The Fort Mudge Memorial Dump

I never did get to the library today, because I spent four hours before class working on my glossary project. I now have 17 complete entries, with definition and context in French and English. Before May 1, I need another 28 complete entries, or more if I can't find context for some of them. Sometimes it's harder to find a definition than it is to find a context. It took me a lot longer than I thought to find a definition for "French knot", instead of instructions for how to do them. And once I found it in English, I then had to find it in French.

Anyway, I was gone between 12:30 and 7:15, and left my phone at home, and of course today would be the day the art department called me about working. I have to call them tomorrow, and go chase down this bloody book. I have a hard time believing that somebody would have absconded with both copies of the same obscure play, in French. I don't even want both copies; I only want one. If I have to get it through OhioLink again, it'll take until next week. (I got it once, but I ran out of renewals so I had to return it. Why so difficult?)

Grocery shopping and laundry have to happen on Thursday. If I had any time tomorrow, they'd happen tomorrow.

This morning I leaped out of bed at what my brain thought was a rather early hour, but my body thought was time to get up. That gave me time to go out this morning and hand in my assistantship application. KSU has done a pretty good job of clearing off the major foot traffic routes, but they haven't cleared the actual sidewalks in the last couple of days, so the sidewalks are covered with something like an inch of that nasty snow/sand/salt mixture you get when the salt can't melt the snow. Anyway, after a couple of minor detours, I found the right building, the right entrance to said building, handed in the application, and came home again, and here I am.

Yesterday I had my first modeling job of the semester (clothed, since they couldn't find any clothed models for that time slot). It was a bit of a challenge, because they started with a series of 30-second poses, and it's hard to think of a next pose that will be interesting in 30 seconds. They did 20 of those, and then 20 two-minute poses, and then 15 30-second ones that involved me going through 15 stages of leaning over to pick something up and then getting up again, and then some longer ones. I think the longest ones worked out at about 10 minutes or so.

After I got done with that, I went off to the grocery store in search of wine. Good thing I remembered, when I was in a position to do something about it, that I didn't own a corkscrew. So I bought a bottle of wine and a corkscrew, and didn't get carded for the first time in my life. Well, not quite, but definitely the first time in my life when trying to buy alcohol in a store instead of in a restaurant. They asked me what my date of birth was and took my word for it.

So I got home with the wine, opened it, threw about half of the bottle in a frying pan with four cracked garlic cloves, rosemary, lemon juice, salt and pepper, and poached some chicken in it. I overcooked the chicken a little, but I more or less expected that. It tasted quite nice anyway, though, and I also made a sort of salad with orzo and spinach and lemon zest in it, and called it dinner. And a very good dinner it was, too.

I should probably go do something academically productive now, just to say that I haven't wasted the entire morning. Yesterday I did a lot, but I can't really say I got a lot done (except laundry, which had gotten to the Utter Screaming Necessity stage).

Last week, somebody figured out how to open the skylights in the art studio I was working in this morning. Of course, this morning it was somewhere below freezing and blowing hail in at me. I made them close the skylights again.

I just caught myself singing harmony with the CD I have on. I haven't sung absentminded harmony in quite a while. Usually when I'm singing harmony, I know I'm doing it. I only discovered it this time because the note I thought was going to be in tune, wasn't. Rather severely wasn't.

I have way too much to do, including finishing the paper on knowledge organization in prosthetic dentistry. I'll have that done in another three or four pages, and that shouldn't take me all that long. I should have done laundry today, and didn't. I also have to have a cleaning fit and pack before tomorrow night. Why don't the gremlins who steal things ever manage to do anything useful, like the dishes?

Right. At least two more pages of paper, dinner, cleaning fit, sorting of laundry. That will do for tonight.

The water is back to being drinkable today, and the first thing I did this morning was take a shower. Ahhhhh, much better.

Then I went off to work, which was in the art studio I don't like as much. It's cooler in there, but it's also not as close to the ladies' room I change in. There's a "changing room" in the studio, but it's really an unused darkroom and the light, when it's working, is red. I find that disconcerting for some reason. Today the light wasn't working at all so I got to get dressed in the dark. I'm not quite sure how I managed to get my shirt back on frontward, but I did, so hooray for me.

After work I went to pick up some checks the Art department was holding for me, and then went to the student center ATM and the library to pick up a book. Now here's the curious part; I had had breakfast in between shower and work, but I came out of work feeling woozy and starving. So I got a scone and a cup of coffee (Irish cream, bleah, but it was the only decaf there was), and inhaled those, and now I feel better except for having sore arms. You wouldn't think that holding still for something over an hour and a half combined would be that difficult, but it is. Today there was another figure drawing class in the studio I like working in, and the model from that class came in to cool off a little during one of his breaks (which coincided with one of mine) and we complained at each other about how hot it is in his studio and how drafty it is in mine.

Domesticity, in the form of making soup stock and doing dishes, calls. Following which, the theory paper and other academic stuff calls. Off I go to be productive.

I think my cold is going away. That would be nice of it.

In the "maybe I really do know what I'm doing" category, I got my second translation exercise back last night. It had one minor error, which was only worth half a point. That's actually better than I thought, since I didn't like that translation very much. It was a translation of a recipe, and I didn't like the tone it ended up with. Apparently the professor did, though, so it worked. I also think I did pretty well with my theory exam, which I turned in this morning. I don't think I aced it, but if I don't get a B on it, I'll be shocked. Grades aside, sometimes I wonder if I'm really any good at this. Translation is one of those fields in which you can get a degree, but it doesn't mean anything until you've got a whole lot of experience besides.

I get another Semiotics exam to deal with while my parents are here. If I'm a really good kid and I do it on Friday before they get here, it'll be out of my hair. But since when am I ever a good kid about that stuff? Realistically, I'll be thinking about it all weekend and then I'll sit down on Monday night and do it, so I'll have Tuesday to rework it.

Speaking of work, I got paid, finally. $121 after taxes for sitting still for fourteen and a half hours. I wish it was more than $121. but I really can't complain about how I earned it. They've turned the heat on in the building the art studios are in (which is not the art building), and now that it's on, it stays on regardless of how hot it is out. Yesterday it was so hot in the studio that they cut the class short so nobody would pass out. I thought it was hot in there, and I wasn't wearing anything.

I love my computer, but I wish I had a DVD player independent of it. Maybe next year if I have a little more money, I'll do something about that. There are a couple of other things on the Maybe Next Year list already, like a patio chair and my next embroidery project (Garden Verses by Mirabilia; she looks like a translator to me. I want to use darker linen than that, though. If she were blonde, I'd do it on navy blue linen, but I don't want her hair to disappear.) I can probably ask for the linen itself for Christmas if I can decide what color I want.

I should go make a list of things I want to get done this weekend. That way I might even accomplish some of them.

As usual, I go for a while without modeling and then suddenly I'm up to my ears in it. Today I was modeling for the open drawing session that happens every Friday. Next week I've got work on Tuesday and Thursday, and then the Tuesday after that. At least it's income, even if it is a pittance. The floor in the studio is covered in charcoal and I have to wash my feet every time I get done modeling. I wonder if people draw my feet with black prints on the bottoms, or if they ignore them? Actually, I don't really want to see the drawings of me. None of them will look anything like what I think I look like.

The weather is what I'd call "unsettled". Today it's been sunny and cloudy and cold and more or less warm and windy and not so windy, and several combinations of those. Right now it's windy and cloudy and sort of warm.

The French coffee hour on Fridays is really fascinating. We get people who speak three or four languages. Today we had a guy who speaks English, French, German and Hungarian. The coffee hour is a good place for window shopping, too. *smirk*

I should go see whose junk mail I got today. Happy Friday, all.

No, that's not my breakfast cereal, that's my neck making that noise. I spent two hours this morning sitting there while a sculpture class started making models of my head. Holding my head still for that long made my neck stiff. The hardest part of the whole thing is finding somewhere to look that isn't directly at a student, because if I were a student, I wouldn't want to be watched like that.

The way this works is, I sit in a chair on a revolving podium, and the students all stand in a circle around me. Every fifteen minutes or so, I get rotated in one direction or the other so that everybody can see me from any angle. It's not precisely boring, but it's not really thrilling either.

I wonder, if I had any Advil, where I would have put it?