Where Did Fall Go?

I've certainly had an eventful six weeks or so since my last post. Things went from being a sedate and predictable pace to seeming suddenly like a treadmill spinning out of control. When I last posted, classes had barely started and now, thanks to the quarter system, final papers are looming three-ish weeks away. For the first couple weeks of the term, things were pretty quiet. I didn't have any trouble keeping up with my class reading, and my social life was limited to once-weekly visits from a friend who is taking one of the same classes I am, occasional departmental functions, and a visit every few weeks from the person I was seeing. Then, I started dating someone more or less local, my parents came for a long visit, and suddenly it seemed that I wasn't even keeping up with schoolwork. I don't for one moment regret spending time with people important to me, but things got a bit ugly there for a while because I wasn't vigilant enough about staying on top of things and disciplining myself to prioritize. Even though we are now gearing up for the end of term, I have my work and life much more under control now. Well, to the extent that you can have your life under control at all, having fallen head-over-heels for someone. I don't for one moment regret that either, though.

OK, enough mushy stuff. For now, anyway. I've been spending a very quiet Sunday afternoon at my boyfriend's place while he's at work. It's an ideal time for me to get work done myself because there are so few distractions. Well, aside from noisy neighbors and the Internets. I've spent most of the day starting to pull together ideas for a paper on the Book of Margery Kempe for the English class I'm taking. It appears that about half the class will be writing on Kempe's Book rather than any of the other texts we read, so I'm not alone in being fascinated by it. The main thing that I noticed in reading all the journal articles we were assigned to go with it was just how much disagreement there is about what genre the Book fits into, so that's what I'm going to write about. I'm looking at how Kempe presents her work in its prologue, and then comparing that to (mostly) contemporary works of various genres, like The Cloud of Unknowing, Bridget's Book, Julian of Norwich's Shewings, some hagiographies, etc. I'm hoping some important similarities and differences will emerge that will help clarify the genre issue.

My other classes have also been pretty interesting, especially the one that I am taking at the Newberry Library downtown. Some intriguing questions are arising from the stuff we've been looking at in there, and I think those might be fertile ground for the major paper that I have to spend the next two quarters writing. More on that later. The field seminar in early modern history has been a little harder for me to get into, but for this week we read a couple of particularly interesting and not too heavy books. One of the books, The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh, is a scholarly biography of an 18th-century woman of undistinguished origins but fascinating life, and the other, Women on the Margins, is about three different 17th-century women of the artisanal/mercantile class. I enjoyed both books thoroughly despite their chronological distance from my usual realm of endeavor.

Well, back to the salt mines until my beloved returns home from work.

Settled In, Mostly

This past week has seemed very long in some ways and very short in others, but it still surprised me that it's been a whole week since my last post. I'm about 95% unpacked now, and seem to be down to those last few boxes of stuff that makes you think to yourself, "What the hell am I going to do with this?" The answer, in a lot of cases, probably really should be "throw it away" but that's a little harder to do now on my present income! Anyway, getting most of the unpacking done has allowed me to get caught up on other stuff around the house and feel like things are a bit more under control. I had a guest over the weekend who seemed to feel the place looks pretty good, so that's a happy thing. The less happy thing is that I have mice. Well, a mouse at least. I saw one in the kitchen once a day for about four days in a row. The last time, I even screamed. Yeah, I know... what a stereotypically girly thing to do. So sue me. I have glue traps down now, courtesy of the building manager, but thus far I don't appear to have any, er, guests. I'm not really looking forward to disposing of the traps if and when they do catch something. However, I now hate going into the kitchen after dark, and it even makes me nervous to go out there during the day, so I really need to get rid of those mice.

I had a pretty nice weekend, all in all. I took my daughter as my guest to a performance by the Second City improv troupe (sponsored by the grad school) on Friday night. It wasn't quite as good as I'd hoped it might be, but it was still pretty funny. I have only the greatest admiration for people who do improv since I am terrible at being put on the spot. Hell, I couldn't even think of good suggestions to yell out when the performers were asking for things from the audience. I'd think of really good things like ten minutes later... Figures. I had a visit from someone very special to me and, though it was shorter than I might have wished, it definitely lifted my spirits. I did some homework and watched a couple movies while I translated a bit of Isidore of Seville's Etymologiae.

Classes are shaping up to be interesting. I have this class that's basically on book studies, examined through the lens of the relationship between literacy/books and late medieval English heresy/rebellion. I'm finding the reading interesting and, considering that it's taught through the English Department, a bit less jargon-laden than I'd feared. I nonetheless keep my Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory handy for when the lit crit stuff starts to get out of hand. Thank goodness I had a little theory in my translation class a couple years ago or I would definitely be up a creek without a paddle, I suspect. The real bear, though, has been getting hold of all the books for my classes. It really creates a problem when you're not allowed to register until two business days before your freaking classes start. I'm supposed to be doing an oral presentation Wednesday on two books, one of which I don't have! Hopefully I will get it pretty damned soon... Anyway, the first class in there involved going to the Special Collections and getting the super-condensed version of the history of the book. Largely old hat for me, but I got to handle some really great manuscripts including the early printed book bound in a leaf from a ninth-century Carolingian manuscript featured in this article. I also looked in depth at a beautiful Italian humanist manuscript of Latin poetry. There are still two classes I haven't even been to yet, one today and one Friday. I'm looking forward to them a lot.

Overwhelmed

I just realized that it's been well over a week since my last post. Well, I've been thinking for several days that it's been a while, but it seems like I've been running continuously to get everything done with the move, starting school myself, getting my daughter in school, and settling in to a new life in a new state. I still have so many things to do, I just don't stop to think about it too hard or I get a little freaked out. Tomorrow is the official start of classes, and my feelings on that subject are a little mixed. On the one hand, the temporary little taste of freedom from classes and readings and homework is over. On the other hand, I need to get back in the game for all sorts of reasons. Physically I am tired every day, exhausted really, after unpacking and organizing and cleaning. There's really nothing to occupy me mentally, though, and that's not a good situation for me to be in at the best of times. Moving to a strange new place where I barely know anyone and starting basically a whole new life is not "the best of times" in this context. So, I find myself working way past the point of exhaustion because then, I'm too tired to think much about all the things I have to do and all the people I miss. I'm hoping that once I'm back in classes, I will have something to occupy my mind more and take me out of myself a little. I'm not really unhappy, just sort of overwhelmed and struggling to adapt to a lot of major changes. Right at this particular moment, blogging on my laptop in my new living room, I'm just plain exhausted. I have a Latin reading group bright and early tomorrow at 9 a.m., followed by a whole raft of errands I have to run on campus. If I have any energy left tomorrow night, I need to do laundry and go grocery shopping. I guess for the moment, I just have to keep from falling off the treadmill until I get my second wind.

Getting A Little Misty

The last several weeks, I've frequently wondered why I wasn't more upset about moving farther away from my friends and family. Part of it, I think, has to do with the fact that it's not really all that far away, just a three-hour drive. I'll be keeping my car, so I think there's a sort of "security blanket" effect where I feel like I can drive "home" anytime I want/need to. Part of it is also definitely that I'm looking forward to setting up house with just myself and my daughter and having things just as I want them. Another part is that I'm just plain happy and excited about starting graduate school. This week, I've been surprisingly busy and a lot of that busy-ness has been spending time with people I'm saying good-bye to. Some I still expect to see on a pretty regular basis, so that has softened the blow a bit. Tuesday night, I went out to the Corner Bar with the usual group of grad students I know. Last night, I went out for dinner with some co-workers. Today, another group of co-workers joined me for a farewell lunch. It's starting to sink in now that there really will be a lot of people I will rarely see after tomorrow. I will see some of the people closest to me on a regular basis, but not as much as I used to. One special person in particular I certainly won't be seeing daily anymore. At the rate I'm going, there could be waterworks by tomorrow.

Mission Accomplished

Moving our crap to the new apartment, that is. Loading started Friday night and continued on through Saturday morning. Seven co-workers, friends, and relatives showed up to help me pack and load the truck on Friday night. Three more came back the next day to finish up the loading and drive down to the Windy City for the unloading. We got on the road about noon on Saturday, with me driving the sixteen-foot moving truck packed to the gills. And by the way, I highly recommend going with Budget for a one-way move. They were much cheaper than the competition and I had no problems with my pickup, drop-off, or charges. The sixteen-foot truck only cost me about $60 in gas for the drive, which came out to around three hours and fifteen minutes. I thought unloading on the other end might be a real bear. My new apartment is on the second floor of a courtyard building, on the end closest to the street. To move in, everything had to be carried from the alley end of the building to my back stairs and then up one and a half flights of stairs. It actually went really well, which I have to attribute to the friends who drove down with me. The weather was also cooperative, since it was only around 70 degrees instead of the 90 degrees it had been a few days previously, and it didn't rain after having rained for the past several days there. Dropping off the truck was a bit of an adventure, since I got to the drop-off place only to find that they had no lot of any kind. Yes, dear readers, I had to parallel-park a sixteen-foot moving truck on a busy city street. That was interesting. Upon returning to the apartment after dropping off the truck, I ran into a fellow incoming first-year doctoral student in my program who had just pulled up in his own Budget truck and was surveying the territory for his move-in. By an astounding coincidence, he was moving into the apartment immediately downstairs from my own! My movers and I were able to get back on the road around 7 p.m. local time, which got us home about 11 p.m. because of the time change. I still had to drive out to my parents' house in the sticks, where I'm staying for this week, so I didn't get to bed until about 11:30. I slept until after nine the next morning, got up long enough to attend to my personal hygiene and eat a light breakfast, and had almost dozed off again by the time my parents returned from church. I got up long enough to eat the incredibly nasty Midwestern German Sunday dinner of sauerkraut, whole potatoes, and pork ribs my mother had prepared and then took a "nap" for another four hours or so. When I got up at 5, I actually stayed up the rest of the evening until 11 and then slept like the dead again. By yesterday, I was feeling pretty much recuperated from the move, other than the spectacular constellation of bruises in various stages of healing all over my arms and legs. No big deal. I have a busy week planned right through Friday night, between the last few errands I have to do to tie up my affairs here and all the social activities I have planned to enjoy my last few days with friends I won't see quite so much after Saturday. Monday I start orientations for my graduate program.

Proud of Michigan

I'm so pleased to read that the Michigan legislature passed and Governor Granholm signed into law a bill requiring that "computer forensics technicians" be licensed as private investigators, according to a post on Ray Beckerman's Recording Industry vs. The People blog. This means that the investigatory firm MediaSentry, the bulldog employed by the recording/motion picture industry to spy on Internet traffic and deliver up IP addresses supposedly engaged in illegal file-sharing activities, has to obtain a P.I. license to engage in this activity in Michigan. This is especially good because, as Beckerman documented in a previous post, MediaSentry has tailored its presentation of its methods and expertise in various court cases depending on the applicable state laws in a deceptive and misleading manner. Presumably, if MediaSentry is required to be licensed as a private investigator in order to offer testimony in Michigan cases, it will also be required to explain to juries the (fundamentally flawed) technical methods it uses. At the very least, Michigan has temporarily shielded its citizens from MediaSentry's snooping and the avalanche of takedown notices and extortionate threats of legal actions that result from their dubious methods. If you live and vote in Michigan, you might want to consider dropping a quick e-mail or letter to your state representative thanking him or her for protecting your rights as a consumer and a citizen.

Six Hours on Hold

I'm finally giving up at the six-hour mark because I have other things to do. As an extra-special bonus, the e-mail form on AT&T's web site won't recognize my new number as valid, so I can't get help that way either. I should also note here that I placed my phone service order through WhiteFence.com, which AT&T claims was the problem. Funny, I didn't seem to have any problem getting my gas or electric turned on through them, but whatever. Nonetheless, WhiteFence.com customer service has also been totally useless, as about all they will do is look up information I can look up myself on their website. I still find it absolutely amazing that I can be stuck on hold with these people for six solid hours without ever hearing a single live, human voice.