Lazy Days

My time as a lady of leisure continues, as Dr. Cooper has still not returned the remainder of my thesis. She sent the second chapter back on Friday with minimal suggestions, again making me wonder, why exactly did this take two weeks? Now she's in Venice, so I can only imagine how long the rest of it will take. To save time, I gave Dr. Hall my front matter and first two chapters yesterday. True to her sphinxlike reputation, her reaction was not exactly what I expected: she asked me how long it was, and when I said about 65 pages she groaned "I thought yours was supposed to be short!" Er, sorry my scholarly thoroughness took a little longer than the forty pages I expected? She was off to Venice herself today, where she and Dr. Cooper will be joined by Jasmine, who's giving a paper at the first session of the Renaissance Society of America. (It is "of America," but in deference to its large foreign membership, every five years the conference is outside the US). Geloso does not even begin to cover it.

I did accomplish some practical thesis-related things today, but all of them were boring mechanical things, like re-numbering my images according to the Chicago style, which I had done incorrectly, and then going over Temple's dissertation and thesis manual to make sure that I complied with the pages and pages and PAGES of specific instructions. Example: you have to double-space between your footnotes, which you would never do in a paper because it takes up a ridiculous amount of space. I also mastered the trick of getting Arabic and Roman numerals to co-exist peacefully in the same document (thank you, Google!) Now with my front matter, text, and bibliography joined together, I have about 80 pages. The last thing will be integrating my images, but I can't do that at home because then the document would be way too big to email to myself, which is how I preserve copious numbers of back-ups.

Besides that, I spent part of the afternoon in the backyard reading Something Rotten and attempting to get some color on my white-as-can-be skin, which hours later seems to have been a dismal failure. Blast!