I'm Alive

I love my internship. I still don't have an apartment, but I am not living in a cardboard box, something a lot of people seem to be worried about. I have a very busy weekend ahead of myself. More later.

I'm Done!

Yay, I've finished my first year of grad school.

Lots more to do before I start my internship on Monday. I probably won't be around for awhile.

It's 3:30 am

I am reminded of that Hilary commercial: It's 3am, who do you want to answer the phone? Well, if anyone is calling, I am still up, fighting with this paper. I have been working on it for what, 18 hours now? I just have to write one more section and then I told myself I could go to bed. I think I am deluding myself though. I plan to edit the paper, run a whole bunch of errands, take a quick trip to campus, pack up my entire apartment, and drive 6 hours on four or so hours of sleep tomorrow. I just do not think it can be done. As much as I really want to head home tomorrow so that I have all day Saturday to run more errands before moving to DC, I just do not know if I can take the drive tomorrow. Especially if I'm already starting to respond to political commercials in my head...

Yay California!

It's about time that more states than my beloved Massachusetts start recognizing something that is so fundamental that we shouldn't even have to discuss it:

California Ban on Same-Sex Marriage Struck Down

Paper Writing OCD

I never realized that I was so particular about how I write my papers until today. I am trying to cut out a few steps, and it is just turning into a disaster. I've never had so much trouble writing even one paragraph in my life. This doesn't bode well for the remaining 19 pages I still have to write in the next 24 hours...

In case you are curious (play along here) this is my process. It is best completed at a rate of one to two steps per day:

1. Find all sources
2. Write outline backbone
   
3. Read sources, adding content to outline as I go along, including all quotes and citations
   
4. Edit outline, rearranging information until I'm happy with it
   
5. Write rough draft
6. Edit 2 times, first time ripping it apart, the second time more for grammar and sentence construction
   
7. Write bibliography (Thank you Word 2007 for doing this automatically)
8. Edit 1 more time
9. Write cover page (I seem to have developed a problem remembering this step lately)
10. Print paper and turn in
    

Top 100 Books

I saw this list on another blog (it's supposedly from Time) and I thought it would be interesting to see how many of these books I've read. I marked them in bold. I'm going to try to read some of the others over the summer.

The adventures of auguie march (saul bellow)
All the king’s men (penn warren)
American pastoral (phillip roth)
An American tragedy (Theodore dreiser)
Animal farm (george orwell)
Appointment in samarra (john o’hara)
Are you there god? It’s me, Margaret (judy blume)
The assistant (Bernard Malamud)
At swim-two-birds (flann o’brien)
Atonement (ian mcEwan)
Beloved (toni Morrison)
The berlin stories (Christopher Isherwood)
The big sleep (Raymond chandler)
The blind assassin (Margaret atwood)
Blood meridian (cormac McCarthy)
Brideshead revisited (evelyn Waugh)
The bridge of san luis rey (thorton wilder)
Call it sleep (henry roth)
Catch-22 (joseph heller)
The catcher in the rye (j.d. salinger)
A clockwork orange (Anthony burgess)
The confessions of nat turner (William Styron)
The corrections (jonathan franzen)
The crying of lot 49 (Thomas Pynchon)
A dance to the music of time (Anthony powell)
The day of the locust (nathanael west)
Death comes for the archbishop (willa cather)
A death in the family (james agee)
The death of the heart (Elizabeth bowen)
Deliverance (james dickey)
Dog soldiers (Robert stone)
Falconer (john cheever)
The French lieutenant’s woman (john fowles)
The golden notebook (doris lessing)
Go tell it on the mountain (james Baldwin)
Gone with the wind (Margaret Mitchell)
The grapes of wrath (john Steinbeck)
Gravity’s rainbow (Thomas Pynchon)
The great Gatsby (f. scott fitzgerald)
A handful of dust (evelyn waugh)
The heart is a lonely hunter (Carson McCullers)
The heart of the matter (graham greene)
Herzog (saul Bellow)
Housekeeping (marilynne robinson)
A house for mr. biswas (v.s. Naipaul)
I, Claudius (Robert graves)
Infinite jest (david foster Wallace)
Invisible man (Ralph ellison)
Light in august (William Faulkner)
The lion, the witch, and the wardrobe (c.s. lewis)
Lolita (vladimir nabokob)
Lord of the flies (William golding)
The lord of the rings (jrr tolkein)
Loving (henry green)
Lucky jim (kingsley amis)
The man who loved children (Christina stead)
Midnight’s children (salman rushdie)
Money (martin amis)
The moviegoer (walker percy)
Mrs. Dalloway (Virginia woolf)
Naked lunch (William burroughs)
Native son (Richard wright)
Neuromancer (William Gibson)
Never let me go (kazoo ishiguro)
1984 (george Orwell)
On the road (jack Kerouac)
One flew over the cuckoo’s nest (ken kesey)
The painted bird (jerzy kosinski)
Pale fire (Vladimir Nabokov)
A passage to India (e.m. forester)
Play it as it lays (joan didion)
Portnoy’s complaint (Philip roth)
Possession (a.s. byatt)
The power and the glory (graham greene)
The prime of miss jean brodie (Muriel spark)
Rabbit, run (john updike)
Ragtime (e.l. Doctorow)
The recognitions (William gaddis)
Red harvest (dashiell hammet)
Revolutionary road (Richard Yates)
The sheltering sky (paul bowles)
Slaughterhouse-five (kurt Vonnegut)
Snow crash (neal Stephenson)
The sot-weed factor (john barth)
The sound and the fury (William Faulkner)
The sportswriter (Richard ford)
The spy who came in from the cold (john le Carre)
The sun also rises (ernest hemingway)
Their eyes were watching god (zora neale Hurston)
Things fall apart (chinua achebe)
To kill a mockingbird (harper lee)
To the lighthouse (Virginia woolf)
Tropic of cancer (henry miller)
Ubik (Philip k. dick)
Under the net (iris Murdoch)
Under the volcano (malcom lowry)
Watchmen (alan moore & david gibbons)
White noise (don deLillo)
White teeth (zadie smith)
Wide Sargasso sea (jean rhys)

That's 13- let's see how many I've read by the end of August. My goal is to be up to 25.

Insomnia is Good for Something

I can't sleep, but I don't have the brainpower to work on my paper or study, so I finished my afghan (finally).

Edited:
Here is the finished afghan

Details:
Started- November 2007
Completed- May 14, 2008
Pattern- Textured Treasure Speed Stix Afghan by Lion Brand Yarn
Yarn- Lion Brand Wool Ease Thick and Quick
Needles- size 50 (!)

Grrr

After I frogged several inches of my afghan to fix my the mistake I noticed a couple of months ago, I realized I only have one size 50 needle. Grrr. I'm hoping I find it somewhere during my packing or at my dad's house because I refuse to buy a new set of needles I'll probably never use again.

Edited: I found it! I remembered that I'd shoved a lot of things into my scrapbooking bag when I came home from Christmas break, and sure enough, there it was. I'm bribing myself to study for my exam tomorrow for an hour and work on my paper due Friday a little, and then I can re-do the afghan. I can't stand the idea of having a "zzz" in my Ravelry queue for three more months!

Feeling Better

Now that I have written the first five pages of my paper, I am feeling better. Well, except for the being homeless in a week thing. I haven't just been doing work all week. I have also been engaging in a little pleasure reading.
I seriously cannot wait to read a whole bunch this summer. I'm getting a library card the first week I'm there. Now I just need to learn how to read and knit at the same time, and I'd be in heaven.

Stress!

It's not even 10am and I can see that it's going to be one of those days. I find list making to be stress-relieving (although I suspect that it is also the root cause of additional stress), so this is everything that is making me stressed right now:

• I have to finish this research paper. It's due by 1pm tomorrow. I have an awesome outline that is longer than the minimum length of the paper, so I should be set. I just have to write now.
• I still don't have a place to live starting on Sunday.
  
• I need to pack. I've started this, so now my entire apartment is in disarray.
• Fenway knows something is up and is freaking out.
• I need to work out the details of the sublet of my apartment.
• I have a million errands to run, and no time to do them.
• I haven't even thought about my last paper.
• My funding hasn't arrived yet.
• Did I mention I don't have a place to live and I have an important paper due in 27 hours?

I wish I were here

Paper Due in < 5 Hours

So what am I doing? Staring at my Ravelry queue. Seriously, I cannot wait until the only things I have to do are work, go to the gym, and knit. I know it's overly ambitious, but I want to get through my three started projects and a good potion of the 14 items in my queue this summer. Besides the bolero I showed you yesterday, I can't wait to make these:
Clementine Shawlette by Michele Rose Orne (Interweave Knits, Spring 2007)


Boing! by Anne Hanson. I'm buying the kit for that one as soon as I have an address where they can ship it at the end of May.

I Need to Make This

It's number 5 in my Ravelry queue, not to mention the three projects that I'm currently working on, but I really need to make it. In red. Won't that be cute?

Two Finished Projects

The cursed scarf is finished and blocked, yay! I even really like it. Sorry that the picture looks like I am decapitated, but I took this picture first thing in the morning before I'd put on my contacts or brushed by hair.
Details:
Started- August 2007
Completed- May 3, 2008
Pattern- Lace 1, 2, 3 Shadow Scarf by Kelley Petkun
Yarn- Knit Picks Shadow in Grape Jelly
Needles- size 3
Notes- so much easier with stitch markers and blocking made all the difference in the world

I also finished these Holly Socks awhile ago:

Details:
Started- April 11, 2008
Completed- April 20, 2008
Pattern- Holly Socks by Laurie Corriveau
Yarn- Knit Picks Felici
Needles- size 2 DPN, 8 stitches per inch

What's Been Going On

I finished the cursed purple lace scarf, yay! It's being blocked as we speak. I've also started two pairs of socks, my first pair of magic loop and a mock cable I am absolutely in love with right now.

Classes ended last week, and Friday was "Slope Day", Cornell's annual end of year celebration. I had people over (finally got to enjoy my porch), and just had a wonderful day hanging out with all my friends that I don't see often enough.

I can't believe that I start work in DC in two weeks! I have to find a place to live, write three papers, take one test, and pack everything up before then. I'm going to be super busy. I think the thing that I'm most excited about is reconnecting with some of my friends from college who are still in the area.