Come Together

At long last, my thesis committee is together! It's taken a while, much longer that it probably should have, to get to this point, but at least I've finally done it.

Now I need to set up the date for my proposal defense, finish my ethics paperwork tomorrow, and get going on my research. Hooray!

Things I can cross off of my grad school check list

I can officially place passing my comprehensive exams into that list! Thank God, and my insane BSing abilities, for that!

Comprehensive exams, for those unfamiliar with them, are, at this particular university department, three tests, three hours long each taken on three consecutive days. Anthropological theory and two other qualifying courses, generally in sub fields like medical, physical, or archaeology. It sucks. It's an extremely draining experience. One I'm glad I won't have to repeat until I have to take comps for a Ph.D. program. The only saving grace was that we were given the questions in advance and weren't completely blindsided by what was asked. One of the questions through me for a loop because of the wording on the sample question did not make it clear that we were going to have to discuss another book besides the two ethnographies that we were supposed to analyze. Hence my reference to BSing!

Of course, the powers-that-be had to ruin my Valentine's day, as the comps were given the 13-15 of February. Thankfully, I did get to see my Valentine and he was sweet enough to go grocery shopping for me. He also bought tons of candy. This is the third less than stellar Valentine's day that we've had together thanks to school. At least our first Valentine's day together was nice and we've always been able to celebrate our anniversary without too much interference from school.

Now I can recycle all of the class handouts, the outlines I created for the comps and other materials involving these classes knowing that I don't need them! It'll be nice to cut the piles of school stuff in half and streamline what I do have a bit precisely. It also helps that I took about 10 books back to the library today. I'll have to take a picture of how tall this stack of paper will end up being.

Hard Work

It has been a while since I have posted anything here. Shame on me! But I do have some good news and progress to report!

I took my comprehensive exams last week. This is one of those situations where the "no news is good news" rule applies. It's still nerve wracking, but I'm feeling better about those papers right now.

This month, I've turned in an annotated bibliography for my proposal and the first draft of my proposal, which I just got back today. My thesis chair said that there's some organizational issues with it, and some things that need clarification, which I will expand upon when I don't feel like I need an IV drip of caffeine! But the questions that I want to ask are very good and she thinks that this will end up being a very interesting project. I've worked on the second draft some already and checked out a book for the library that she recommended. I was extremely nervous when I was writing the first draft, especially since I've never done anything like this before and didn't know what to expect! I really hope that I can publish a few articles in journals with the work I have done for my thesis!

It's just good to know that I'm going in the right direction and that all of this stress and hard work is paying off. The fruit of my labor (i.e. reading until my eyeballs practically fall out of my head the the perpetual noise of the keyboard) is beginning to flower. It's one hurdle that I have successfully jumped with plenty more to go. Writing a thesis is like running a marathon!

Everything is coming together! All of the uncertainty, the stress, the insane amount of coffee/energy drinks, nervousness, hard work, and worry are finally paying off! Right now I'm extremely tired and ridiculously giddy! Now I have to use these positive, happy feelings and thoughts to get me through the rest of the day! I've got two books I'm in the middle of reading for my thesis and two more than I need to start soon.

Reasons that it's been so long...

I have only spent one weekend out of thirteen, it's going to be fourteen this weekend, at home. Even the one weekend I was home, I was cleaning and making an anniversary dinner for my boyfriend and I that Saturday. Sunday we had his brother's over for the Texans football game. And if it weren't for the fact that I have to write everything down in my planner (I jokingly call it my brain!), I would hardly remember what I did.

Since I've been so horrible about posting this month, I'll just recap what's been going on:
The first weekend of October was spent just as I said, a nice, romantic dinner for my boyfriend and I. I made what is known as Engagement Chicken. I had threatened him with it a few months ago, mostly joking, but after hearing the recipe, he wanted to try it. I made a vinaigrette dressing for salads, garlic butter for our garlic bread, ginger and garlic green beans, some cabernet sauvignon sauteed mushrooms (all of the recipes are from this wonderful cookbook). And for dessert, I followed this sweet cream recipe, because I'm a total nerd and it sounded like a great compliment to some fruit. I used the medieval recipe and it was yummy! It's a lot of cream just for two people, but if you used it for a mixed berry dessert at a party, it would be more than enough. So I spent four hours cleaning to spend three hours cooking and get half of my dishes dirty all over again. Dinner was a success, though! Sunday we had a great time hanging out with his brothers and unfortunately, we watched the Texans get stomped.

This was the week that we started reading a book about Rigoberta Menchu in one of my classes. I have to say that we're about to be on week four of her, because we read two different books then compare them, and I'm thoroughly sick of this woman. She lied about her experiences, then she got mad about people making stereotypes based on what she said was "the story of all poor Guatemalans" years later because she started changing her mind about how she wanted to be represented. She contradicts herself at every turn. Yes, I know that memory is not perfect. Again, were it not for the fact that I wrote these things down in my "brain", I wouldn't have remembered the order they occurred. But to blatantly lie about your life to garner attention and international sympathy for your cause is just wrong. Why she did it makes sense to me - she wanted people (read: Americans and Europeans) that were in a position to do something to help to know so they would help - but does that make lying about your life (and then taking it out on others) right or wrong?

I went with one of my classmates to her daughter's school's international festival. It was really cool to see some of the dances, traditional dress and sample the food! The food was so great! I left full!

The following weekend, I cleaned and we went out to dinner with my boyfriend's brothers and their ladies. We had an overly talkative waiter. I've waited tables myself, and there are times when it's fun to interact with your customers and there are times when you're just being annoying. This guy was annoying. After he brought our food out, he left only to take care of a few closing duties then came right back and dominated the "conversation." I'm sorry, but there is absolutely no reason in the world that I need to know that you met your baby's momma by selling her weed. And that you just quit smoking weed, too. I didn't think my entree was that good, combined with the overly friendly waiter made for a not so stellar experience.

But the haunted house we went to made up for our less than amazing dining experience. To give a little plug for them - it's $20 to get into two haunted houses and there is a free haunted house, the chainsaw maze. They did an excellent job, so go check it out if you're in the area!

Sunday was much more school-oriented. I worked on a midterm that day and spent time with family.

Last week I made cookies for the class that we're reading the Rigoberta Menchu books in. My grandmother passed away a few months ago, so I finally got to the point where I could handle making molasses cookies. This was a recipe that I grew up on and always associate with her. The first time I made it, I cried quite hard. I made a second batch a few days later for class and that was a tear-free event. She always told me not to eat the dough (yummy!) because it has raw egg it in. And that half the dough needed to be baked. She would have been proud that I actually proceeded to actually bake the dough! They turned out great and they were a hit! I went in with 30+ cookies and left with three. I also decided to do something different for my chapter presentation.

Because I'm obviously super thrilled about another week of Rigoberta, I decided to take a somewhat satirical twist on the chapter summaries that we have to make and created diary entries for my chapters. I threw in a few pictures, too. Hopefully it will be a nice change of pace than just the usual chapter summary that we've been reading. I had to edit out some of the sarcasm that I used when I wrote them.

Another positive occurrence - I've finally narrowed down my thesis topic enough that I can start writing my proposal! I've been gathering sources for that so I can start writing an abstract for that this weekend. I've also been working on an annotated bibliography that's actually due for class in a few weeks. The semester is half way over! 

Gah!

I haven't posted here as much as I have hoped to. It's mostly due to personal stuff. The plan is to write something more substantial next week.

Enjoy the weekend, everyone! I'm going out to dinner, then to a haunted house tonight.

New Software

It seems this semester I got into the groove of school more easily than I have in the past. I know what is expected, have become mostly desensitized to the workload and have been hopped up on caffeine for the past six weeks (partially because I've had so many things going on in my personal life, as well as my school life). Time management has been a critical skill to have. Thankfully, after this weekend (family outings!) and next weekend (celebrating my boyfriend and I's anniversary!) I will have one weekend where I don't have anything going on for the first time in almost three months. Hooray!

Anyways, so the biggest problem I've had this semester is dealing with one class: Data Analysis. First, we had to observe 50-75 people on their cell phones. That was easy enough to do around campus. But then I had to deal with Microsoft Access, which I believe to be Satan's high tech incarnation. And to those of you who read the previous statement who think that is a gross exaggeration have clearly never had to deal with that ridiculous program! So I entered my cell phone data, but because the class is divided into qualitative and quantitative sections, and I chose quantitative, I had to input my professor's data (I really have to question my sanity - I'm paying someone to teach me how to do all of this, but I'm also paying to do someone else work for them. There is zero logic to this, except to get to the point where I have grad students as minions, too.) into Access then put it into SPSS. Access began deleting information in my fields. Of course, it would input into SPSS wrong. I must have read my prof's data what feels like ten million times before I got it right (weeks later, I'm still finding mistakes!).

To make matters worse, SPSS is not the easiest program in the world to figure out, especially when you've never used something like that before. And certain mathematical things that this program does are not named the same as the equation. On the bright side, I can officially upload data into SPSS in my sleep since I've done it so many times. I've also run the statistics and histograms so many times I know exactly where to go. The bar charts and stem-and-leaf plots are getting there as well. I just did Chi squared for the first of many times today.

After I got out of class today, armed with a hazelnut iced coffee, I went to conquer more revisions. Prof told us that we could use a little thing in SPSS called transform to merge some data together. I had tried that earlier in the week and it messed up my male and female counts for the data I'm working with. I had the wrong numbers down to transform, but I didn't want to try to fix the data in SPSS to just screw everything up even more, so I go back Access to fix it. Besides that, I had to fix a few other things that I was unaware of (since it's not my data, nor my research interest I had no idea) that needed to be fixed at the Access level then had to import the data for the 2,039,894,854,897,109,328,586,343,785,908,347,198th time into SPSS. Fun was not had by me until two hours later when I finished.

To add to my "List of Things About This  Class I Can Complain About," I despise statistics. I didn't understand it when I took it [probably because 1) I was taking two different statistics classes simultaneously, 2) math is not my forte to begin with] and I sure don't like it three years later. The only good thing that has come from statistics was, oddly (haha) enough, meeting my fantastic boyfriend.

I do realize that I will use this program, or, sweet little baby Jesus help me, one like it for the rest of my life. These are also skills that I will use throughout my career. They're just a wee bit frustrating to learn right now. Practice makes perfect and yada yada yada. It's not easy. But it will be easier the next time I have to do this, and the time after that, and so on until it becomes old hat.

At lease I know I'm not alone in my frustrations. Misery found in SPSS loves classmates for company. And that is quite comforting on pretty much all levels. Undoubtedly, there are a plethora of social science graduate students who are also ready to Office Space their computers due to frustrations caused by Access, SPSS and Daunting Research Questions.

Since I'm caught up on homework for one of my other classes and practically done with my assignment for Data Analysis, I should spend the rest of my time at work reading for my third class to get ahead so I can more fully enjoy my weekend!

The first diffuser experiment

So I finally got all of the stuff in necessary to making my own reed diffusers. Yesterday, I had the chance to play! I surfed the net for a while to try to find a good recipe that included the fourteen or so essential oils that I ordered. That was the toughest part about the whole thing, other than finding the conversion for ounces into cups (I don't have anything that measures in ounces). I doubled the recipe because my little vase was large enough to do so. It's pretty nice!

I was able to smell it when I walked into my house after class, so I guess it's working pretty well! I think there is one oil that is more overpowering than others, so maybe I'll add some of the less powerful oils to try to even it out. Lavender is the very strong scent throughout my house, but when I get close to the vase, it's lemon that is the strongest. Maybe I shouldn't mess with it and see what happens after I flip the reeds over.

This is one of the vases that me and my friend found for me when we redesigned my living room. Here's my bookcase after:

 And before:

My new small bookcase:

And my throw pillows match this other vase:

Bye bye old air fresheners and hello homemade diffuser!