Dissertation Owls

For Christmas, we bought Nephew the awesome Twilight Turtle. He apparently loves it. He's added dinosaurs and space to his interests (it has been all trains all the time for a while now). We bought him this awesome Squishable T-Rex for his birthday, so decided to go spacey for xmas. Husband had the brilliant idea of getting him something to project stars and constellations in his room, and the Twilight Turtle was the only age-appropriate (3) star-projection-thingy we could find. Success! But while in Thinker Tots, we stumbled across an owl--a little grey owl and I fell in love. It was the cutest thing I have seen in a long time. It was really hard to leave the store without it. And it had friends. But I was strong, I said good-bye, and we left sans owls.

Christmas morning, I opened my present from Husband to find owls! Three of them! I haven't been this happy to get a stuffed animal in over a decade. They are my dissertation owls. They live in my office and move around, reminding me to write. Right now they're sitting on my desk because with never-ending meetings of doom and prep for next week's first week of classes, I've neglected my diss this week. They say "Who, Who is not working on her diss?" I was thinking of naming them Chouette, Buho, and Eule. I joked Diss, Er, and Tate. I don't know yet.

But just now, I googled "dissertation owls" and found this remarkable post from Bestiarum Vocabulum:

Stories about Elf owls sneaking into open windows to peck wildly at computer keys, leaving finished dissertation chapters behind, have long been considered urban legend.

Great minds, eh? Elf owls are real and are the smallest owl; they're the same size as my dissertation owls. Wikipedia says they chuckle. So now I think my dissertation owls have elven names.