Work is just a synonym for HEARTBURN

Last week I pulled serious overtime on my research job (I quit counting at 50 hours on Thursday) and it pretty much sucked because I was tired, stressed, consumed far too many Tums, and since I'm salaried I don't get overtime pay. Activity #1 was helping the boss get the very large CDC grant finished - if we get this I get a raise, if we don't get this....well, the boss will be difficult to live with for quite some time. Activity #2 involved getting some numbers out of a study one of the ID people started and another RA analyzed - let me just say that it was completely set up wrong and I managed to get something useful out of it by Friday morning. Activity #3 occured Wednesday and Thursday because our clinical monitor from 3M came to close out our clinical trial - she bought us some seriously nice lunch at Atlas downtown to thank us (ps, Connie-the-monitor is very nice to work with, too). Basically, I worked like crazy and didn't do shit for my class last Monday evening - faked an entire evening of Faulkner discussion (bad, bad, bad). And I'm pretty sure that none of the other three RAs that work for the group did anything even remotely stressful. I hate being dependable.

To remedy the overworked attitude, I took yesterday off to read about 200 pages of the class assignment for Monday. Yup. And I finished Bound to Please and Reading Like a Writer. Go me.

Current book-in-progress: Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night (only 100 pages left now) and The Cambridge Companion to Modern American Literature (oy - but good).
Current knitted item: Eyores. I eyeballed my sock yarn, too.

New semester, same-ol', same-ol'

New semester's started. Taking Modern American Literature (being taught by "Harry" as he signs himself) - the texts range from 1920-1939 (inter-war years). The reading list is pretty cool (but it would have been nice to have this on ISIS or his website somewhere before the start of semester, grrr):

Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton
Manhattan Transfer, John Dos Passos
Cane, Jean Toomer
Quicksand, Nella Larsen (and I might read Passing since it's in the same volume)
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein
Absalom, Absalom!, William Faulkner
Tender is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Day of the Locust, Nathaniel West
Native Son, Richard Wright

Really nice - no overdone books from high school in sight (i.e. Gatsby, Grapes of Wrath (ew), Hemingway, etc)

Current book-in-progress: The Age of Innocence, an article by Nancy Bentley (to present in class tomorrow) and, yes, still the crap for my term paper - Cavendish, de Pisan, and Wollstonecraft (they're starting to seem like the three Witches from Macbeth - Double, double, toil and trouble....)
Current knitted item: Half a set of booties for Rebekah's baby shower (bootie #1 is knitted and just needs seamed - hey, I have until 12pm February 3 to get them done)

Paper Hell

I am in paper hell. The dratted thing will not write. And I'd like to get it done before the new semester starts. So instead of writing my paper I read Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets in about three hours. I've come over to the dark side I'm afraid.

Prairie Lights is refusing to give me a list of the books Dr. Stecopoulos ordered for class. I did manage to eyeball them and pick up one at BN (since I work there) solely based on cover art (I also do not have a reading list for said course, yet, because I can't register until the start of term). I do know that Age of Innocence is up first, so I hope I can just use my copy.

I haven't knit anything in about 3 weeks - and no, I didn't finish the d*mned stockings.

Work still sucks. I want a new full-time job (part-time job is still OK most of the time).

GAH!

Current book-in-progress: Crap for my term paper - Cavendish's The Blazing World, de Pisan's The City of Ladies, and Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Women; Harry Potter; The Age of Innocence
Current knitted item: Does it count if it's on the needles even though I haven't touched it since Christmas Eve?

Hat done, stockings started. Shawl? Still not done.

Went to see my Grandfather for his birthday. He was 80 years old on Saturday and had a party to celebrate - the best quote of the day was from one of his good friends who said the gathering looked like a geriatric ward (kind of funny, since all my Grandpa's friends are around his age). But I got absolutely nothing done, except to finish The Thirteenth Tale, by Diane Setterfield. I had been wanting to get that finished because the author is going to read on Wednesday.

As far as knitting, I made a hat on Thursday from the Noro I just bought using the Sunflower Tam pattern - based on phyllotaxis - from the book Knitting Nature (and I have enough to make another hat since I think the pattern needs tweaking, but the yarn makes the pattern really interesting). One Christmas stocking is started but I need to dye some yarn before I get to Santa's face (flesh colored yarn is not a commodity apparently).

And I need to write a paper. Sigh. I would rather read and knit.

Current book-in-progress: Rooms of Our Own by Susan Gubar, one-half of the team that wrote The Madwoman in the Attic (a very good book also)
Current knitted item: Torn between the shawl, Christmas stockings and another hat.