better vision in worse light

The snow seems to be melting, but apparently the sun won't come out until Thursday at the earliest.

I put in a new pair of contact lenses this morning and I can see straight again, halleluia. Last night when I took the left lens out, I discovered what the problem was. It was an old lens and it had protein buildup on it. (I find it mildly ironic that things like that can only be discovered when I'm not wearing the lenses, i.e. when I'm blind as a bat unless I put my glasses on.)

I did make some progress on my analysis last night, in between messing around with other parts of the case study. I seem to sort of be writing the outline into the analysis more than usual. None of the other papers I've written have had section headings. I like it, though, because when I run out of steam in one section, I can go work on another one without wandering off the topic much. I've reached the conclusion that the first draft doesn't really matter all that much, because my advisor is going to take it apart completely anyway, so I might as well just write and save the worrying for the next draft.

another item off the list...

Well, it took six hours, but my terminology is DONE. I've got dictionaries going both ways (FR>EN and EN>FR), and I've already got a list of equivalents, so all I have to do is alphabetize it and slap the appropriate headers on everything. I ended up with 53 terms in the dictionary and something like double that in the list (I haven't counted the list lately). The longer of my two translations is completely done, to the point where I'm actually taking the reference marks out of it. The shorter translation got handed in today, so when it comes back (hopefully this week) I can start making it fit for committee consumption too.

Tomorrow I write analysis and nothing else. I'm only about six or seven pages behind where I should be on that. I think I'm pretty much ahead or even on everything else, though, and I don't have a defense date yet because one of my committee members is out of town until the 29th, so it's not even being discussed until then.

I won't swear to it, but I think I'm getting an A in CLD. The last five or so translations I've handed in have come back with only one or two minor errors. CLD today made my brain hurt; we were doing sight translation into French of a news article about the stock market. I suppose it's only fair, since we usually do sight translation into English, but I don't carry stock-market-related French vocabulary around in my head, so I looked like an idiot a bit more than usual. (And then I went and parked myself in the lab for six hours. I would dearly love for my brain to slow down and my back to loosen up.)