Saturday, May 17, 2008

In which I seem to have wandered off

...for, like, a month? Or something. How 'bout some bullets then?

  • I am in a very bad grading place. I've had assorted midterm crap for more than a week, and have only started in on it this weekend. And I've promised everything back on Monday and Tuesday of next week. The UChaos papers are pretty good, and I only have about 8 more to do, but the Big Willie class has exams and essays, and I'm kind of dreading them.
  • The official annual meeting with my committee was last week and... it went surprisingly well. I have a new title and conceptual structure for the diss (basically, I'm sticking a keyword on each chapter to guide the argument a bit more), so I wrote up a little outline for the committee, along with summer writing deadlines. Prof. Persnickety? Loves the new approach, and has revised his memory of the past year so that he's always been a fan of my topic and my approach. I'm finding this simultaneously encouraging and even more frustrating than before.
  • Currently, however, I am not actually writing anything. My already-awful time-management skills have been further deteriorated by this four-day-a-week teaching schedule.
  • Did I mention that my new title is awesome? C. suggested it, and it is indeed all poetically evocative and crap.
  • Jobs for next year? Who knows. I've put out a whole bunch of applications for UChaos stuff, in hopes of covering at least my tuition (because I'll be damned if I'm paying them for making me stay an extra year), but I've heard from exactly none of them, and I'm not expecting to until god-knows-when. Last year, I didn't hear about my fall teaching for the first-year thingy until July or August.
  • I did at least get some departmental funding to cover the last conference I went to. It's a pittance, but it's something.
  • As for non-complainy, non-schoolish stuff, there was visiting mom, going to Cubs games, a very pleasant Cinco de Mayo party, and what may be permanent success in quitting biting my fingernails. Go, me!