Ringing in the New Year

I can't believe it's the last day of 2013 - where did the year go??  It's been a busy but good year for us, and I am definitely looking forward to what 2014 will bring - my official "graduation" from my masters program, positive changes in my job that will hopefully mean less work, potentially a few trips to Asia, but mainly because.....

(no, there is no bun in the oven)

We bought an apartment!  We are super excited, and will sign the paperwork in two weeks, and then officially get the keys mid-February.  I've got a few posts in mind to explain how we went about buying it and some of the things to watch out for, but in the mean time, I am already picturing us celebrating NYE with this view next year!!

A rose by any other name...

Last night C & I were all snuggled up in our bed with visions of sugar plums dancing in our heads, when he said "Our duvet cover is very festive - but why do we keep it all year round?".  I looked him with a perplexed look on my face and said "Um....exactly what color do you think it is?"  He replied "Red and Green?", to which I immediately burst out laughing.

Just so we're clear, this is pretty close to the ACTUAL color of our bedspread:

As I was still laughing, he gave it another try -"Is it red and brown?"  Bwahahaha!  It took me a while to calm down, and I finally said "No, it's pink and grey".  He got a horrified look on his face and said "Our bedspread is pink?!?"   And I had to laugh again because we've had it for around 3 years now, and here he was thinking it was red and green this whole time.   So I tried to justify it by saying  "Well, it's more a dark pink, like a fuschia".

He thought about it a minute and then said "Wait, are you playing a trick on me?"  I reassured him that I was not, but he must have had people do so in the past because he was looking at me quite suspiciously and rolled over muttering "Rose et gris, n'importe quoi".  So don't be surprised if you come over and he asks you to confirm the color of our bedspread....

Oops

This past weekend, I realized something that will likely negatively affect my final grade for my masters....Duh duh duh.....

You see, we only have one week of class left (unbelievable, right??), and that last week includes our final exam.  I was thinking I was sitting pretty good because my average grades for the first two weren't too bad, so I haven't exactly been studying like I had for the first two.  However in talking to my classmates on Saturday, I realized two things:  1) some of our classes were more heavily weighted than others, and that 2) the grades our director had given us had not yet taken this into account.  

So I start looking back at the classes that were deemed most important (finance, accounting, etc) and saw those were the areas where I had the lowest scores.  Doh!  Suddenly I realized that I had gone about studying for my tests all wrong.  We had six subjects per exam, and I had been studying for them all equally, whereas I should have been focusing most of my time on the heavily-weighted subjects.

Cue mega panic about the third exam.

So my classmates start trying to explain how to go about calculating the minimum grade I needed to have on the third exam, and after a few minutes, my head was absolutely spinning with numbers and advice.  I finally asked my tablemate to help me figure out exactly, and the formula he wrote down was something like this:

M= (Axy + Bxy + Cxy)/Z

And I was like "WTF is that??".   He then went through this complicated (to me anyways) system of calculate M, A, x, y, B and Z, so that we could figure out C, ie the minimum score I needed for the third exam. I guess it's probably easy if it's something you've been doing it since grade school, but I'm still not sure I could do it on my own...

Luckily it turned out to be a fairly low number, so I should be alright (though it was not as low as my tablemate, who could get a -2 on the exam and still average more than 10).  As a disclaimer, I realize that I may just be slow, and that the idea of "pondération" is completely obvious to those of you who have grown up with this method and/or have done schooling in France, but figured I would put it out there just in case I can help someone prevent making the same studying mistakes I made.