Well, as mentioned in my last post, which was over a month ago, meeting with my advisor is like being abducted by aliens. My ass is still sore and the quarter has been over for a week, but I did manage to pass everything and get all my papers done and turned in on time and take my exams. I still haven't decided which was more painful - the cold translation of an Egyptian funerary stela while dealing with intestinal trouble or the Mesopotamian history final while dealing with my total lack of time to study and my total apathy concerning Mesopotamia from the 1st millenium BC onward.
Anyway, Fenway arrived on the evening of Friday, December 12th with a Penske truck full of his stuff and my bedroom furniture that had been at my parents' home until they moved to California last May. With the help of one of my kind fellow graduate students, we got everthing up to the apartment in just a few hours and arranged the furniture the next day. Sunday morning we shoved Oreo into his soft-sided carrier and headed off to Midway to fly out to California to see my parents, as we saw them only briefly during the wedding in June. They're living in Clovis, just outside Fresno, but we flew into San Jose, thus avoiding the horror that is LA. The three hour drive home was lovely - beautiful rolling hills still tinged green and then down into the San Joaquin Valley and all those lovely fruit orchards - we'll have to go out in the spring when everthing is in bloom, even if it will mean taking massive quantities of antihistamines. The Sierras are just visible in the distance from Clovis and while it's not quite the same the view from Washoe Valley, it was still pretty. Spent a week relaxing, doing some shopping and trying to keep Oreo and Oliver (Mom and Dad's schnauzer) from killing each other. I'm afraid there are no pictures to share as Tom and I rarely remember a camera, or, if the camera is remembered, the process of photography is usually forgotten - the wedding and honeymoon photos were sheer luck, really.
I read My Name Escapes Me by Sir Alec Guiness during my brief respite from school and loved it - it's a collection of his diary entries spanning about a year and a half from January 1995 to mid-1996. Other than that, it's difficult to describe other than to say it was charming.
We returned to Chicago this evening, having taken off from San Jose just after the earthquake hit near San Simeon (sp?) a.k.a. Hearst Castle. I actually felt the earthquake in the terminal, but thought it was just a dizzy spell from sleep deprivation and the cigarette I had just smoked until we heard the news.
Fenway and I will be spending Christmas here in Chicago, just the two of us, and then weather permitting, will head down to Mississippi on the 26th or 27th for a few days. I'm afraid my visit has to be cut short so I can work on my thesis (I have given up on the euphemism "Two-Year Paper") with my advisor (alien abductor) before he goes into the field (Mars) to look for more scraps of the Ahmose temple complex (cattle to probe anally). On the last day of the quarter, he was kind enough to dump on me some of the field notes I needed which are either beautifully detailed with excellent plans and sections or painfully lacking of any useful information with plans and sections that look like they were drawn by a 3 year old using his butt-cheeks to hold the pencil. Oddly enough, the notes are all by the same person. Yet another person to add to my list "Do Not Meet These People with Witnesses Present" (because it's harder to kill them that way, or at least kick them in the shins and run away).