Texty

This, folks, is the school from which I just graduated.

Apartment: Finally completely cleaned and locked up.

Graduation: Commencement walk completed. Now just waiting for one last grade.

Sister and her kids: Met, had very pleasant contact with.

Shawna: Exhausted and going to bed. Full details about the rest of these things tomorrow after the parents have been sent home.

I'm very tired and sore, but happy to be home. I'm mostly moved out of the bachelor pad, now. There are just a few more small things and some cleaning left to do, which will be dealt with when we're up there again next Saturday for commencement.

Of course, there's still a half-full U-Haul sitting in my driveway. It'll be emptied tonight, but things will mostly be going directly into the garage, where my car usually sits, as there are several household cleaning/re-arranging things that need to happen before those things go to their proper homes. Two years of being away from home means two years of household projects have been buiding up. I suspect I'm in for a busy (and probably expensive) summer of mucking around the house.

I need the domestic downtime, though. I'd go completely nuts if I didn't have any mental stimulation, so this won't last long, and I'll likely be doing plenty of brain-oriented projects, too, but two years of school means the old noggin needs a bit of a rest for at least a few weeks. Continuing to catch up on my reading, plus daily rounds of mah-jongg and spider solitaire should be enough for it. :)

Other than domestic stuff, reading, playing and socializing (Eeee! People!) I'll probably be working somewhat on the fertility stuff, to see where that goes. Otherwise, I'm just waiting for a good job to come along.

If October rolls around and I'm neither pregnant nor in a perfect job, I'll probably go sign up with some temp agency or something, since we'll definitely need the money by then to start paying off some of the massive credit bills this whole educational adventure has racked up. Fortunately, my degree means that the kinds of temp jobs I can now expect will be far different than the biological office equipment ones I'd done before. No more answering phones, that's for damned sure.

I'm done!

Sweet mother of heavenly fuck...

I. AM. DONE.

I did my presentation this afternoon, we put the paper to bed 45 minutes ago and I am currently picking up the apartment a bit before meeting the gang downtown.

LET THE DRINKING COMMENCE!!!!

I'm just a gnat's whisker from finishing my senior paper, and I would love it if some of y'all scholarly minded types wouldn't mind giving it a look through. It's 25 pages--though most of that is formatting and bibliography--but it reads quickly.

Any takers?

The draft (and the research log, and the weekly participation summary) es fini! 12 pages of the damned thing, too. Well, OK, so it was really only about 8, if you shave off the biblio and the weird opening pages that APA style requires. It was about 2100 words total--a little less than half of the final size. However, all that's left for me to do on it is just amass and analyze (according to criteria I've set) several more stories. This should take a fair amount of time, but next to no effort.

With all that's left for this class being that, a final essay on my class participation and a presentation, this means I'm officially on the downhill side of this class. Unless he finds something horribly wrong with my draft, it's smooth sailing from here out, and I should have no trouble passing. Yes, I was actually worried about that.

My advanced reporting project, now that's a different story. I'm glad I can kind of sleep through the next two weeks of seminar, because I need to throw a metric fuckton of effort into getting that project in better shape. I'm worried about doing the map (which reminds me: n8dagr801, are you a GIS guru and can help me with that?) but I'm more worried about getting the last interviews I need. You know me and sourcing. Bleh. I think I'll manage, especially with the wonderful efforts of the lovely miztiy involved, but I'm still stressing anyway.

For the moment, however, I'm going to take a well-earned break. I am going to do absolutely nothing of academic value tomorrow. Instead, I'll probably spend the day starting to pack up my apartment, since I now have only three weeks left of actually living here (I'll be sleeping in SnoCo during finals week.) M is going to meet me for dinner, which will also be nice.

Early next week, I'll probably do the advanced reporting project stuff, plus herd my kittens to get decent coverage of the GAP nonsense going on. Then I get FOUR WHOLE DAYS at home. More like 4 1/2, if I get out of production early next Thursday and don't have anything other than class to occupy the following Tuesday. I'll probably spend almost that entire time sleeping--resting up before I do my final push to finish my two projects, which are due at the end of dead week. And I may also try to get my LOTRO characters to a level at which they're actually useful for group play. I could use the whole blasting orcs thing to calm me down after all this chaos.

I also, however, do plan to celebrate my birthday a bit early in some way that weekend. Not sure how or when or what, but something other than the usual.

And now, bed--and a few chapters in the latest Redwall book I'm devouring--awaits. Zzzzzzzzzzzz.....

I can actually taste impending freedom! Exactly one month from today, I'll be doing The Walk and leaving this insane school thing behind.

Assuming, of course, that I can even get this bloody fucking bitch of a draft for my senior project done. If we hadn't gotten a 24-hour extension, I'd be screwed.

At least the draft for my other project is basically done, but for a bit of fancy editing stitching parts together. Only thing left after that is doing a map and then polishing the thing for the final version.

It's been really weird having to shift my research mindset back and forth constantly between journalistic and scientific. It may not seem that different--and thank goodness I'm working on similar topics for both--but the sourcing processes are really different, as is the writing. But I think I'm managing. Both processes, if different, feel comfortable for me.

Just one more month. I can do this. Gahhhhhhhh!

I had a hell of a time trying to get to sleep last night, and could not haul my carcass out of bed for love nor money until about 20 minutes ago. My reading notes for my seminar class were due at noon. I knew I wasn't going to get those in on time, but I also agonized about making 3-5 class, since I'm moving slowly, in pain (not sure why; probably my usual chronic inflammation and such) and have to drop off my rent check before 5.

And the prof sent out mail saying he wasn't going to make it to class. Sweet. Not sweet that he's sick (he's... strange... but I don't wish him illness) but sweet that I have a reprieve. We're supposed to go to class anyway but... honestly, I'd rather spend the rest of the day working on my thesis instead of brainstorming for the midterm. Thesis? 50% of the grade. Midterm? 10%. Not a tough decision.

As it is, I'm a bit busy anyway, because I'm trying to use what I've learned in my last couple of psych classes to help M and his family understand what might be going on with his mom's memory issues. Turns out that learning about encoding and the hippocampus was useful.

I have decided to form G.U.C.E: The Guerilla Union of Copy Editors.

Our motto: "An apostrophe is a terrible thing to waste."

We will roam the English-speaking world with our red pens, correcting flyers, ads and other printed evidence of ugly grammar, spelling and punctuation.

Fear us, ye foes of proper language!*
( Caffeine + tired = silly Shawna )

*This random message was brought to you by a flyer from our department that used the phrase "over $10,000."

*facepalm*

I am SO freaking tired. We didn't put the SPFH to bed until almost 2. Mondays suck anyway because they're so damned long (usually 12 hours, minimum), and having to be in the newsroom--as much as I love the people there, it's not exactly comfortable--that long sucks twice as much.

To top it all off, when I got home, I spent a little time unwinding so I could sleep, instead of going straight to bed. Good thing, because my building's fire alarm decided to go off. For an hour. No sign of smoke or flames, so I just stuck earplugs in and tried to ignore it until they came to fix it. The alarm here has generally been busted for a while anyway--it's done the false alarm thing twice before that I know of. It's annoying, because eventually, people are going to stop caring when it goes off, and some poor schmuck is going to get roasted during a real fire.

Seminar class today. We have reading notes and "participation notes" due each week. I actually like our textbook, so I wrote four pages of summary and analysis just on chapter 1. I wonder if that will count for or against me.

Yours truly went ubergeek yesterday. In my advanced reporting class, we're studying a "news package" from the Miami Herald. Unfortunately, the link to the Flash/multimedia site for it was busted, so we were just using links to the stories, and didn't have the whole thing to look at. I discovered what was wrong (ftp instead of http in the link) and got us to the right site, then e-mailed the webmaster at the Herald to tell him that and several internal links within the Flash site itself were busted. He's in the process of fixing them now. Heh. My hours spent sitting on my ass in front of a computer haven't been a waste after all. ;)