I have been assimilated to the Ravelry knitting borg. I've found a few people I know, who else is on there?
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| Date: | 2009-08-20 12:15 |
| Subject: | |
| Security: | Public |
| Mood: |  accomplished |
I promised more details about the race a couple days ago. Better late than never and all that.
( The details )
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I'll actually write something today after I've had some coffee, but here are the results:
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“The problem with Livejournal is that we all think we are so close, but really, we know nothing about each other. Hence, I want you to ask me something you think you should know about me. Something that should be obvious, but you have no idea about. Then post this in your LJ and find out what people don’t know about you.”
Ask what you want; if my answer is too personal for general consumption, I'll screen the comments.
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| Date: | 2009-05-30 19:24 |
| Subject: | UP |
| Security: | Public |
| Mood: |  content |
I just got home from seeing UP.
No spoilers here. I just wanted to share that it is of the same emotional vein as Wall-e or even Watership Down -- bittersweet and exploring some very adult emotional territory in a way that kids and adults will both enjoy.
I thought it was really well done and enjoyable.
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Lately I've been going on bike rides with my friend and former classmate, Anna.* We've gone for 6 mile peddles and I've done (what I thought was) 16. Last week she suggested that we ride out to a spot on the Katy Trail called Cooper's Landing where there is a campground and a lady who sells Thai food out of a trailer. Hey its an adventure! Anna had biked out there before and thought it would be about 25 miles. I thought "hey, I've done 16 miles in about an hour and a half, 25 should be do-able in an evening before it gets too dark..."
( Here's the first half of what happened )
* Who is famous for apple pies topped with bacon, and has taken her BA in sculpture and love of baking and started an awesome sideline business as a baker. Last night she showed me the beginning stages of the cake she is baking for a friend's birthday -- three feet tall and shaped like a rocket!
** CoMo is about 8 miles from the Katy Trail itself, and has built a connector trail to give residents an easy access to the trail and to funnel bike tourists into downtown. It passes through several large parks in town.
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| Date: | 2009-05-19 15:33 |
| Subject: | Summer Cooking |
| Security: | Public |
| Mood: |  curious |
The thermometer has topped 80 degrees out here in CoMo and I am at the beginning of my yearly summer cooking dilemma. Give me cold, dark, rainy weather and I will give you soups, stews, roasts, and casseroles that will stick to your ribs and keep you cozy through sheer thermal mass. Once the weather warms up, though, I'm at a loss. There are only so many times I can do caprese, or sandwiches, or a salad with some kind of meat on it. Boiled shrimp is delicious but spendy. I just read an article by Mark Bittman from last year's New York Times called "Summer Express: 101 Simple Meals Ready in 10 Minutes or Less" it has some great ideas, but many boil down to "salad with meat on top."
So here's my question to the peanut gallery -- What are your favorite summer meals? Do any of you have suggestions for specially good summer cookbooks?
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| Date: | 2009-05-12 09:29 |
| Subject: | Wildlife |
| Security: | Public |
| Mood: | calm |
My favorite running route takes me through a city nature area, on a path called the Bear Creek Trail. The usual loop takes me through the woods along Bear Creek and around a small marsh area. It is an extremely pretty run, especially now that it is spring and the woods are all incandescent green with new leaves. More birds than the ubiquitous robins, cardinals, and sparrows have settled in for the summer and I have started looking up the ones I don't recognise when I get home from runs. Last night's new birds were an indigo bunting and a vermillion flycatcher.
The trail is also well-populated by deer. Last week I almost ended up playing deer tag. A doe and half-grown fawn crossed the path a few yards ahead of me. The doe did the expected deer thing and bolted when I got closer but the fawn had not been listening to mama. She stood there, legs splayed, with the "oh shit, now what!?!!" look that my art history survey students would get when I would call on them to ID slides in class. Mama Deer stopped about twelve feet away and looked back with that "Oh god, what are you doing?" look that mothers get when their offspring are being seriously dumb. I got within two feet of the fawn and said "ok, this is the time when you run for it." The fawn blinked, realized she was a prey animal, and took off with her mother. Silly kids.
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| Date: | 2009-05-11 08:55 |
| Subject: | Star Trek |
| Security: | Public |
| Mood: | cheerful |
Alejandro and I saw it on Sunday morning. Overall I thought it was excellent -- it built in all the best lines and in-jokes from the series while being completly accessable to somebody who hadn't ever see the original. It was also refereshingly upbeat. I do have one tiny quibble
( Wee Tiny Spoiler )
Other than that I'd happily go see it again.
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But, I just have to say that my department's DGS (Director of Graduate Studies) is TOTALLY my hero.
During my (immensely frustrating) advising meeting last week she gave me a great suggestion for a PhD program that I should look into, The Bard Graduate Center. And after some poking around their website it looks like a really good option. The theoretical thrust of the program is very much what I do intellectually and they are very consciously interdisciplinary, which also fits with how I research the material world. This quote from their website kind of sums up their philosophy:
Works of applied art have the misfortune of being regarded as products of the lower faculties of homo faber and of being relegated to the basement of the museum for the history of the human mind where, at best, they are shown as creations of technical interest. Who would so easily hit on the idea of responding to such precious showpieces as sensitive reflectors of the outward and inward life of their period? (Aby Warburg, 1927)
So, I wrote back to her yesterday just to say "Thanks, that looks like a good possibility" and she wrote back and mentioned that the Department's hotshot 18th century art prof knows the director of the program really well, and that he thinks that Bard would be VERY excited to have somebody who is interested in Byzantine textiles.
*Squeeee!*
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....in three and a half hours.
It will be fine. I had surprisingly confident dreams about the meeting last night. (All my grad school friends backing me up, my advisor suggesting I should just teach one of the classes I wanted to take.) I have copies of my updated CV, and did the (silly) grad school progress report thing on Tuesday. I'm wearing serious stomy boots.
It will be fine.
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Along with the thesis and advising debacles I've had some persistent family issues blow up all over me last week. Ugh. I spent Sunday somewhere around the intellectual and emotional level of a sponge. I picked up a little in the afternoon after sitting down and figuring out the grocery and meal plan for the week. Odd how little things like that make me feel more in control of my life.
Today, I'm feeling a little more lively. On tonight's agenda: make enchiladas, go for a run, do some sewing for Alejandro (one quilted avantail a la Walter von Hohenklingen), and start edging back into the thesis and advising mess. But at least I have plenty of time to update my CV, since that meeting got postponed until Thursday so my very least favorite professor can be there. Lovely.
In other random news -- its been six months and I'm still surprised at how much food ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) baronalejandro can eat. We had a whole box of crackers from the store just yesterday. Now? Considerably less.
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I do a little tutoring through on online service, Global Scholar, every once in a while. I just got a kid who sent me his Latin assignment with a not attached that he needed it translated from Latin to English.
*dangerous eyebrow raise*
Oh, you little twerp, I HOPE you didn't just ask what I thought you just asked. I DO NOT do people's homework for them.
Besides, 30 lines of Caesar is worth a _lot_ more than ten bucks.*
*This is said in complete jest. I won't help people cheat.
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Yesterday, I finally got a response to my application to NYU's PhD program.
It was not good.
I'm not going to New York in the fall.
(Insert some more swearing here. And some wailing and gnashing of teeth.)
I know its not any kind of judgment on me, or even much on my academic capabilities. (ok, I'm still working on believing that last one) Many schools are dealing with reduced funding this year and accepting fewer people this year. I'm working really really hard not to second-guess myself and beat myself up with "I should have been a more dedicated grad student." or "I could have done something better." or "Maybe I'm just being arrogant thinking I can do better than this department, and I'm not as good as I think I am."
So at this point I need to decide if I'm going to spend another year out of school and working and apply to other PhD programs next year, or if I'm going to just stay here and do my PhD at Missouri.
There will probably be some thinking out loud on that subject in the near future.
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| Date: | 2009-03-20 16:18 |
| Subject: | D.U.N.DONE |
| Security: | Public |
| Mood: |  exhausted | | Music: | dictation |
My thesis hit my committee memebers' mail boxes about 4:00pm today.
30 hours worked in the last 2 days to finish it
100 pages of text
200+ footnotes
7 page bibliography
6 languages other than English
Frankly, It is not all it could be, and I am expecting MANY changes before I can give the University my final copy and I'm ACTUALLY Master Betsy. But i can schedule my defense now. And I've at least got a whole draft.
Thank God.
And thank Baron Alejandro. I couldn't have done it without him.
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| Date: | 2009-03-11 15:07 |
| Subject: | Hunh... |
| Security: | Public |
| Mood: | busy |
So, the original plan for my thesis was that I'd be comparing fulling and dyeing workshops from Pompeii to the workshops found at four Late Roman cities: Ostia, Timgad, Gerasa, and Sardis. This was going to be the last chapter of my thesis.
Friday I dropped off a HUGE chunk of my thesis in my advisor's mailbox. It was the revised version of the first three chapters and the first draft of half of the fourth chapter, which roughly dealt with Ostia and as far as I've gotten done on the other sites. I spent the weekend and the last two days working furiously to finish the last chapter and my conclusions, with mixed success. I also kept thinking that this should have been a smaller project to start with, and could I just cut the comparison sites to Ostia and Sardis.
Today I checked my school email account and found an email that my advisor sent Monday giving advice on the big hunk o' thesis.
Part of the advice was "why don't we cut this down to just Pompeii and Ostia."
So, yay! smaller thesis! And CRAP. I just wasted the last two days.
I'm choosing to be relieved. Really.
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| Date: | 2009-03-10 11:26 |
| Subject: | Academic WTF? |
| Security: | Public |
| Mood: | working |
I'm seriously wondering if the author of the article re-assessing the evidence for the use of one of the archaeological sites I'm writing about* actually read the same site report that I have in front of me.** Because it seems like A) what is on the ground looks very different from what was written in the site report in some of these shops, B) what was written in the excavation notebooks got edited heavily by the time it got published in the site report 35 years later, or C) the author of the article was smoking something funny.
* The Byzantine shops connected to the large Roman bath at Sardis, just in case anybody is interested....
** ...on my desk, at work -- there are times I love my job.
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Smart chicks are sexy!
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/oxfordshire/7906884.stm?lss
PS: AND she's a Classicist.
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| Date: | 2009-01-21 08:40 |
| Subject: | Note to Self |
| Security: | Public |
| Mood: | sleepy |
Self,
What were you thinking trying to stay up late and get up early to work on the thesis when you still have a cold? You should know that's a dumb idea and you don't get any actual work done when you're that tired.
Get your head on straight, girl!
Tut-tut,
Me
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| Date: | 2009-01-11 10:51 |
| Subject: | I DID IT! |
| Security: | Public |
| Mood: | happy | | Music: | chatter from the Northwestern Women's Fencing team |
About to get on the plane home, but I thought I'd let the f-list know that I gave my paper at the AIA conference Friday afternoon and it went REALLY well. The BIGNAME scholar (a curator at the Getty Museum) who was the discussant for our session told me that he'd had a lot of fun reading my paper.
*on cloud nine*
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nervous
irate