Wednesday, November 05, 2008

Somebody's Checking Out!

I am giddy with relief that the presidential election is over and that Obama has been elected our next president.

Moving on, I am putting my blogs on hiatus at least through November. I have so much to do, I feel like I am coming apart at the seams. I still have half of that dissertation to edit, plus a 30+ page article to edit for my student job, and 3 English courses per week to teach, on top of studying for my exams. And in case the last bit doesn’t actually sound too bad to you, check out my schedule for the rest of the semester, *just for the exams*:

Nov. 11: 45-minute PowerPoint presentation in German on suppletion and morphological markedness

Nov. 20: 1-hour oral exam in English on 4 topics
15 minutes on Toni Morrison
15 minutes on 18th-century women writers
15 minutes on cognitive semantics
15 minutes on language change

Nov. 26: 1-hour oral exam in German on 2 topics
30 minutes on locative adverbials
30 minutes on cognitive approaches to second language-learning pedagogy

Dec. 18: 5-hour written exam in German on topic from Nov. 11 presentation

Jan. 8: 5-hour written exam in English on a linguistic topic (TBA)

Thinking about all the above, plus normal day-to-day stuff, makes me want to curl into my natural pill-bug form and sleep the winter away under a log somewhere. But since that is not really an option—since I want to finish my degree and my family likes clean clothes and eating—something else has to give. And that something is my Internet addiction. Bye, bye, blogs. Sayonara, favorites list. Catch you on the flip side, World Wide Web. I won’t be checking the email account for my blogs at all, and my personal yahoo account only infrequently. Since my students contact me via my gmail account, that is the only one I’ll be checking, and only once a day. I hope to be back, if only briefly, around Thanksgiving.

And to keep you from being too bored while I’m gone, here is a photo riddle.

John brought home flowers. What do you think?

Rose?

An interesting rose?

Overly trimmed cabbage?

NOT a rose after all

Audrey II?



Discuss. See you in a few weeks.