Progress

My presentations are both done, and so are my papers! This despite my late realization that I would need to reformat my 100+ footnotes on the Eakins paper in order to accommodate Dr. Braddock's preference for a certain (weird) citation style. Instead of placing a footnote after each sentence in which you used a source, you use just one footnote at the end of every paragraph; if you used any quotations, those sources are listed first, and the reminder are then organized chronologically beginning with the most recent publication. That means the footnote sources don't actually match up to the order in which you used sources, something that he acknowledged makes it difficult for people to look at your work and extract references from it. He feels that this style places more focus on your work and not on your sources, but I just think that I'm really glad I don't work in American or modern art, because if this is how their articles work, how does anyone ever find anything? Anyway, after an hour or so of copy/pasting (and cursing when I realized I had an orphaned ibid, the source of which was now unclear thanks to the shuffling) I found myself with only 39 footnotes. However, I saved myself a copy of the paper with my original footnotes, so that should I decide to work this into an article (which he recommended after hearing my presentation, *grin*) I will actually know where I got information from.

I have begun working on my annotated bibliography, which was six pages worth of sources before I even began annotating, so God only knows how long this is going to turn out to be. In addition, I haven't even graded any of the papers yet, and after next Friday I'll have 80 exams to grade. The 20 extra exams are thanks to Agnes, who is skipping off to Egypt on Thursday to learn to use computer imaging equipment to model the monastery that Dr. Bolman is working on. However, she has promised me Polish chocolate upon her return, so I'll forgive her.

Fun stuff ahead, though; this Saturday Jasmine and I are going to a symposium at Princeton, though we will be missing Deborah Howard's talk because we have to skip out early so Jasmine can get ready for her Christmas party, which I will be bringing alcohol to in lieu of a baked offering. Next week Sean is coming up because he'll be done with classes! Yay! That next Saturday Meredith is having a Christmas party, and Carla will be home, and it will be all wonderful. We're going to the casino for New Year's with Sean's friends, for which I have a dress but no shoes, but Sean has promised to remedy this. Then it will be our five year anniversary, if you can believe it! We've decided to keep celebrating it without the gifts, because, you know, it's awesome.

Next semester, I'm taking one class (which is based around learning to polish up a paper into an article, so I think this will be extremely useful), TA-ing AWW again, and writing my thesis. After my presentation yesterday Dr. Cooper told me that it's definitely a thesis, and worthy of presenting at a conference (Cheshire cat grin). She told me to shoot for 30-50 pages for the thesis, and if I then take 40 as my upper-limit goal, I'm already a quarter of the way there!

You know, looking back at this, I'm in a very good mood. Unfortunately, now I have to walk to the eye doctor's and have my eyes dilated so they can check out the hole I have in my right retina, whoo! It's been there for a while and it's not a problem, but it does cause me to see bright light things if I look far to the right in a dark room. The doc compared it to "prisoner's cinema," which refers to people in dark solitary confinement who pressed their hands against their eyes to see the sparking lights. The downside is really the fact of being dilated, because it makes everything blurry and very photo-sensitve; last time I sort of stumbled the four blocks home squinting and shielding my eyes. I have so much work to still get through, though, that I wish they didn't have to do it. Ah well, c'est la vie.