"Post your drive" meme

As is so often the case when I post here, I'm currently avoiding doing work. However, the work I am avoiding doing is writing, which means that I'm not even inclined to write anything here. Therefore, I am following Graham's lead and doing a "post your drive" meme.

The rules:
1. Post 10 pictures off your hard drive. No cheating.
2. No captions!
3. You may answer questions about the pictures in your comments section if you wish, but you are under no obligation to do so.

I don't have that many pictures on my new computer yet, so these are all pretty recent, but without further ado:






















wondermark.com


























































icanhascheezburger.com




























icanhascheezburger.com

Life *is* a garden!

I left for New Mexico last week without having harvested anything from my garden, and I returned to a giant cucumber that Bill picked for me and one more on the vine.

























Notice that the cucumber is bigger than my garden, and nearly as big as Joyce and Bill's house. Clearly, I am a master gardener.











The garden's coming along. From back to front of this picture it's tomatoes, cucumbers and a cantaloupe, bell peppers, more bell peppers/ jalapenos, more jalapenos, green beans and wax beans, carrots and onions. There's also a little garlic planted around the edges, but that's more to keep the rabbits out than anything.







I don't have a name for her yet, but I bought a fancy painted salamander in Santa Fe, and she's now living between one of my cucumbers and a cantaloupe. There's a close up of her in situ below. I know it's a girl, because she's wearing mascara and has fabulous painted toenails.























Some fancy lilies grow by my fence.













I always forget what this is called, but it's a plant that my great-grandmother, and it's still in the pot she planted it in (which I think is actually a bird bath planted in the ground, because it's impossible to move). It's a pretty little thing, anyway.













I also have a little potted garden by the side of the house. It's mostly herbs, but I also have some pepper plants and other fun stuff. this is an awesome teacup-shaped pot with spots on it. It has coriander (the little tiny one in the back - I planted the seeds a few weeks ago and it's just now getting very big), sage (the unruly looking one to the right), lemon basil (light green), and chives in the middle.





Many more of my basil seeds sprouted than I expected, so I have lemon basil coming out my ears. That's another coriander in the bottom right corner.











I got a great hanging basket at the farmer's market last week. I don't really know what all it has in it, but the flowers are gorgeous. You can also see a couple more jalapeno plants in the bottom of the picture and my Meyer lemon tree in the left corner. The light green leaves on the lemon tree are all new growth since I bought it - I'm pretty excited. Maybe I'll have lemons in the next year or two!

This is out of order, but it's one of the Easter lilies from the church that Grandpa planted. It blooms every once in a while, and it's really pretty right now.

I made cucumber salad this afternoon from the aforepictured cucumber, which means the plant's already paid for itself. I can't wait until my peppers start producing. I love me some bell peppers. We're going to make jalapeno poppers with the jalapenos, and I think Eric and I are going to try to make salsa this year, since we practically have a salsa garden. I love the summertime.

Checking in

...to say I survived last semester and enjoyed what little of spring break there was. Wooster had a 2 week long spring break - that seems much more reasonable than one measly little week. This is not even enough time to get rested. Seriously.

Spring quarter starts tomorrow- tonight feels like the calm before the storm. I should be cleaning my room and doing laundry, since as of tomorrow morning my life will once again belong to the history department and I won't have the leisure to do all of that stuff as well as it ought to be done, but I've basically been laying around all evening watching episodes of Battlestar Galactica and playing on the internet. It's rainy, I have a headache (probably from staring at a computer screen for too long, natch) and I don't have to do anything tonight. Which means I probably won't.

The infamous seminar paper

So I'm working on a seminar paper for my advisor, and I have a draft due on Monday. Now, normally I'm not one to get worked up about a paper, but this one is kind of big since it will eventually become my master's thesis. Additionally, my advisor has a reputation (no pun intended*) for basing her opinion of a person as a scholar on whatever work of theirs she sees first, and no matter how much better your second paper is than your first, she still will lose interest in you if she doesn't think your first paper was good.

So there's a little pressure. Which, for me, translated to hardcore avoidance for a while. (I.e. I'm supposed to be working on said paper at this very moment, and yet I'm writing in my blog instead. You can always tell when there's something I'm procrastinating on because suddenly blog posts skyrocket). The thing is, I'm really enjoying the topic, and I think it could end up being something really good. I have good ideas, but I feel overwhelmed by my other classes and don't have time to do anything really well - I'm half-assing my classes because I'm working on my seminar paper, and I'm skimping on time for the seminar paper because I don't have time to get everything done for my classes. Sheesh.

Well, I thought I was handling everything fairly well - I worked hard on my paper yesterday and got it in pretty good shape, and I thought I was in a better place with it mentally, too. The funny thing about that, though, is this morning when I met my mom for our weekly breakfast at Aladdin's I started telling her about my topic and the research I was doing, and she watched me break out in hives all across my chest literally as I kept talking about it. She says she wouldn't have believed it if she hadn't seen it.

So maybe I'm a little more stressed about it than I thought.

However, this afternoon is to be totally devoted to it, to the exclusion of all else, so I can take off to Wooster and see my girls for the first time in a year (2 years for Katie!). I'll consider this blogging a warm-up to get in the mood to write.

It'll be so nice to turn in a draft on Monday and just have it done for a couple days - I'm sure no matter what I turn in is going to get ripped apart, so I'm not so worried about that, I just need to have something half decent to turn in period. I'm putting a page/ word count in my blog heading as encouragement to keep writing - it's exciting to have the words add up! Some of the current count is still outline and such, so the word count will go up faster than the page count as I replace bullet points with paragraphs, but even so - it's exciting.


*I study reputation and identity, which is why that was funny. Well... not funny exactly. Maybe only to me. Maybe because I've typed the word "reputation" so many times in my academic career now that every time I see it or hear it anywhere I can't help but notice. I'm basing this paper on a chapter I wrote for my senior I.S., which you'll remember from
The Good Old Days, so I'm reusing a fair amount of the writing from that, but I'm also adding some new angles and a bunch of new examples, which is what I've been dragging my feet on. But no more! Andiamo!

ETA: I decided to make a list on the sidebar instead of counting pages and words in the blog heading so I can include dates and times and such. I'm done working for today - wrote 904 words, or about 3 pages, but I also edited some stuff and rearranged a few things, so not too shabby for a day's work. I'm headed to Wooster now, but I'll be working hard on this tomorrow, so I'm sure I'll post a progress update sometime tomorrow evening. Have a great weekend!

The best day

So I'm supposed to be reading for/ writing my seminar paper right now, but I had a really great day today and I have to share before I get back to work. I'm going to do it in bullet points, though, because maybe that will keep me from elaborating too much and writing a novel about my day.

* I woke up before my alarm, but didn't have to get up early because I got all of my reading done last night for today's class, so I got to just stretch out and lay in bed a little longer.

*The sun was shining, I had my favorite breakfast (an apple diced up and tossed in plain yogurt and a spoonful of ricotta cheese, with a spoonful of Smucker's crunchy peanut butter on top and a little drizzle of honey), and I had a good workout at the gym (to which I've been faithfully going at least twice a week, although often four times a week, since the first week of January, with the exception of one rough week when I was way behind on my work and couldn't spare the time. Also, please notice the number of subordinate clauses in that sentence. That's impressive).

*I didn't need a heavy coat on the way to school because the sun was shining (see above) and it was 60 degrees, so I took my jacket off in the car and turned the radio up. I put my windows down a crack and as I was pulling out of my driveway my favorite song came on the radio (Bon Jovi's "Livin' on a Prayer"), so I rocked out all the way from Newark to Granville. The radio station continued to play great songs all the way to Columbus, including the Steve Miller Band's "Jet Airliner" as I was driving past the airport and there was a jet taking off right over my car. That's just cool.

*As I was pulling into my parking lot on campus someone was pulling out of one of the first spots just as I got there, so I didn't even have to drive around looking for a place, *and* it was right in the front of the lot.

*Class was a lot of fun today - everyone was in a good mood and we were talking about some interesting and kind of humourous sources, so everyone was joking and laughing. Love that!

*The drive home was fairly painless, and the radio continued to impress. I do love me a good classic rock station.

*My books came in at the library, so I picked them up - I can finally write the theory part of my paper! Woohoo!

*I talked to Paul on the phone and he had a good day, too. Good days all around!

*I bought tortollini at the grocery yesterday and made some for dinner. Mmm... pasta and cheese.

*I just went downstairs to make a cup of tea and saw the first robins of spring hopping around my yard.

*Only two more days until I roadtrip up to Wooster to see my girls! It's been over a year since I saw Jen, Toohey and Nettie, and I haven't seen Katie since we graduated, so I'm beyond excited.

Hooray!

"The rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated..."

This picture is from the lolcats website and it really, really cracks me up, so I'm sharing.

While the rumors of my death may have been exaggerated (what a great quote - thanks, Mark Twain!), the rumors of the pile of work I'm slowly crawling out from under are not exaggerated at all. I have about 80 lines of Latin to translate today (although there's no way I'm going to get through that much - my Latin is a pitiful, mewling thing and is probably only up to about 30 lines at best with the other stuff I have to do today), about four documents to read for my French history class, three of which are in French (which, thank God, is coming back to me, so these shouldn't take me nearly as long as the Latin) and I promised my advisor a draft of my seminar paper by Friday, which means a lot of writing between now and then. So naturally I'm avoiding all of it by writing in the old blog for the first time in a month. Lol.





Overall, though, I swear I'm mostly enjoying grad school. I was reading a Newsweek article a couple weeks ago about people who thrive on stress, and I think I must be one of those people, because I just keep putting myself into impossible situations and moving on. What? There are plenty of nice boys in Ohio? Nah - I want the one who's six hours away. You mean there are plenty of jobs (well, maybe not right now, but still...) that don't require a PhD? Well... I want one of the few jobs that does require one. I could be living with my parents and not paying rent or for food? But then I wouldn't have my own kitchen or bedroom.... I could've gotten an apartment in Columbus and not had to drive in to school? But then I probably couldn't have my garden.





Who wants to do things the easy way? Not this girl.





In other news, I'm getting close to done paying off the new computer, which will mean a new camera within the next month or so. I find blog posts to be much more interesting when they include pictures, so perhaps blogging will pick back up when I have a working camera. In the meantime, must get back to writing!

Things that make me happy

Sunshine: Although my little weatherbug says it's only one degree outside (that's just ridiculous, and I'm pretty sure it was 2 degrees when I got up this morning, so how can it be getting colder as the day progresses?), the sun is shining through my window onto my desk and I woke up in a great mood. Sunshine does very good things for me.

It's Thursday, which means this afternoon is the start of my weekend. I have an incredible amount of stuff to do this weekend, especially if I want to go to New York next weekend, but it's nice to only have one more class this week.

My computer: it's beautiful. And I can get on the internet in my room.

Book club: we met last night and had a great discussion on Tomcat in Love by Tim O'Brian. Mmm... books.

I'm hosting the next book club, which means I get to justify buying more books. I mean, I could just order the one we're reading for book club (Company of Liars by Karen Maitland), but if I spend more than $25 at Amazon the shipping's free! What a deal! ;)

Paul was here last weekend and we had the family over for dinner at my house Sunday. He made Spaghetti Bolognese and I made veggie lasagna. We also had a great salad with cranberries, walnuts, homemade red wine vinaigrette, mixed greens and fresh Parmesan, a peperonata, garlic bread and Joyce's Texas sheet cake. I love hosting dinner parties, but this was a particularly fun one.

As of today, Paul and I have officially known each other for three years. We met at a Superbowl party in Edinburgh on February 5th, 2006, although we didn't "officially" start dating until October of that year. Still, though, 3 years is a long time!

I'm trying to get a lot done school-work-wise this week so I can visit him in New York next weekend. His birthday is February 13th, Valentines' Day, of course, is the 14th (although I think it's dumb to have a day when you're expected to tell someone you love them. Shouldn't every day be Valentines' Day?), and my birthday is the 18th, although I'll be back in school by then. It's a big weekend, though, so we try to get together for it when we can.

Speaking of getting schoolwork done, I need to go finish reading these articles before I leave for class, but it's a beautiful (if excruciatingly cold) day and I'm happy!

Cheers!