Honestly, the excitement never ends around here.

I don't think I've bothered to mention it yet, but I have been A.B.D. with a doctoral dissertation on film for an embarrassingly large number of years. Like ... as many years as my daughter is old. Well, I withdrew from graduate school a couple of weeks ago. Somehow it started to seem Really Dumb to be paying tuition fees to sit around and avoid writing my dissertation.

Make that "Really Dumb, Ph.D." And that might be the closest I'm ever going to get to being Dr. Poppy.

So now that I've ceased being a card-carrying Intellectual and fully embraced my life as a housewife, what have I been up to? Glad you asked:

1. Become a total fashion plate via the seasonal clothes rotation cha-cha. It finally got cold enough to justify taking the time and energy to haul all of my winter clothes out of storage, get all my winter shoes and boots upstairs, and take the summer clothes and sandals downstairs. I know, it's the middle of November, but honestly, it's been unseasonably warm around here. (It has too, so just stop laughing, Badger and Joke.) Anyway, it turns out I have frightening numbers of shoes and boots. Even more frightening was the fact that I had forgotten buying some of them. Even the very nice and quite expensive ones appeared to make little or no impression on my long-term memory. Even though I got them on sale. So here's a shout-out to my recently unearthed shoe fashion finds. For example: Ralph Lauren, I commend you for the seriously nice boots you make. They are like buttah. I hope you don't mind that I wore them today with a Tarjay leather jacket and a Tarjay Marc Jacobs knock-off bag. (Marc, honey, there is no way I'm paying retail for one of your hopelessly trendy yet ugly bags. The only thing I can say in their favor is that at least those little pockets are useful for stashing a cell phone. But they are ugly.)

2. Became Martha Stewart via the seasonal garden cha-cha. Tonight I brought in the rest of the tender perennials, i.e., plants that will die if left outside in the cold. It got down to 26 degrees tonight, so I brought in the last of the rosemary and some zonal geraniums. When I've bathed them and made them comfortable, they'll go on a sunny spot on my closed front porch. This makes me feel all kinds of thrifty and down-to-earth and country gal-ish. Another plus is that between the thyme, rosemary, and geraniums, it smells a bit like Pears soap out there. And that's ... a Good Thing.

3. Changed my ethnicity. Because I'm not just a housewife. I'm a Japanese housewife. I.e., my job appears to be to oversee mind-numbing amounts of homework as performed by number one son and number one daughter even though I think they were both hit with the ADD stick and consequently, can't sit still and focus on anything for more than 20 seconds at a time and I am NOT exaggerating. So I have to ("Do your homework!") keep sitting ("I mean it, sit down and do your math problems NOW") on their heads. The Whack-a-Mole game at Chuck-E-Cheese's? Now I know why I'm so good at it--I get so much practice during the off-season. So some days it's three straight hours of homework, and then I feed them nourishing meals while my husband works late. Again. Both kids had major projects due yesterday and I had to sit on their heads to get them done. What with the Elmer's glue and construction paper from the diorama and the flashcards for the history of the Age of Exploration test, I was ready to kill myself by 7:00 last night. As it is, I was thatclose to putting on full Cio-Cio-San regalia and belting out "Un Bel Di" as I waited for my husband to come HOME already.

--P.