elanya

Lets see. I came home for 5:30, slept for an hour and a half or so, had dinner, faffed about looking throught boxes for my dissertation, flipped through the appendixes (*cringe*), and faffed about a bit on LJ. I guess that would do it.

I did have a productive afternoon before I came home, at least. I went through more of Evans. I think it is the skiming that kills my brain. What I need to do now is polish up my Thucydides report, and do some of either my Theory readings for this week, or else start one of the Armada books I need to review. Maybe some of all of the above. I also need to do dishes, and bake something. It probably won't be rice pudding after all, since I have no milk. Maybe it will be bread and brownies!

I got back my paper on Parry from Swanson and I got a B. This isn't too bad, since only 4 proplr in the class got A's, and only 4 got B's. The rest got... less than B. This is about what I expected. I know I have a tendency to be very vague in my arguments, and not provide enough evidence. I am usually aware of this habit, but in this case I didn't take good enough notes (okay, I didn't take *any*) while I was reading. He liked my arguments, though, and he *didn't* tear apart my grammar, and I am proud of that. I did do a lot of proofing on that paper, and I guess it mostly paid off. It also means that the mark reflects the content so my pride is perhaps a mite ironic. If I have time, I may well do another paper to replace it. We can review any of the other books we have to read for class, and there are a couple that I think will be quite interesting. On the other hand, it is only worth 10% of the class mark, and I am going to have a lot of other work later on as well. We shall see.

In other scholastic news, I talked to Dr. Babbits about my thesis idea, and he was maybe a little less encouraging. I am not really surprised. I have the impression that he is pretty sceptical about identifying piracy in any context. He pointed me at a paper he gave at a Society for Historical Arcaheology conference in 1998 about the (alleged)QAR, basically saying it isn't. It has some really snarky title, along the lines of "It has to be a pirate! I really want it to be!" or something. Boo on him. I don't know exactly what he thought of my blatantly disagreeing that the only thing differentiating a pirate from another sailor was the law, either. He isn't going to tell me not to do it, I know. It is probably good to have a sceptic around, for that matter. I am just a little concerned about being too screwed over my someone else's personal biases. We'll see how it goes, anyway. On the bright side, I can use this for my 'researech paper' for theory class. I just have to figure out *how*, now. He says in the syllabus that it "can be the methodology section of your thesis". I suppose I'm just not clear about how to apply that, at this point. It seems awful early. More thinking is necessary, it seems. It isn't like I don't have enough other stuff to work on in the meantime. Which I should go do, right. Bread first, then dishes, then Thucydides.