I think we’re about to hit that point in the blogging where I don’t have anything to say, and no time to say it in. It’s finals week!
So I guess that’s it. One day of classes left. Lovely weather today – worked outside most the afternoon. Got started on my semantics paper, and my research write-up. Made a tasty dinner and played Zombie Fluxx with Lewis while we ate.
Boy, I guess that’s it. How sad! Amazing how time flies when you’re staring at this screen. Oy.
This is one of those dead-tired sort of days. But it’s okay. It should be the last one this quarter!
It was a necessarily busy day today. Had Quechua this morning and we did dialogs and had a little Peruvian feast. I wish I knew what anything was called or made of, because it certainly was delicious. Oh, and we drank some Inca Kola. Drinking neon yellow soda at 10 am is certainly a way to kick off a day. Anyway. Much fun was had in Quechua, and my heart is softening a bit towards that class. Probably a good time to have handed course evaluations out.
Went straight from Peruvian snacks to my lunch date with Bernard Comrie. It’s so amusing to have lunch with famous linguist-types. I don’t know what it is about being a grad student that gets you introduced to these folks. Maybe it’s the benevolence of those above you to spread your name around and get your face known. At any rate, it was great being invited to lunch. The food and company were both excellent, and I learned amusing things about Comrie that will stick with me for a while. He’s a good guy.
Had to ditch lunch a little early to go meet with my TAing professor, and then my research professor. This is the last set of homeworks I have to grade for this quarter, which is excellent, but sadly means that soon I have to grade the final. Had a very nice final meeting with my research professor, and wrapped up what we’ve been reading very nicely. Unfortunately he also assigned me a little write-up to do before the end of next week, so I didn’t quite escape without a short paper to do. Oh well. I sort of needed to synthesize what we’ve been doing anyway, so it will end up being rather useful later.
Spent a few minutes with Lewis in the sunshine on the Quad, and puttered about for my spare hour until it was time to go to Comrie’s talk! I’d seen him give portions of this talk in Cambridge before, but for some reason it was much more engaging this time. The talk seemed to fly by, and all the questions were very interesting. Before I knew it, it was 6:00 already and time to go home. Crashed a fair bit when I got here, didn’t make dinner… but I did watch some Colbert over some left-overs, and made a loaf of lemon bread for breakfast tomorrow.
All in all… a very successful, if draining, day!
Finals week, you beast!
It’s been a very eventful day, though considering my huge petering out this evening I don’t know if I can call it that successful. I woke up all bleery-eyed and feeling completely exhausted, no doubt from the emotional (and stupidly, physical) exhaustion from proctoring the Lin 1 final. I really could not get moving this morning. Luckily Lewis needed to go to campus, and also needed to get his bike fixed, so when he got up we both whisked ourselves to campus and got some breakfast and got some bike turned in for tune-up-age. I, too, need to get my biked tuned up at some point.
I got a fair amount of work done in my office this afternoon, punctuated by short lovely winter walks to move the car. Picked up some groceries at the co-op on the way home, made a delicious quesadilla dinner, and got some, but not a lot, more work done. I’m half done with my last paper, though I was hoping to be more like 3/4th done with it by tonight so I could have ample time to edit and revise tomorrow without being too exhausted from writing it. I’m not sure that will happen, but it’s not due till noon on Friday, so I may still be able to get up early and work on it Friday morning. You never know.
What I do know is that I’ve been doing sudoku and paying bills instead of working on my paper for the last hour or two, and I’m exhausted and only getting progressively more retarded. And that’s the exact moment you know it’s time to go to bed and hope you wake up raring to go on what you have left. The pull of winter break is strong… and I’m very much ready to just throw it all to the wind and Christmas shop like the dickens! Turns out I only have two weeks till Christmas. I have a whole heck of a lot of cheer to try and cram into just two weeks. I haven’t even listening to Christmas music all day. Sigh! The things I sacrifice for graduate school.
…by which I mean eternally droning on and on until the rocks of your attention break into tiny granuals and I wash away the continent of your comprehension.
I wrote essay (singular) and replied to emails (numerous) all day. Emails were odd – some really downputting, like telling my professor I protested to some of the questions on our final, and telling some of the kids I TA for that they can’t do anything about their grades. Some good though, since a few kids were studying today and needed help with some questions. Those are uplifting. All I can do is shake my head at the final though. I really protest having questions on there we haven’t talked about in class. It turns into a reading quiz where none of the material is discussed, tested, or mentioned, and you had several hundred pages of new technical material to get through in the last 5 weeks. Then again, this is probably why we curve the tests. Sigh.
Essay went pretty well. I got the portions I wanted to get done written, and I’m well set up for tomorrow’s big push to get the first one finished. From there onward it’s one big day of final administering, and one more big paper, and then I’m free! Hopefully we can get a few other things done between here and there – like getting a christmas tree. And maybe even a puppy! Saw one online today that’s at the Yolo County shelter that we could potentially pick up Tuesday or Wednesday if it turns out that’s what we want to do. I think Lewis and I are both waffling now that the time is getting near. I just don’t know about these things. And it’s so hard to make a clear decision while you’re exhausting yourself with school work and other responsibilities.
Which reminds me. When my eyes unfocus and my sentences creep on, it’s time to go to bed. It’s definitely that time.
I keep thinking I’ll get back to posting tonight closer to bed time, then I screw around on the internet for ages and realize that I’m already tired and I really do intend to keep blogging nightly… so here I am, bleary-eyed and with nothing to say but “i did chores today”.
Which is true.
It’s acutally been rather productive today. This morning after breakfast I wrote up a huge list of stuff I want to get done in the near-ish future and completely covered our minuature white board. But I have made a little progress, and none of it is particularly critical. Just stuff I want to get done to feel like I’ve “finished” setting up the house. It’s crazy how much stuff there is to do when you have all this extra space and outdoors to take care of in addition to the regular gettin’ business done sort of stuff.
This morning I spent a while digging out mystery overgrown plants in one of our flower beds. I’d like to start planting soon, thinking that maybe it’s a good time to get stuff in before the winter, and before we can do that we need to dig up all the old crap that’s here and prepare our beds with something better than wood chips and dirt. Lewis got a compost bin for his birthday (from his parents!) which we’ll set up pretty soon and finally have something to do with our food scraps and lawn clippings and such. Anyway, it was rather gratifying working in this dirt this morning, and it’s looking a little better out there already.
I also put a little dent in the filing that needs to be done. We finally got ourselves (rescued from the Lawyers’ garage, at least) an honest-to-goodness filing cabinet and it’s high time I got all our disparate files in one place. It’s really oddly telescopic seeing your life through the lense of the paperwork you generate. Why do we have 15 different accounts in our “finance” section? What the hell has gone on that two kids can generate 15 different bank and credit accounts in this amount of time? It’s also really funny finding uber-important documents like your diploma right after you’ve spent the last few minutes deciding whether I need to keep set-up instructions to items I don’t even own any longer… Sadly, I only managed to put away the files that were already somewhat organized and still have all the more important, less sane papers scattered all over the desk to get through.
After a day like that, there was really nothing left we could do but forage in the fridge and watch the remaining two Monty Python episodes I haven’t seen in our collection. And of course, uploading pictures to the blog, and the aforementioned screwing around on the internet until I realize it’s already getting late. I’ve got orientation to start in a few days, here! This is no time to get in a stay-up-way-too-late-doing-nothing habit! Jeesh.
