I'm one part chair-dancing, one part flailing in panic, and various other parts emotionally eating a thing of raspberry yogurt because I'm all out of chocolate and I just got an email from prof P, director of graduate studies, informing me that I've been appointed as one of the department's teaching fellows next year. AAAAAAAAAAH! This means I'm ( Read more... )

First of all, waking up to the final score of a Canucks beatdown of the Calgary Flames? EXCELLENT way to start the week. I also managed to drag myself out of bed earlier than I have been of late, and now I'm fed and showered and dressed and doing things and it's not even ten yet! The first order of business is my weekly to-do list. Here is my ( Read more... )

I seem to have weathered the phase of despair over my Haskins paper, and hopefully I'll be able to avoid another one. I now have a rough working outline, an experimental scrivener project dedicated to it, and a thesis statement I can build the paper around. I started some introductory writing this morning, although I think it will mostly belong ( Read more... )

So by the way, I live. There hasn't been much of excitement going on here - things are generally enjoyable but not dramatic. I've eaten a number of delicious baguettes, and lately, some pastries, and I have some hand-washing to do if I want clean socks tomorrow, and I've been going to the library and reading a lot, and the Canucks are 1-1-1 in ( Read more... )

Here it is: my comprehensive list of everything I need to do by the end of August in order to be ready to move out of Boston and fly home to Vernon for three weeks before I move to Rennes for eight months. It will be lurking at the top of my journal until the end of August, and spawning (hopefully) daily spinoffs.

( Visa stuff... )

Sooo, I am absently eating a bowl of soup and coming to you from my new iPad! Yes, that's right, new iPad. You know how I was saying yesterday that as soon as I got my French visa, I was going to walk briskly from the consulate to the apple store and buy an iPad? Well, that isn't exactly how it all went down. I actually dawdled for a few minutes ( Read more... )

Now, for something completely different, although not totally France-unrelated, I'm test-driving an iPad! I've been thinking about getting one for my research while I'm in France. I could use it both as a second monitor to display images of my documents as I transcribe them and as an e-reader for .PDF files and the academic ebooks the library is ( Read more... )

And we have a Vancouver Canucks/Boston Bruins 2011 Stanley Cup Final! It's the matchup I've been hoping for, but now that I've got it, I'm feeling a little nervous. What if the Bruins come over all awesome? They've only played the Canucks once this year, and they won ( Read more... )

So, following my last post of total paper and life anguish, I live. I live, and for the moment the desire to drop out of grad school and go and live in a box at the bottom of a hole under a rock and flagellate myself for a couple of years, after which I might consider myself fit to rejoin society at a level of intellectual responsibility more ( Read more... )

So, I ended up staying out until midnight last night, which I didn't exactly plan, but which I roped myself into by going out for drinks in Brookline to celebrate fellow grad student JB's dissertation defense at five. I got a ride there, and intended to get a ride back, with my office mate LB-W, who was the one to invite me in the first place, but ( Read more... )