picked a handful of violets in my name

History prof is totally my favorite today! Our last class is on a Monday (the very last day of classes for the semester, actually), and our paper isn't due until the Friday after class ends. o_O

I am actually leaving Boston that Friday, and going to Maryland for a long weekend. JetBlue was running a 25% sale, and even before that discount, tickets were much cheaper than they had been for Thanksgiving holiday travel. I'll be with Cory and his family from Friday the 14th to Tuesday the 18th... giving me time to recuperate from the hell semester and finish that seminar paper before I leave, and to clean my damn apartment before my parents get here for Christmas.

I meant to have a batch of holiday cards in the mail today but I kinda failed on that. Soon, though! In the meantime, still plenty of time to ask me to send you one.

Now to answer comments and get groceries. Not necessarily in that order, or both this evening.

My weekend has come to a satisfactory conclusion, with all work completed on time, even with social media sanity breaks. \o/

Ellie has decided to Clean All The Things. The apartment totally needed it, but it was a little stressful to come in from Special Work Event after lunchtime and find Even MOAR Stuff in my bedroom.

Also, today I talked to my mom about getting a new computer. My Macbook is five years old!* It's still a perfectly adequate computer for my needs, except for two problems:

1. The fan makes loud angry noises whenever the computer is sleeped/hibernated/shut down, carried in my bag, and woken up again.
2. The plastic case around the screen and keyboard/trackpad has begun to chip off. Including right under where my right wrists rests when I'm mousing.

But, as my mother needs a new computer (hers is so old she can't update past Firefox 2, and she's understandably worried about Bad Shit From The Internet), we have decided she can have the Macbook, since she won't be moving it around or using the trackpad.

So now my goal is to locate the best Macbook for the least money. We have determined that it is a worthwhile investment to get a better computer than I need Right Now, because said computer will serve me for more years.

* I have been pretty impressed with the longevity of the Macs I've owned. 6 years, 4 years (would have been longer but Evil Ex stepped on it and refused to admit it was his fault the screen died), over 6 years (since AFAIK the iBook I gave to Cameryn is still kicking), and 5 years. Mom's iMac is 7.

It's been a very uneven start of the semester for me - everything usually just feels kind of off (although I do have stretches of time where everything is going well and making sense, too).

So I've been doing so much ordinary stuff and feeling so weird so much of the time that I haven't been posting.

I'm going to try and attend the Louisiana Historical Association annual meeting, because there's a lot of things that mesh really well with my interests. I'll have to miss at least one class session (conference begins on Thursday, I have class on Thursday, sigh) - I'll talk to my professor tomorrow and see how to work it out.

( my semester )

I have decided that from now on I should only take 9-12 classes. Any other time of day interferes with my work schedule and/or my ability to have a few empty blocks of time in my week.

Had to go to school early today to wrap up an assignment, because there was a piece of it that could only be done using resources on campus. But at least I wasn't the only one; I ran into loads of classmates all doing the same thing.

I should probably start packing for New Orleans soon, just so I can be sure I have everything together. I won't actually need that much clothing because Mom does laundry pretty much constantly - just enough variety that I don't get bored by the third week of vacation. And probably a variety of clothing weights/warmnesses, since my parents say the weather's been weird and they can't predict how warm/cold I might feel.

Shadowrun later today. Kind of sad it's the second-to-last session until I'm back in Boston (maybe even the last, depending on what kind of end-of-term stuff everyone else is up to next week). On the other hand, I can use that time off to copy my character sheet onto some fresh paper not yet stained with tikka masala and pepper steak.

Dreamwidth's new update page has entered beta testing - turn it on at the beta features page! There's an entry at dw_beta for reporting bugs.

I have been sitting on my ass the past couple of days, because I am so uncoordinated that I wrenched my knee getting into a taxi. /o\ (My foot got stuck, and then I tried to turn the rest of me 90 degrees clockwise. It hurt.) Ellie had to go to CVS and buy me a knee brace. On the bright side, I succeeded in getting to class this morning, although I was slightly late since I waited for a bus at Ruggles instead of walking.

So I posted a while back that I was really stressed about something and then I didn't post anything for a while. Oops.

The stressful situation is resolving itself, both more quickly and more slowly than I might have expected. But at least I've stopped losing sleep over it.

I've pretty much just been going to class, going to work, and doing face-to-face social stuff. I'm not in a bad place, depression-wise, but I am not as active as I'd like to be. I think it comes down to recalibrating myself again: the structure of my life has changed quite a bit lately.

Grad school has a different feel to it. The good news is, I'm keeping up with readings and assignments much better than I managed in undergrad. But I need to train myself into spending a bit more time on campus being involved in groups and meeting people. (Tangential to grad school: I have already encountered a fellow student in the local kink scene. We spotted each other on FetLife, but have not yet managed to be at any of the same events.)

I have been more social within my pre-grad school contexts. I attended a couple of munches - someone has relaunched the munch for Mob New England, and someone else has started a munch for bi/queer/etc. women in relationships with men. I also spent a nice chunk of time with oration on his birthday. I hung out with him while he cleaned his house for the party (and then had to leave the party early because being there while Cid was cleaning had upset my lungs something fierce, and I didn't have my inhaler).

Plus my Battletech group is switching to Shadowrun. The character creation process is so involved, and our schedules have been so start-of-term hectic, that we've only played one mini-session so far (and only one of us had a proper character - I used a stock character from the rule book and Cid was using a character our GM made, I think). We had a nice character creation session on Cid's back porch last night - well, Cid was working on a character and I just went over for people-time and got a couple of questions answered.

Notes

My parents have been here for the past two weeks, and then my internet connection spent a couple of days being pissy, and then I had other shit to do. But I'm back!

Parents

It was a good visit! We did many fun things, such as go to museums (Museum of Science with Ellie's kinda-sorta-girlfriend-I-think,* two three year olds, and the dad of the of the other three year old! MFA, wherein I learned exactly how intensely my dad does museums), elbow our way through the North End (I have been to concerts that were less crowded than those sidewalks, sheesh, also who the fuck drives in the North End are you fucking kidding me), etc.

* Yeah, I'm not sure what's up with that relationship thing, so I do not have a single-word term for it. It is very functional and they seem happy! It's also kind of hilarious (but possibly only to me, because of the sheer amount of TMI I have on Ellie's life and personal identity).

Thanks to a trip to Ikea and two carloads off to Goodwill, my room is in pretty good order! This is kind of miraculous. I still have too much stuff, but A) some kind of shift has occurred that unblocked my ability to get rid of things I don't need and B) I have improved my storage capabilities.

An important note: if you are planning to rearrange some furniture, and are drawing something out on paper, make sure your measurements are correct. We were off by two feet.

Grad School

I am not sure why advising needed to be an all-day process, but it was. There was assorted fuckery related to my being listed with the wrong concentration and assigned to the wrong advisor, but I did have the proper advising experience I was supposed to. Then there was the unrelated fuckery of not enough seats in classes, the end results of which are that I'm taking core library classes in a slightly different but still completely reasonable order than I'd originally thought, and I am still waiting to hear which history class I've been placed in (they needed volunteers to take Methods some time other than first semester, and one of the alternatives was a women's and gender history course, so I volunteered, but we're being manually registered and I haven't received an email about it yet).

There were two really bright spots in my day: I think I met a friend of a former schoolmate (one year ahead of me, so we weren't really friends), and one of the professors pinged my "you are from the internet" radar. Also there was ice cream and I got to go to work for a little while afterwards.

Work

Boss is departing; she'll still be available to advise us but today was her last real workday. This makes me the second most senior employee in the archives. I am deeply unsettled by that.

I am processing a new collection... three new collections... six collections? There are three organizations who donated their records, so there will be three collections. There are six accessions right now, because sometimes they gave us stuff in multiple batches. Some stuff will need to be moved between accessions because it belongs to one of the other organizations. Sorting that out will be the easy part.

The third organization was created by the merger of the other two, which helps to explain the cross-pollination of materials and also makes it a little harder to deal with it. Furthermore, each of those orgs is the result of mergers and renamings of even older organizations, such that the final conglomerate can say it dates back to the 1800s. (The bulk of the collections is more modern, but there are items from the predecessor orgs and these are the oldest papers I have processed.) I am going to need a nice detailed organizational chart to make sure everything is housed where is belongs, is referenced where relevant, and is laid out sensibly and accurately in the finding aid. Fortunately for me, someone wrote a history of one of the orgs and all those materials are in the collection; a thank-you card to that person may be in order when I'm finally done.

(JP)

(That's supposed to represent those oval bumper stickers that usually have two-letter country abbreviations. Someone makes such a sticker for Jamaica Plain. I keep threatening to buy one for Ellie, to upgrade her Subaru wagon [Level One JP Vehicle] that now has a carseat for a small child [Level 2 JP Vehicle; can also qualify with one of those fences to keep your dog in the back] to a Level 3 JP Vehicle.)

Boomerangs has been holding a massive sale to empty the store ahead of planned renovations. I've paid them a visit every day since Tuesday; retail therapy works for me and thrift stores reduce the financial burden and potential for guilt. (I mostly look for things with violets on them. It's kind of a theme.) I also finally made it to one of our local botanicas, which I have been meaning to do for over three years (ever since we were apartment-hunting and I saw it out of the realtor's car window); unfortunately I think I kind of interrupted the owner's lunch. The botanica has a shop cat, whom I briefly petted when I walked in; I spent the rest of my time there being insistently headbutted in the ankles. Secretly I was delighted, because I almost always love cats more than they love me.

I also keep returning to City Feed for lunch. It is very pleasant to eat a ham and cheese sandwich and watch people walking by.

Notes

Turned in my last assignment today! Except actual content soon as a result. :D

21 Days of Dreamwidth

4. What do you do online when you're not on DW?

Tumblr, Fetlife (sofiaviolet on both). I read a bunch of non-Dreamwidth blogs plus I use Twitter and Facebook, but since I interact with those mainly through apps instead of a browser (Vienna for feeds, Socialite for Twitter and FB status updates, Adium for FB chat), they don't feel the same.

Notes

Three Weeks for Dreamwidth happening now. Expect everybody to be posting all the time. (Seriously, the amount of stuff on my reading page today was terrifying. If you want the actual firehose, the threeweeks feed on Latest Things aggregates posts tagged with several variations on the fest name.)

Recently

Got to see the US Archivist speak today but was barred from the reception afterwards due to being a student (supposedly because of the presence of alcohol, which is doubly hilarious to me because I am over 21 and still do not ever booze it up). Although his speech was good (and confirmed that government archives are not my first choice but would not be too soul-sucking), and I got to archives-squee at the guy I sat next to.

21 Days of Dreamwidth

( day 1 )

Questions meme

erika asked: ( three questions )

Links

( 4 links: male privilege, derby girl names, non-fictional women of interest, migraines )

Plans

Last blog entry for class, last paper for the same class, only paper for the other class, book reviews, responses for the New Orleans FONSFAQ (also still taking prompts), possibly some responses for other FONSFAQs, possibly a notable woman for She's Kind of a Big Deal, the thing I am making for MCR (yes, I am making them a thing).

Ellie has found a new grocery store, which is good because it's closer and has better produce, but bad because it's not near anything else (that we know of). (Seriously, we switch grocery stores basically every year. At our old place, we went to the one in walking distance. The first year we lived in JP, we needed a T-accessible supermarket. After Ellie got a car, we started going to South Bay because there were other stores (like Home Depot) nearby. Then we switched allegiance to Dedham - Home Depot along the way, BJ's down the road.)

forthwritten: fanfiction and my younger self

And so, when we were about 16 or 17, one of my friends discovered fanfiction in general and slash fiction in particular. In a way, we used it as a silent, secret rebellion, swapping these stories underground (no, really; our common room was in a basement). It fascinated me. Here were stories about people who presented as female one day and male the next, who loved people of their gender, who negotiated sex, who didn't have happily-ever-afters but who had to talk and argue and reconfigure their friendship. The screen did not coyly fade to black and the story often did not end with sex; instead, there were morning-afters and misunderstandings and confusion that had to be resolved. The people had agency and were active participants and, as the_shoshanna notes, sex did not fundamentally change them.

denise: dw_suggestions: A User's Guide

So, you want to learn more about the dw_suggestions process! This entry will be made the "sticky entry" in the dw_suggestions community (replacing the existing one, which was starting to show its age) to serve as an introduction to the Suggestions process, Dreamwidth development, and just what the heck people should be keeping in mind while they're discussing things here.

dw_maintenance: New imports temporarily stopped; import queue paused

We are therefore temporarily pausing the existing import jobs until the traffic clears up some and we are able to further modify the importer so that it is even less of a load on LJ. We are also temporarily stopping the ability to queue new imports, so that once we bring the import queue back up, it will give the queue the chance to clear a bit. (Also, we'd like to minimize the impact on LJ.)

Now to assemble a Powerpoint for tomorrow's mini-lecture on Maria Callas, Renata Tebaldi, and Teh Famous Rivalry!!!! (Wondering whether it would be cool to play an aria and make the class guess which of them is singing it...)