To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive

Fringe gets a 13-episode fifth season! EEEEEEEE!

(There is one very vague spoiler in the article about the direction S5 will probably go. I am...not entirely thrilled, but willing to see how it plays out.)

In other news: Asteroid mining in the planning stages! Part of my space pilots story is coming truuuuuuue!

I have a complete rough draft of my thesis.

Let me repeat that. I HAVE A COMPLETE ROUGH DRAFT OF MY THESIS.

Okay, yes, in the latest chapter there are four or five spots where the analysis is nonexistent wrong paper-thin lacking, shall we say, and I certainly have enough revisions to keep me busy in chapters two and three, but it's all basically there.

YAY!

My teaching today improved ONE THOUSAND PERCENT. Since just writing down five open-ended questions about the reading and trying to fly with that failed last time (I am simply not the kind of person who can work that way, although my mentor is, which is why I tried it last time), this time I overprepared, and didn't even get to everything I had on my piece of paper to talk about. I had pointed questions, I had significant passages, I had my own readings of the text, I had critical backup...I had it all. And the ironic--but in hindsight expected--thing about it was that I didn't have to talk nearly as much as I did last time, even though this time I had more to say. The more specific questions and topics I seeded the discussion with allowed them to actually build up some momentum arguing and talking with each other, and I got to sit (well, stand) back and watch. They even took the discussion places I wasn't expecting, and it was awesome. These kids are really bright, and really into the topic.

It helped that the content was Beowulf instead of Greek myths this time. Beowulf, I have the critical background to do something with. Greek myths are sort of shadowy and amorphous to me, and always have been. I guess this is why everyone says teaching your own class will be much easier than being a TA, in the sense that you've chosen the material and know where you want to go with it rather than having to teach it because it's on the syllabus.

In other news, I got my...hemienniel? once-every-three-to-four-months haircut today, and now I have what could legitimately be called a "bob." Yay, it's not eating my shoulders! It's at that stage where it's a little too short to tuck all the strands behind my ears, but it'll get over that in a couple weeks.

Other good things:

- Adam Bede. Once you get used to the dialect, it's rather good. It's interesting reading this while taking a Joyce class, because some of the sentence structures Eliot uses feel almost like they could come from Portrait. Almost. I can see the germ of Modernism in them. In all other respects it's very Victorian, especially with the narrator-who's-kind-of-but-not-really-a-character-too. That's been in every book we've read so far, and it's been a continual source of interest and frustration to me. The shadowiness of the narrator's status drives me crazy, but I think there's more too it than I'm understanding at the moment.

- My Joyce professor agreed to let the grad students in the class do one conference paper and an abstract instead of one five-pager and one ten-pager, so I don't have a paper due next week. Just an abstract. Of course, that means my conference paper at the end of the semester has to be a higher level of awesome than it might otherwise have been, but since this is my freaking field, for once, hopefully that won't be a problem.

- My parents came up this weekend, and we celebrated my birthday two weeks early. There was a Boston Cream Pie. In fact, there is still a Boston Cream Pie in my fridge, only half of it's missing. Soon all of it will be missing. :D I also have a comfortable spot to sit in my living room now! My futon started out comfy, but it's not so great after several hours of reading on it. Now thanks to parental generosity and redecorating at the house, I have big soft club chair and a footstool, and it's awesome.

- I watched When Harry Met Sally last night. I love that movie. Now I own it. Yay.

OMG!

I appear to be awash with good news today and this week. The English MA program director at Boston College just gave me a call and said they'd accepted me into the program. Woot!

Apparently they won't have their funding worked out until the beginning of next month, so no promises there, which is unfortunate; however, he thought it was likely that I would get funding, so cross your fingers for me, eh?

Squeeee!

(...Karma is going to do something HORRIBLE to me soon, isn't it?)

Thanks to rowdycamels, I have a real live wax lion now. He's not smoosh-faced, which is probably good--otherwise he might start talking to me, and that would be bad.

( Check him out )

Hooray! My third season Northern Exposure DVDs came today! I've mentioned before how awesome Amazon is, right? 'Cause I ordered these on Wednesday night, and got the free 5 to 9-day shipping on them, and they're here TODAY. Since I ordered them after business hours, that's essentially two-day shipping for free. Not quite as spectacular as the next-day shipping I got once when I was in Gambier, but still nothing to sneeze at. (And the DVDs were almost thirty percent off the list price! Yay!)

I suppose the postal service probably has more to do with this than Amazon, come to think of it. Either way, yay for infrastructure getting my indulgences to me with excellent speed. :)

And yes, for the next few weeks, you will all have to put up with my natterings about the best season of one of the best TV shows ever. I'll try to keep my glee contained under lj-cuts. *g*

*

I finished off the BBC miniseries North and South (based on the novel of the same name by Elizabeth Gaskell) today. ( Reviewish thing. And talk about broody men. )

Guess what.

I'm going to NYC for a publishing job interview in January! Woo-hoo!

I ran the gamut of possibilities for the three interviews I applied for. HarperCollins accepted me (WHEEEE!), Random House listed me as an alternate (if someone who got chosen doesn't want to interview, I can sign up instead), and Holtzbrinck (owns Tor, Bedford/St. Martin's, etc.) rejected my application. I am uberexcited about getting even one acceptance, though, because...HarperCollins. And possibly Random House. Woot!

( Random quiz with pretty picture )

I had more to say here, but it all flew out of my head. Alas.

Guess what.

Really, guess.

Give up?

I'm typing this from my VERY OWN COMPY!!!!!

*bounces about*

Except various put-backed-up-hard-drive-contents-on-the-new-hard-drive programs aren't working at the moment, but hopefully will be once Dad gets home from work and can tell me what new username I need to use and such.

At any rate, COMPY!!!!!

There's a dog (nearly full-grown puppy, really) that's been running around our neighborhood lately. She looks like some mixture of pit bull and beagle, so Mom came up with the portmanteau of "pit beagle." As there's no tag on her collar, that's become her name when she comes by the house. She's so cute! To wit:



Click here for bigger. Also, there's another one.

So cute!

I just discovered that a Lisa Loeb fansite has the entirety of the Cupid episode she guest-starred in up in Real Player files here (scroll a bit). Omg. OMG! Eeeeeee!!!!!! *dances around the room*

*grabs spockette and continues dancing* Kim! Now we can finally see an episode of this show we both somehow became addicted to through fanfic and screencaps and not be quite so pathetic! OMG!

This post has absolutely everything nothing to do with the extreme amounts of chocolate and Christmas candy I've consumed today.

Edit: And check out the second post on this page of the TwoP topic devoted to the show...Rob Thomas on how it was going to end! Both happy and sad, really...