finally . . .

And now for my first month in the month of May . . . wow . . .

Why have I been out? In a phrase--finals week . . . er . . . weeks. For some reason or another I completely underestimated the closing weeks of this semester and found myself with quite a lot to do and not as much time as I would have liked . . . but then again, I suppose that characterizes everybody's end-of-term situations . . . or even week-to-week situations.

Late last month, I realized that I had misread a crucial clause in the academic catalog. I had been taking a linguistics course this semester as Pass-Fail. For some reason or another, I missed the clause that read essentially: "graduate students must attain a grade equivalent to a B- in order to pass." Let's just say that with a week or so left in the semester, I had not done B- work (that's the point of doing a course P/F, yeah? So one doesn't have to put in as much work as normal?) So I had one homework assignment and the final to turn it around . . . luckily I also had the benefit of the wonderful Curve.

On 11 May, I had my major project due for Akkadian on -ma and u in OB šumma clauses . . . I had been working on this since February or March, so it wasn't as if I wasn't prepared for writing. At any rate, come the weekend prior to the due date, I was around 97% finished with my research and analysis and chasing down a few last minute leads (which all turned into dead ends). I started writing Friday . . . on Sunday afternoon, I was thoroughly dissatisfied with my approach and scrapped it. The result: my first full all-nighter (which made the next day a bit of a wreck including the presentation of my research, a meeting, and the rest of my research day) and a paper that I think may have been my worst since high school . . . the worst part was that I failed in my initial goals and came away saying that the OB grammarians pretty well have the right of it.

Two days later, I had to write my Sumerian final and my German exam (for reading proficiency). Sumerian wasn't too bad, though I wasn't real satisfied with my performance there. However, I was thoroughly embarrassed by German. For some reason or another when I sat down to do that thing, everything I knew about German was gone (apparently supplanted by cuneiform . . . ). I've been reading scholarly German for about a year now without much of a hitch (or at least, I think so . . . maybe if someone knew how I was translating articles . . . ), but I'm pretty sure my committee thinks I'd never seen a German clause before . . .

I then had the aforementioned linguistics final . . . at 8AM on a Saturday morning!!! What the Sheol is that about??? Apart from that ungodly schedule, the actual writing of the exam wasn't bad at all.

Then I had to finish around 40 lines for my omen texts final due either Monday or Tuesday . . . I can't remember which.

I next had to finish up some data input for the prosopography project before we meet next week in Philly.

Oh, and I had my jury service today. When I called last night, I was put off to the afternoon group, so I still didn't know if I would have to serve. Thankfully when I called this morning, I'd been dismissed with obligation fulfilled.

So I'm finally caught up with everything just in time to start my summer projects. Thanks for letting me gripe for a bit. In the coming weeks, I'll (try to) talk about my summer plans, my tablet time at Penn/trip to NYC (visiting a good friend and his family), a couple reviews, perhaps a preview of my fall semester, and general normalcy for this blog.