The Fort Mudge Memorial Dump

It's oddly anticlimactic to finally be absolutely done. The weight came off me when I submitted my case study for review. The worst part of the defense was the five minutes at the beginning when it was just me, presenting the reasons why and the points I didn't make in the analysis. After that I mostly said "oops" for an hour and ten minutes, with an occasional "no, that's really how it goes" and an occasional "yes, I did that on purpose, and here's why" thrown in. Then I was sent out, stood around in the hall for five minutes, was brought back in again and congratulated for five minutes, and went off with the annotated copies. I changed the things I agreed with, left the things I didn't agree with alone, and that was all. Everything after the defense is sound and fury signifying not much, and everything in between the submission for review and the defense is like waiting for an earthquake. You know it's coming, and there's nothing you can do about it, and it makes a lot of noise when it arrives, but it's over fairly soon and then you go on about your life.

Tomorrow I can finally return all these books to their respective homes and get the carpet of paper off the floor. I don't quite know what to do with myself any more, and I'm not sure whether I want to bury my original copy of my case study under the pile of random stuff on my kitchen counter, or whether I want to put it somewhere I won't forget about it.

The daily thunderstorm seems to have arrived. It's running slightly late today.

It's been a comparatively relaxing day. I turned in my last CLD translation, went and did the end of the chores I didn't get around to last week for my advisor, came home again and corrected the things in my case study translations that needed correcting, and made lists of things to get done in the near future. Tomorrow I correct the analysis, print the analysis and the translations over again, and take the whole thing off to be copied and permanently bound on Thursday. I want to get this all over with before I lose my academic drive entirely.

My two classmates came looking for me here (at home) about half an hour ago. They knew I had done my defense yesterday and hadn't seen me since Friday, and wanted to make sure I'd survived. They both defend tomorrow, and then we all three go out drinking.

Once I get done fixing the analysis, I can return all these books that don't belong to me, and start going through and throwing the draft versions of everything in the recycling pile.

They say we're going to get thunderstorms today. I hope they're right.

Wow, apparently something has flipped the cooking switch in my head. Yesterday I made enough vegetarian curry and couscous to be dinner for most of the rest of the week, and I just made myself a really good mushroom and dill omelette for lunch. (Good, of course, doesn't necessarily mean good for me; I probably shouldn't eat three eggs all at once. Or are eggs still good for you? I lost count.)

It occurs to me that I might be cooking because I have to concentrate on that, and I can't concentrate on being nervous about my defense tomorrow if I'm cooking. Which would also explain why I haven't fixed the buttons on the shirt I want to wear tomorrow. The top four buttons all need to be taken off and reattached, and I haven't done it, even though the shirt is hanging on the coat closet door and I spent inordinate amounts of time last night screwing up my current embroidery project. Once I realized how badly I'd screwed it up, I gave up and went to bed. Having slept on it, I think I know how I can fix it; it's still going to take a while, but it might not involve taking out absolutely everything I put in yesterday.

All right, dwelling on not doing it isn't getting it done, so I'm going to go fix my shirt, and when that's done I'm going to work on my presentation some more, and then I'm going to do the dishes and fix my embroidery and stop thinking about how much I want tomorrow to be over.

*whimper*

I finally got up enough energy to talk myself out of being stubborn (and cold), and turn the heat on. I really don't think it ought to be 43 degrees outdoors in May. At least with the heat on, I can face the idea of drinking something cold.

Last night I got inspired and did the draft translation for the final CLD project. I also, somehow, managed to convince myself that yesterday was Tuesday, and was utterly shocked when it turned out that it wasn't. Of course, then I couldn't remember when this week's project management meeting is. (It's on Wednesday, which, last night, I thought was today. Confused yet?).

Today I should be doing research on QA procedures for terminology for the meeting, but I'm less excited about that than I am about maybe finally seeing the end of my case study today. I hope it's sitting in my mailbox in Satterfield, since I haven't gotten it back by e-mail.

Tomorrow I have the project management meeting, Thursday I have the last coffee hour/project management lecture, and Friday we're making up for an hour of CLD (we cut the class short by half an hour this week and half an hour last week). Sometime during that hour, we're deciding when the final project is due.

And then on Monday I defend my case study, and sometime after that we slap together a QA standards document for project management.

Sometimes I really wish I wasn't such a perfectionist. I've probably gone through five pounds of paper trying to print the first half of my case study, and it took me four hours to get the tables and figures right in both languages. (Damn it, I REALLY need Photoshop!) I win, though; I got all 52 pages printed, and nothing's misformatted, mispaginated or otherwise missing. Printing the rest will be easier, because there isn't anywhere near as much formatting in it.

Supplemental GYACK: The woman who cut my hair this afternoon put something in it that has made it stiff and sticky at the same time. It's driving me crazy, but washing my hair three times in the same day is just a tad ridiculous.

I hereby declare it Saturday, even if it is three and a half hours early for it. I am absolutely not doing anything academic until midnight tomorrow. I am, however, going to do a lot of cooking tomorrow. I've been meaning to make fried rice for about two weeks, and I meant to make curry last week and didn't.

It's done. Damned if I know if it's any good, but it's done. It topped out at 19 pages, counting the list of works cited (which is probably too short, but I don't care terribly much at this point). Now the question is, can I get it back in time to fix it and print the whole works on Saturday?

Now maybe I can get around to doing the dishes, and doing the cooking I bought ingredients for last week, and cleaning the bathroom, and excavating the living room floor again, and all that stuff that got put on hold while I was chained to the desk. I'm getting my bangs cut tomorrow. Thank goodness.

Today is definitely a coffee day. I won't get through the project management lecture, never mind the meeting afterward, otherwise.

I want it to be over, and at the same time I want next week to be put off indefinitely.

I got the analysis up to 11 pages yesterday. The hardest part of the rest of it is going to be the conclusion, because now I'm into the translation approach section and I can go on for ages about that.

I also, after my brain started to shut down from academic writing, put headers on everything, and whipped up a FR>EN and an EN>FR list of equivalents. So now I have all the necessary pieces except for the second translation and the rest of the analysis, and adrenaline or something seems to have flipped a switch in my head. I couldn't get to sleep last night and I woke up an hour and a half early this morning.

If a miracle happens in terms of my advisor getting stuff back to me, I'll have this done by May 2. I wonder if I can play the "well, M and R aren't defending until later that week, so read my stuff first" card? (Problem being, I don't know when M and R are defending.)

Right. Hair dryer and coffee and go drop off the next installment of case study, and come home and write. It would make me absurdly happy to be able to put page numbers on everything, because that's the last thing that has to happen.

Oh, and lest I forget, I still have to do two translations for CLD on Monday and we have a project management meeting after class tomorrow. No wonder I've given up sleeping.

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.)

They say it's going to snow tomorrow. Just when I thought I was done with the winter coat...

Today, it's raining. The fun thing about rain in the spring is, you can practically watch the grass get greener as it gets rained on. (Not so much fun if you're the one who has to mow the lawn when it dries out, but I don't, so I'm enjoying it.)

The editing that wouldn't go away is now Son of Editing. Basically, it's the next issue of the journal, the last issue of which we disposed of two weeks or so ago. At least it's easier now that I know what not to forget. This is supposed to be an annual journal, but it was horrendously late last year (the 2004 issue is the one we just finished with) due to one of the other editors/contributors being ill.

I should be doing terminology today if I'm not writing my analysis. I think, since I'm further behind on the analysis than on the glossary, I'll write today and do terminology on Monday.

Oh yes, and I have to pay bills today too.

It seems I'm not particularly good at source-text analysis, which is causing me to write a whole lot of two-sentence paragraphs with "MORE HERE" at the ends for the sake of having place-holders. However, I've gone on like that for four pages now, and I'm not even dealing with the second article yet. Once I get into analyzing the actual translation process, I can go on ad nauseam. Length, for once, is not going to be a problem with this thing.

I knew it was time to go to bed last night (this morning) when I spent about five minutes trying to find a legitimate way to work that song about "people are people, so why should it be..." into the cross-cultural adaptation section. The point I was really trying to make is that the human body works basically the same way, regardless of what language it speaks, so there isn't a whole lot of cultural difference to deal with when you're talking about diagnosis and treatment of tremors.

I also made cookies yesterday, since we ran out of cookies for the coffee hour last week. I tried a recipe for sour cream cookies, which I thought would come out something like plain old ordinary chocolate chip cookies, and didn't. They hardly spread out at all, but they did rise a bit, so they look rather odd. They taste all right, though, and I put white-and-regular-chocolate-swirl chips in them, so they're interesting. The recipe said it made three dozen, but I think what I ended up with is more like four dozen, and I don't know what I'm going to do with them if nobody at the coffee hour eats any. They're all right, but they're not something I want to have four dozen of in the house. Maybe I'll see if anybody wants to leave them in the GAs' office.

We're supposed to be doing our sales presentation for project management tonight. I suppose I had better type out what I'm supposed to say, so I can actually read it, and then read over it ten or twelve times. My handwriting has gotten worse since I've been here (gee, I wonder why?).

I wonder if the fact that it's 20 degrees cooler today than it was yesterday will mean the lab is less like a sauna? I doubt it, because trying to get outdoor air in there is generally like trying to teach a pig to sing. Today's lab project is to see if the new version of MultiTerm will export to RTF. The old version did, apparently, and I have no idea how I'm going to get my glossary into printable form if it doesn't. Oh, and populate the last six terms, so I can stick a fork in the terminology research.