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After I put the finishing touches on one more paper, I’ll be officially done with school for the 2007-08 academic year. It was a very good semester as I really liked all my classes but man, it was a lot of work too. I’m on 33 books read for the year. Next year is still up in the air because the TA positions haven’t all shaken out yet, but the outlook is not good. There’s a chance I’ll get an admin position within the department to help out, but the numbers would have to work out for me to do it, so I don’t even know for sure what I’ll be taking next semester due to schedules and finances. Grad school—it’s not lovely.

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We leave for Madrid on Wednesday morning and I came down with a bad cold on Friday. Lots of wheezing, hacking, sore throatiness and stiffness. Nothing a nine-hour flight won’t cure, I’m sure.

I’m bringing four books on my trip: Love Medicine and The Bingo Palace by Louise Erdrich, and Child of God and The Orchard Keeper by Cormac McCarthy. Four books sounds like a lot but all but the first one are relatively short, and I have the better part of two days in airports waiting for connections. I don’t like running out of things to read while traveling so I figure better safe than sorry. I also have an e-verision of John Kessel’s Baum Plan for Financial Independence on my Blackberry just in case. (You should go download it from Creative Commons now—Kessel is awesome.)

There were some games happening in England yesterday. Man Ure won the league with the lowest point total since 2002, Fulham stayed up, Reading and Birmingham went down. All in all, a very entertaining year in the Premier League. Normally I would say I don’t know how I am going to survive the summer without any football to watch, but happily it’s the year of the European Championship, and all the games are on ESPN/ESPN2. We’re lucky. We really are. Did I mention it kicks off about two days after we get home? Lovely.

Current Mood: Sick |
Currently Listening To – Eddie Vedder – “Into the Wild Soundtrack”