only thing i was ever a hard-ass about (aside from citations. i told them that if they didn't have a works cited that actually works in their final paper i would give them a straight up zero.), and for fuck's sake it takes like 2 seconds to change your margins. and, for an extra second, you can even make it your default setting, so they stay 1 inch FOREVER. 

so seriously, was he trying to piss me off right before i turn in final grades? probably not. but the thing that irritates me the most is that i really wanted to be able to have an excuse to give him an a, because if i'm really honest with myself, he probably deserves an ab, margins aside. but he's always been great in class, he's really creative, and his papers are actually not boring. but compared to other students, even those who got ab's no question, he just didn't put much time into revision. to top it all off, i'm pretty sure he's the kind of kid for whom an a is almost indistinguishable from an ab, so now i'm even more irritated that i've spent so much thought-energy on his grade when in reality he's probably going to be just as happy either way. 

oh, and i have 15 pages left to write in the next 48 hours (not to mention shopping and packing for the trip down south). fuuuuuuuuuuck.