Lazyish day....

I didn't leave my house until after 3 today. Oh, unless you count going outside in the slight rain to press the Silence button twice. Stupid alarm. But the dorm manager is actually working on it, or says she is, which makes me happy. And the Silence button works, although it did start up again a few hours later, but it worked again. Hurrah. And I took out the trash while I was at it, which makes me virtuous.

(Former housemates think, "Since when does she ever take out the trash?" Although that's not quite true; I did take out the trash a few times last year. And whenever I did, I made sure someone saw me. What's the point of being virtuous if no one knows?)

But I have a new draft of my writing sample! Draft 8, to be exact. Oy. But it's starting to firm up. Surprisingly. Now I think I might actually cave in and buy a printer because I really want to look at the thing in hard copy, and I don't want to pay--let's see, what's 5p times 11 pages.... 55p for a hard copy I'm just going to mark up and recycle. That's like a dollar!

In the culinary corner, I made up a new recepie (or however you spell it) today. I made pasta, then tossed it with cream cheese, marinara sauce (from a jar), leeks, and smoked salmon. Officially using up my smoked salmon. Yay! It had passed its "sell by" date. But not by much! And I feel fine.... Oh, and the dish was good. :) It's funny; I get really into cooking things, and then I tend to eat them pretty quickly... often because no one's around to talk to and so pace the meal. Although there are often people around for dinner. We all cook seperately then sit around talking and eating and playing with the take-out menus people keep sending us in the mail. If we ever want to order out for curry, we'll be all set. And if we make an order of 20 pounds or more, we'll get a free bottle of wine! Won't that be.... nice.

And I had my first research methods class today. Two hours about writing a Master's Thesis. They were aiming it at the MPhils, who have to write 20,000 to 40,000-word essays (depending on whether they're in the A or B program--don't ask), as opposed to us Taught MAs, who only have to write 12,000 words. My English thesis was 14,294, and my music one was 9,842. So their average is over 12,000 words, and that was in one semester. I'm not worried about quantity. It's quality that's worrying me. Oh, and I also have two 8,000-word essays due in April; musn't forget about those. I think that the major difference between this thesis and my undergrad theses (particularly the English one) is that this is graduate-level work. Which means I a) need to do more comprehensive research and actually have a sense of the field, and b) have to actually turn out a product that is polished, focused and well-written. Considering I'm on Draft 8 of the writing sample based on my thesis, I think I do have a long way to go.

Some ideas I have for the thesis--and I might use the ones I don't use for the thesis for the 8,000-word essays--are the Sherlock Holmes stories, illustration in the 19th century more broadly, more on etiquette books (especially their quality, readership, cost, demographics, etc.), books owned and/or read by servants (I got onto it b/c of the servant etiquette books I saw, but I'm not sure how I'd go about researching it), Victorian pornography (hey, it's an academic interest--seriously, Walkowitz refers to it, and I'm intrigued), music printing, Victorian newspapers, or Shakespeare in the Victorian era. No way I could do all of these, and some of them are still far too broad. Also, some of them aren't very marketable to PhD programs.... although I'll have to ask around about that. For instance, I think an MA thesis about music printing wouldn't be so impressive to an English department. Victorian porn, on the other hand.... I don't know. Right now, the servant book idea is very intriguing. I also need to see what kinds of materials are availible to me. I know a lot of etiquette books are in the British Library, which I could access, but, practically speaking, I don't want to be running down to London all the time. Although it would be nice if there were a few volumes I could only get at the BL or the Bodlien (did I spell that right?)...

For a lazy day, it certainly generated a lot of writing! I'll try to restrain the babbling about academic matters--it's all so inchoate, anyway. Did I spell that one right? Definitely learned it quizzing Crystal on GRE vocab words with flashcards at our kitchen table, accompanied by Chris J---. Good times.