Monday started off like usual, with me running 3 British History One tutorials in a row. I've been looking forward to them these past few weeks because we're into the student-run tutorials. At the start of the semester I assigned teams of students to run one of five specific tutorials. In the 10am tutorial, two international students had created a board game using a world map showing the many colonies of Britain, and the other students travelled around and answered questions on the various colonies they were in. Excellent stuff, and creative -- I was very proud.
That afternoon I had my monthly supervisory meeting. I always get quite nervous, and try to counteract this by making a list of stuff I've done and questions for my supervisors. The major thing I've accomplished in the past month was to develop a system of organization for my primary source research. My first major source is Cobbett's Parliamentary Papers, which go up to 1803. I'm stuck in the early 1790s at the moment, but am slowly reading through every time the West Indies and slavery is discussed, then recording important quotations and their location and date. This had become an 18 page, 10 000 word Word document that was too big to be useful. To fix the problem, I took a half day course on the database software FileMaker Pro, wrote out a point form outline of my thesis and numbered/lettered each segment, and went through every quotation coding it to match a segment in the thesis. Ta da! My professors seemed happy with the results, too, and I'll be meeting them again in April to give them an update. It's quite likely I'll still be working away at the papers, although hopefully I'll have moved onto the Hansard (post-1803).
Tuesday morning I was back to the papers until I heard a knock on the door. It was our neighbour from downstairs asking if I'd like to join her for a trip to Ikea. As if she had to ask! We took the bus to the southern outskirts of Edinburgh and after a nice cheap lunch, spent a good part of the afternoon wandering through the showrooms wishing we had houses to decorate with all that amazing streamlined furniture. Plus I pointed out the couch, chair and ottoman that we once had in our living room back on the other side of the ocean. I miss that chair. The furniture we have here is awful and uncomfortable. I long to have a 3 person couch again. I was good -- all I bought was a set of steak knives for £2.95.
Wednesday wasn't terribly exciting. I think I spent most of the day inputing data. Oh, I did find a new argument regarding the slave trade because I had moved onto 1793, and the French Revolution has the MPs terrified of change in the name of liberty and freedom. I should have anticipated that.
Thursday was a great day. Derek woke up to some excellent feedback about the second draft of his thesis, so that put both of us in a great mood. A friend of mine came over in the afternoon and brought some excellent chocolate chip cookies, and the three of us sat and chatted for over an hour about school and traveling and homesickness (she's an international student doing a PhD as well, but in economics). We both continue to struggle with school bureaucracy, as we're both tutoring scholarship recipients and are therefore treated by some as award winners and others as employees, very different classifications when it comes to payroll, human resources and the government. Have I mentioned that I still haven't been paid for marking 90 essays, beginning last October? And I'm supposed to mark 30 more next week?
Friday I woke up ill. I'd been fighting off a bug for a couple days, but it won yesterday's battle. So I turned down an invitation to karaoke, miss the weekly drink with the upper year PhDs that I've only recently started to go to (because I only found out about it 2 weeks ago), and just stayed inside on the couch with comfy pants (trousers) and some ginger ale. I'm feeling better now, thanks to the rest, my inhalers, some LemSip Max (just like NeoCitron) and excellent care by Derek.
1 comment:
I vote for this being "interesting".
Post a Comment