Happy 2015! It's 2015, the year in which, barring major unforeseen extenuating circumstances, I will either finish my dissertation and get my PhD, or concede defeat. I'd prefer it be the former, not the latter. To that end, Marek and I have formed an agreement to write the remaining drafts of our respective MA and doctoral theses in regular ( Read more... )

It's finally Friday night, and I'm finally about to collapse into bed. It's been a long (albeit in reality short) week! I still owe a discussion of the terrible error I found in the article on Wednesday, but that will have to come later ( Read more... )

After three days of unmitigated procrastination stretching from when I got back from Virginia until the end of yesterday (and some of those Kirk/Spock fics were terrible, I'm just saying), I decided last night that if I was ever going to be capable of finishing my PhD, I was going to have to get something done today. And I did! I've made major ( Read more... )

In the ongoing process of cleaning, unpacking, and organizing my room following last weekend's furniture acquisitions (and the addition of a desk from office-mate JK yesterday), I found a bunch of papers I wrote at various points during my Colgate career and evidently brought to Boston at some point. Features include a series of A- and B+ marks on ( Read more... )

I'm now back in Boston and working my way back to health, although definitely not there yet. ( Boring details... )

So, tomorrow November starts. I've been at this teaching my own class thing for two months and have piles of exams and papers to mark - and I should be writing a lecture on the Wars of Religion right now - but for a change of pace, I'm going to talk about my research ( Read more... )

UGGG. I am now self-medicating with maple-walnut ice cream, because of one of the few unpleasant events in my otherwise pleasant and uneventful week, namely, debit card fraud. Debit card fraud to the tune of $400 US on my French account, that appears to have gone down after I surrendered my debit card to the lovely people at my lovely bank branch ( Read more... )

So, internets, since last we talked, I have done... various things that I didn't feel like posting about at the time. But I'm now all signed up for library privileges (although still working on internet access in said library) and reunited with all the books I sent home from France, and working on scaling up the amount of work I'm doing every day ( Read more... )

PORTRAIT OF THE MEDIEVALIST READING AN ARTICLE ABOUT THE BRETON-MANCELLE FRONTIER, 500-1500 ( Read more... )

The filing and paying of my taxes is in progress, and I'm likewise steeling myself to shell out for the plane tickets for my travels in May and June. So much money, gleep. It's going to be a bit touch-and-go financially, especially over the summer, but I think I can make coming back to France for another month after Kalamazoo work - I think ( Read more... )