elanya

Is next week! /o\

I put it on the grad list and on FB, soI may as well put it here too:

I would like to welcome everyone interested to attend the public segment of my dissertation defense next Wednesday, May 29th, in Glasscock 300 at 9:00 AM! The topic of the talk will be "Harbour Island: The Comparative Archaeology of a Maritime Community."

Thank you!


...I'm just starting to feel a little stressed about it now. I'd feel better if I had my presentation more together, but I am procrastinating pretty hard on it. But I have all weekend, right? D: I do have it started.... Why is it so hard to sort out the history bits?

I finally handed in my prospectus today!

And then I have been sitting around doing nothing on the internet all afternoon. Better get at that data entry...

How are all of you? :D

Have some soothing pirate tunes while you think about your answers.

<3!

No monster truck rallies, alas ;p

I have two (maybe three >.>) sections to finish for this last chapter. The one I started yesterday should go pretty fast once I get in to it, and if I can keep focuses I may even get most of it done today! If I do, I will then look more seriously at adding a fifth comparative site (I want something more northern, and more urban, which shouldn't be too hard, I hope... The trick is that people working in, say, Boston, were more critical of South's work, and I need something pre-categorized).

Other than that, I need to clean the cat box at some point today, and eventually I need to go to the pet store and pick up more litter and some canned food to start Maze's and my canned kitty food adventures! The vet has recommended wet food for managing his weight, and I have been doing some reading in to that, and it is time to give it a shot.

I'm also having exciting shower adventures! Merc got us a new shower head while she was here (yay!) and I'm working on getting that installed. The trickier part is the new (taller!!!) shower arm, which is proving difficult to dettach. I'm trying some WD-40 on it now though, so hopefully that will do the trick!

Anyway, time for writing now, to get as much done on that as possible before I have game late this afternoon.

Whee!

How is neither 'ocean' nor 'water' in the top 1000 words, but 'mumble,' 'expression,' and 'interrupt' are? It think that's telling in and of itself, but these are apparently words from the contemporary fiction frequency list. In any case... my Upgoer-Five Elevator Speech:

I am writing about how the living around water makes people think about themselves and the people they live with. Do people who don't live around water think different things about who they are than people who do not live around water?

Things people had and used in the past can tell us how people thought about themselves. I want to get things that people left in the ground when they lived in places near water in the past. I want to look at these old things and see if they are different from the things that people who didn't live near water had. This will help me know if these two groups of people were thinking about who they were in different ways.

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IN other news, I had a good few days of writing early this week, and am doing meeedium at keeping up that momentum. The next few days are going to be odd, because Merc is coming down to sort out some house things before I get a new roommate (another friend of mine displaced by Life Issues). So that will take some adjusting.

However I think I can get done by August. I need to write an email to my committee and figure out when I can wrangle them all and start setting some dates. I will try and do that this weekend. Next week, I am going to get my proposal all squared away and start bombarding at least parts of my committee with chapters :p

Well, bread in toast form, anyway!

It is the weekend, and as I am lucky enough to have a job that doesn't require weekend hours, more time off for me! I am hoping to get more dissertation work today. Right now I am going through a report on a site I am using as a comparison so that I can pull out relevant information - what is the history of the place, how was it excavated, why do I think it is a relevant/interesting comparison - so that I can do a couple-page write up on in in my chapter. I have a couple of other sites to do, but I I am hoping to be able to knock these out pretty quickly as I go. If I'm really lucky I'll be done this chapter by February, then I just need the intro and conclusion.

I need to look up the deadlines though, because I'm afraid I'll miss the August graduation time line by just not being able to get stuff to my (notoriously slow) committee :/ Basically this semester is one of CONSTANT (but variable levels of) PANIC! My I-20 expires in August, so really I need to be DONE by then. And really I should be looking for jobs too. like now. Only there is so much shit I need to be putting together for that and I just... ugh :( I don't have it :( I'm trying to really focus this semester, but at the same time I need outlets or I'll go nuts.

Anyway, the point here was: today I am trying to focus on diss work, but I have some exceptions - I want to take some time tis afternoon to put together my monster for mailing. And I felt like there was something else, but I forget.

Now I have finished my toast (bread maker rye with no carroway) and cheese, and have a mug of tea to linger over as I blow through the rest of this report :)

Apparently I have used that title before, but I stand by it.

Today is an odd day, demonstrated by the fact that it is Thursday and I am not yet at work. I'm going in at noon to help get set up for the Amazing Aggie Art Race, which is something we do at work every year - kind of like the amazing race, only with more art-based challenges and all on campus.

Tonight I am going to go see the live Rifftrax broadcast of Birdemic!

All in all this is not a typical Thursday! Tomorrow may also be an odd day, I'm not sure - we might be cleaning the big memorial of the bonfire disaster, but only if it isn't freezing and raining. Either way, I'm taking Monday off, so wooh!

Mornings home are generally pretty unproductive for me. I work much better in the afternoon, but when I'm home in the mornings I tend to linger over things I other wise rush through - savouring tea over the course of an hour, sleeping in, longer walk for the dog, and so on. Having my morning rather than my afternoon off generally results in me getting no dissertation work done either. Even on full days off, I have trouble getting started until usually around 10:30 or 11. Whereas if I'm at work, I'm in by 8 and get lost of stuff done there.

I have to leave in about an hour, and I need to figure out lunch in there as well (I should have something here before I go in, I suppose, though that puts me having a very early lunch!) and get a few other things ready (I need my camera for the race!), which doesn't feel like it is enough time to get anything done, although it probably is. I will try to do some writing tonight after the movie - I should be home before 10, I hope!

I keep wanting to write more in here, and I keep not having time, or I have other things I want to make time for more. I am well on my way to finishing knitting my first pair of socks ever though (about half through the second sock), and Yuletide is starting up! I'm also going up to canada to visit friends and family in a month, and I'm really looking forward to it! I have clear diss goals at the moment as well and I hope I can stay on top of them to actually get out of here next spring. Wish me luck!

I have not been doing as well as I'd intended at keeping up with this, but that's par for the course. I have laundry unfolded (some still in the dryer) that I washed almost a week ago. I don't even have a good excuse for it really. I've been keeping busy, but not with anything essential. Enh.

I need to take a bunch of pictures off my camera, from my visit home, still, and then from the recent SHA conference I attended last week in Baltimore. It was great! Going home was great, and the conference was also great. However math stupidity led to me shorting myself six hours from work, so, uh, oops? Someday I'll get it right - some day, I'll learn to count to forty :V The good news there is that it's been so quiet that if I'd had to spend six more hours finding myself things to do I may have shot myself out of boredom :p Luckily, things have been picking up recently, and I'm sure we'll be going full steam soon enough as we get closer to the move-back date. Speaking of, I need remember to bring in crappy clothes for working in/cleaning the vault. And my sneakers.

I have so many things to say, but so little energy/time to say them! I'll try a short list. Hmm.

-I haven't been doing any real fiction writing since Yuletide ended. I have written lots of creative fictional things, but nothing narrative. I think I needed the break, but I do want to get back to it. I need to budget my time better.

-I have been "finishing" a paper for publication for about two weeks now. I had issues with my references. I chose to fix them using the time consuming solution, but this has proven to been the wrong one. Now I need to go unfix all my fixing, whoops. And fix different things. I should have been done with all this ages ago, but I'm not. Why? I need to budget my time better.

-I spend yesterday hanging out with tethys123 for the first time in forever. We went out for food and worked on crafting things. I can taste the end of Innsmouth - it tastes salty, like my tears. I'm sure I could finish it in a few hours, if I could find them, or make myself give them over to knitting. I could do this.... if I could budget my time better.

- I have joined a new bi-weekly D&D game. I have spent way too much time on my character history and writing up stuff for the setting. Its been fun, but I need to budget my time better.

-The conference was great for kicking my ass in to gear on my dissertation, but it doens't seem to have taken. I haven't revisited it at all yet, because I've been making up time at work, or working on that paper or writing you don't want to know how many pages of game stuff, or knitting, or generally faffing about in the internet. I need to budget my time better.

I'm sure there was more, but you're probably getting an idea of the running theme. I'm not sue what the best solution will be. I work better at school, but I have a hard time getting there when the buses aren't running regularly. I need to keep my house clean, and feed myself. I have to take care of the animals. I'm sure I can fit more useful things in to my day, but I don't know how to make myself try to do it. Maybe once the buses are running on a more convenient schedule it will help, and once I'm no longer putting in full days at work and have more time on campus. We'll see.

Right now what I really need to do, though, is go to bed. Tomorrow is technically a holiday, but I sill have a ton of stuff to do.

I woke up in the night last night due to a pretty powerfully awful dream which I am going to ( cut for trigger warnings... )

I have more thoughts, but I'm at work, so this'll have to do you for now. Anyway, I'm glad my boss had tea at work, because on top of staying up too late and waking up in the night with horrible dreams, I forgot mine at home >_

I have a ton of stuff to do today, so I am trying to figure out how best to organize my time. Which of course means a to-do list ;p

Things I need to do:
Source and label unlabeled glass on my table (faaaail Heather)
Label and catalog ceramics and glass from OBH ST001
Fix INA interim report
photocopy field data for INA
Burn report and field data for Debbie
Make sure all my data backups are current in all 3-4 places
Lunch @1
Swimming @2
Starbucks ~4:30
Review prospectus and send 'er out!(?)

I shoooould be able to get ti all done if I don't spend too much time faffing about. Gonna start the glass sourcing/labeling now :)

I stopped at Walgreen's this AM to get nail polish for labeling, and also stocked up on some belated Easter zorms @_@