Me & My Dayquil

Me & my Dayquil are best friends. It's like the ads for My Buddy dolls in the late 80s, where the kid takes the doll everywhere with him - to build a secret clubhouse, on a trike ride, climbing trees. Remember those? Only instead of a doll, I have a huge bottle of bright orange cough syrup. And instead of laughing with joy while I riding my trike through a meadow, I'm coughing and hacking while I trudge through the icy cold campus to my office. Ok, actually not very much like the ad at all, except my drugs go everywhere with me.
The good news is that I went to the doctor, and I don't have SARS. I do have an upper respiratory infection (lungs, throat, and sinuses...which makes me wonder what constitutes lower), which they think is viral, so there wasn't much they could do for me except make jokes about what a nice baritone I have. Seriously, I sound like a lounge singer who smokes 5 packs a day (until my voice cracks like a 13-year-old boy's). Not quite how I envisioned the beginning of the semester....

Good News, Bad News: the Triumphant Return

Good News: this (sort of) weekly post is back. Admit it, your life just wasn't as balanced without it.
Bad News: I missed something like 5 weeks. Woops.
Good News: Sarah is doing well (probably also good) in Guatemala.
Bad News: I am not in Guatemala. I'm in MN (significantly colder).
Good News: That's because I've been going to class.
Bad News: By going to class, I exposed myself to lots of new sick people and germs. Now I have a really bad cold. Or SARS.
Good News: I have that daytime medicine, so I can stay awake while I do my homework.
Bad News: I'm still falling asleep every three pages - I don't think anything short of meth could keep me awake through Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit.
Good News: I started saving for retirement, in an IRA that I can invest in various things (I'm learning about the things. And that I should have taken a class on econ or something finance-related in college.).
Bad News: The market isn't being very helpful.

Welcome back!

I know it's been ages, and I wish I could claim to have been way too busy to post, but that's not really the case. Since my last post, I got my grades (I'm keeping my fellowship), went to Wyoming for Chirstmas (an intense bonding experience with NWA flight #417), went to Boston (an intense bonding experience with cannoli in Little Italy), read lots of books, started to write one, cooked, ate, drank, relaxed, and generally enjoyed myself while avoiding the frigid cold (-20 makes for pretty days, but only if you're bundled up inside). I spent approximately 15 hours finding a good planner for the year. I learned to make really good pork roast. Also, the other day, Rob and I adopted Cricket, a one-year-old lab mix. She and Nick are getting along well, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that her favorite game is to try to fit Nick's face and her bone in her mouth at the same time.
Meanwhile, the new semester has begun. It's off to a good start, with a better schedule than last semester and classes I think I'll enjoy. But I've only been to a couple of them, and haven't done any homework so far, so things could always change....

Good News, Bad News

Disclaimer: this is not me. This is how I feel, only the pile of books is bigger, and I'm crawling out.
Good news: A very smart, interesting professor accepted our invitation to be the keynote speaker at our conference.
Bad news: So did this other smart, interesting professor. And our faculty advisor hasn't gotten back to us about that problem....
Good news: Finals are over! Tra la, tra la! Or, as Walther von der Vogelweide (an author of Middle High German poetry, and former bane of my existence) would say, tandaradei!
Bad news: I realized I made at least one big mistake on my Middle High German final, right after I turned it in. I might fail, which is to say get a GPA below 3.5, which would cause me to lose my fellowship.
Good news: If I fail, I'll open a bakery/write a novel/get another dog, and all of these projects could benefit from my background in German and/or be named Tandaradei.
Bad news: I sort of lack the start up capital for any of those projects. And I don't know if anyone outside of German studies can pronounce Tandaradei.
Good news: I don't need a root canal!
Bad news: I finally have no excuse to avoid those bills and applications and administrative things and laundry that have not taken care of themselves or disappeared, despite the fact that I have firmly ignored them for the last three weeks.
Lessons learned: dead languages are a pain, my dentist is great, clean clothes can be more important than clean dishes, I'm more organized than many forty-something academics, and there will always be something else to worry about.

Baryshnikov

Tomorrow is my Turkish final. So I've been studying diligently, mostly in the new Turkish grammar packet that Meghan found and sent out to everyone. I don't know where she got it, but I love it because it's written in plain English. My other grammar resources have boring examples, like "Hasan does not have your book," followed by a bunch of abbreviations you have to look up in the index which stand for things like aorist and pluperfect (which do mean something to me, btw). But it's so much easier to memorize grammar structures with colorful examples! For instance, when explaining a certain negative suffix, this packet gives the example "Barisnikov dans etir. Siz, Senatoer Kugayl, siz dans etmezsiniz" which means "Baryshnikov is a dancer. But you, Senator Quayle, you are not a dancer." And now I have a picture in my head of Baryshnikov and Quayle dancing in Turkey, and I will never forget that suffix.
I love grad school.
Edit: Later on, there is a comprehensive table of tense and mood combinations using the example of seeing dervishes - I am seeing dervishes, it is said that I am seeing dervishes, I might see dervishes later, would that I had seen dervishes, etc. Each of these phrases is only two words, and one of them is dervishes.

Good News, Bad News

Bad News: My tooth is still hurting, several weeks after the cavity was filled.
Good News: I went to see my dentist about it this morning.
Bad News: I might need a root canal.
Good News: Perversely, I like my dentist a lot. He seems to know what he's doing, and he tells me everything that's going on with my teeth - including the scientific names of my problems (not that I remember them). He does not blame/shame/guilt me for the state of my teeth. He didn't try to converse with me while my mouth was full of dental tools. He understands (patiently tolerates, does not mock or patronize) my fear of root canals. Also, when the receptionist got snippy with me for wanting an appointment to check in with Dr. L. in two weeks and tried to tell me the only possibility anytime soon is Dec. 31st (not exactly the two weeks from now that he recommended), he got snippy with her and said she had to fit me in before I leave town for Christmas.
Bad News: I still might have to get a root canal.

Winter

Remember that snowstorm I was all skeptical about? Well, it wasn't huge, but it dropped four or five inches at our house. And then yesterday it snowed again! Hooray! I love having enough snow around to actually justify my winter boots/making chili/drinking too much hot chocolate. I also love that this is happening just as my finals are starting. For one thing, the snow muffles all kinds of noises. Also, it makes it easier to be cooped up inside, although I would much rather be in my cozy study den at home than my fluorescent lit office at school. Only a few more days of classes, though, and then I'm going to pretend I'm snowed in.
The finals have officially begun. They don't seem much more difficult than undergrad finals, really, except that there is less direction. For one class, I've been assigned a paper on "something interesting" to do with early film. Since it will probably take me as long to come up with a topic as it will to actually write the paper, I suppose I should get started...but you can probably look forward to more frequent posts, because I will clearly need to procrastinate a lot in the next few weeks.