a bored update

[trochee]

I am still un-caught-up on reading livejournal -- I'm probably about ten or twelve days behind; I haven't been catching up. I turned in my thesis yesterday, finally putting a lid on the sprawling research project that my MA turned into. It's a full 150pp. To recap what's happened in my life in the last few weeks, to kill time while I sit (without internet connection) in the San Jose airport, on my way to Baltimore:

July 29: practice talk for thesis defense. It is a disaster. But that's why we practice. I begin entire rewrite of the talk.
July 31: I receive notice that my paper submitted to the Vancouver HLT/EMNLP conference was accepted. Am pleased, and adjust my talk to indicate this acceptance, but frantically write the talk until late at night.
Aug 1: Defended the thesis. This actually works out. My committee requests only one additional experiment, and I scramble to finish additional experiments requested by my committee before going home. My committee signs the departmental warrant for my graduation (yes, that's what they call it!).
Aug 2, late at night: left for Maine on a red-eye, with imtboo, to spend some time with lapartera, trombo2, and _dkg_.
Aug 3-9: While there, did some requested rewrites of the thesis. But I didn't have comments on every section from Advisor, and I really wanted to try to relax. I had some good success there -- at least on the relaxation front. I have internet access on only two days while there, and only by walking a mile to the island's tiny gourmet grocery/coffee shop and mooching off their connection. I use that time online to correspond with my committee, and my fellow authors of the Vancouver paper.
Instead of work, I read most of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy; I kayaked around the island with imtboo, and cooked and ate good food with the whole group. imtboo made herself instantly at home by eating a lobster as fast -- and completely -- as lapartera, no small feat.
Aug 10: We returned from Maine, and I threw myself into final rewrites, and discussions with my fellow Vancouver-paper authors regarding the revisions.
Aug 11: I pick up the preliminary draft I'd dropped off at the grad school. They have formatting changes -- ironically, the parts they want changed are all in parts of the LaTeX template that they distribute. I hack the template myself. I have good intentions of sending these changes back to the guy who maintains the template. [as yet, they have come to nothing]. The big sadness here is not the edits, it's that the signature pages on my thesis need to be changed -- and re-signed.
Aug 13: A saturday; I worked all day but had a social evening; blackwingedboy and imtboo and I went to the lgtheater cabaret, hosted by the lovely and funny jaegerlicious, watched erin80 and llcoolray in their awesome Eleqtro-Lyte reunion, as well as a few new numbers: LYLAS, a girl-on-girl pie fight that involved daisy-duke shorts (uh, yeah) and Celene with serious songs. That woman is an amazing songwriter and a very good singer. She's going somewhere. We go to a party at J&S's house after the cabaret, and have a lovely time with our hosts and a few guests who can hang on until very late. imtboo and I argue after going home, and some heavy language is thrown. This startles both of us enough that we re-ground.
Aug 14: back to the grind: I needed to get the thesis done by Monday morning so that I could do battle with University paperwork all day Monday. I nearly finish, and also find some extra time to go over to Reader #1's house and get her signature. Her 3-year-old can read (!) and interviewed me about where I was born so that he could put a little sticker on his world map, and he showed me his fish-robot Legos, and I made him giggle by telling him that one of the pieces looked like the faucet on the bathroom sink. D. comes over after I'm done for the night, and, after checking in, we have a quiet evening while I read Zelazny and she makes notes on her play.

continued in another post...