Lists
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Tips for Surviving Puppy’s First Few Weeks at Home
Raising a puppy is some exhausting business, let me tell you. Haruka has officially been part of the family now for about a month, and I am tired, constantly smell like puppy kibble, and am covered in itty bitty puppy bites. It is as demanding as it is rewarding, but I wasn’t expecting it to be such a wake-up call for me. I’ve helped raise puppies before, and so I thought I knew what to expect. However, while this may not be my first puppy rodeo, I don’t think I ever realized exactly how challenging it is when you’re doing it relatively on your own. All my puppy experiences before…
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Hello, 2018
I’m really no different than anyone else when it comes to having a, well, not-so-great track record when it comes to sticking to New Years Resolutions. And yet, here we find ourselves, year after year after year after year… making more goals, and not always keeping them. But while I’m definitely one of those people who isn’t good at keeping to the letter of the resolutions, I still see a lot of value in making them anyway. For me, making resolutions provides a concrete goal to aim for. Even if you miss the target, any forward movement towards it is still valuable. This year, my goals are all about small,…
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October Wrap-Up and November Goals
October was a whirlwind of a month, to put it lightly. Much of the first few weeks flew by as our days were consumed with moving, and unpacking… and setting up the house… and figuring out bills… and… and… and… That said, even with all the chaos, October ended up being a pretty good month in Magpie world. Let’s see what got accomplished. 1) Jim and I celebrated 7 years together. So yea, I think we kind of like each other. 2) We bought a house (HOLY SHIT WE BOUGHT A HOUSE) and moved into said house. Again, no small undertaking. So while most of my other personal projects and…
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July/August Wrap-Up and September Goals
The last two months have been just an absolute whirlwind. There’s some pretty big and significant life-changes that have been going on behind the scenes here at Magpie over the last few weeks that have been simultaneously super-exciting, and absolutely terrifying. I won’t say too much about it all on here until all is said and done, and everything is finalized, but it has certainly contributed to the overall chaos that has been the last two months. As a result of everything that’s been going on, many of the goals that I had originally set for July ended up put on the back-burner for much of the time since I…
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Tips for Emailing Your Professors – From a Professor!
In recent years, one of the most common things I’m asked about by students is email. Specifically, how to email your professors. When I first started getting this, I was a little confused by it – until I realized that we’re at the point where none of our traditional students remember a world without IM or texts. For the current batch of college students, communication has always been getting increasingly informal, and increasingly instantaneous, and so it seems that many find themselves anxious about saying “the right thing” when sending a formal email to a professor for the first time. So I’ve decided to compile some tips about how to…
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12 Tips for Adjusting to College from a Student Turned Professor
This year marks my 7th year teaching college. It’s an absolutely CRAZY thing for me to think about, since it seriously just feels like yesterday that I was receiving my MA. But time marches ever forward, and with seven years of teaching under my belt, in addition to the five years I spent in higher ed. as a student, I feel like I’ve picked up a few tricks of the trade along the way. Between the mistakes I made and lessons I learned as a student myself, and the years I’ve spent watching class after class of new freshmen arrive (and then graduate!) – here are the top twelve tips…
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Liebster Award and Blogger to Blogger Personal Tag
It’s been a very hectic week here at Magpie Making Do (for a variety of personal reasons that I’m not going to get into here, including a death in the family), and I’ve noticed myself feeling very guilty about not posting in more than a week and a half – which is nice, because it’s been a while since I had even enough energy to feel guilty about my absences. The guilt makes me feel like I’m FINALLY getting back into the swing of consistent posting! But anyway, I don’t have a huge amount of time this week, and it’s been a very long time since I’ve done a “get…
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#ReadWomenMonth Reading Wrap-Up
Participating in StasiaLikesCakes’ Read Women Month was a really fun, fulfilling, and enlightening experience. I did both the Instagram challenge (see that wrap-up here), and the reading challenge, and in the process read 9 books, reacquainted myself with reading fiction regularly, and learned a lot about my reading preferences and habits. I realized how much I miss just reading for the sake of entertainment, and discovered some great series and authors. So what’d I read? Well, because I ended up going through so many books, I’m not going to review each and every one here. I will be doing full reviews on a few of them in the future (I’ve…
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June Wrap-Up and July Goals
Ah, another month gone, another goals wrap-up post – and June did NOT go as smoothly in terms of goals as I hoped it would. That said, it wasn’t quite the total failure that it could have been. So how’d I do? Well, June was a strange one this year. I spent the first two and a half weeks rush rush rushing to clean, and prep classes, and run errands, and catch up on everything I always let go during the semester when I’m working 14-18 hour days all week. And then the last week and a half I did, well, nothing. Positively nothing but read, and eat, and travel.…
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#ReadWomenMonth Instagram Challenge Wrap-Up
Today marks the end of #ReadWomenMonth, and not only did I pledge to read only female authors this month (wrap-up on that coming soon), but I also participated in the Instagram challenge – as best I could anyway. So today, I’m wrapping the month up with a compilation of all my Instagram posts over the course of the challenge. It’s been a blast participating in this, even though I didn’t hit every day of the challenge (mainly because my book collection is split between my apartment and storage). In addition to totally being down to do this again next year, it’s also definitely made some differences in how I choose…
