I don't quite understand your confusion. Could you elaborate on it?

Jim has mentioned many times that Mouse is a Caucasian Mountain Dog (or one of the variant names of that breed).

I have a doctorate in Snarkology. 

Psshh!  I am the Chair Emeritus of the School of Snarkology at Snark University, the school consistently ranked #1 in the global snarktastic ratings!

Trying to rope this back into the topic of the thread, I've toyed off and on with the idea of getting a grad degree in creative writing, or fiction writing, or whatever the particular name of the degree is.

As I said, I really enjoy writing, but my writing has matured a great deal on its own, due to the sheer amount of fiction and non fiction writing I've done over the past seven or eight years, for school or for pleasure.  Not sure if I'd benefit a significant enough amount from going to grad school for it to justify getting that degree.

My choice of majors in college story was an interesting one.  I went to a military college and for years had wanted to go into the military upon graduation (after three years of trying to get in, I finally gave up, due to medical reasons).  I started out as an electrical engineering major, but as a member of the honors program at the school was put into honors calculus.  I had rocked algebra and trig in highschool, but only did middlingly well in calculus, so I was in WAY over my head with honors calc.  After realizing that I'd have to take years of honors calc, I dropped engineering...and switched to political science.  Picked up criminal justice my second semester in school, then picked up history as my third major spring of my sophomore year.

...And then realized at the end of my junior year that there weren't any real job opportunities that I was interested in in any of those fields.  So, throwing it all to the wind upon graduation, I was a swim coach for two years, then got an MBA and am now an IT/financial management contractor.  Four years of taking 24 hours a semester and having zero life down the drain, in terms of how they have benefited me in the professional world.  Well, I take that back--I wrote a LOT for those three majors, so I'm pretty proficient at writing these days.

Go figure.

During my time on the forum, I've noticed that we've got forumites with a wide variety of careers and educational backgrounds that have come up in random conversations, ranging from high school to a gazillion doctoral degrees in superspecificethnolinguistics (*cough, cough, Shecky, cough, cough*).  So, I thought it'd be interesting to see what sorts of educational backgrounds folks have.  I'll kick it off:

I got a triple major for my Bachelor's--History, Political Science, and Criminal Justice.  I've also got a Masters of Business Administration, and am considering a Masters in Strategy/Innovation/something of that nature in a few years.

Titania is harder to cast, since we haven't actually met her in the books yet.  My pick for Mab (as pointed out by my lovely wife) is Natalie Dormer.  Check her out in the Tudors. 



"Mine! Mine! Mine!"

I could see Alex Kingston playing Lea, though.  She could pull off the godmother vibe.

While she's definitely attractive enough to play the part in my mind, I've always thought Mab appeared older, as in middle aged.

I haven't been aware of the daily backup slot for the servers, due to usually being fast asleep by that time... 

However, there's still the off and on slow response time of the site.  Prior to the switch to the new software, the site was almost always quite snappy.  Now, I'd say 60% of the time it's still snappy.  The rest of the time, though, pages have taken up to a minute to load.  If it's not an almost instantaneous page load like it is when it's running smoothly, it averages around 7-10 seconds to load a page for me.  Sometimes I get error messages that the browser can't connect to the site.  All of this happens during the hours I typically access the site, which is between 7:00am-11:00pm, so none of this should be related to the daily backup.