An Academic Summer - Part III

Alright, I won't lie. I spent a good week doing... not a whole lot really. "And it was everything I thought it would be" (~ Office Space). Haha. I cleaned the patio and whole house (again) -- it's surprising how quickly it dirties itself when you are home all day every day. I watched movies. Actual movies! I don't do that very often. None of them were really worth talking about but such is life. I also watched season 1 of Mad Men, which I love.

I did way too much of this:

I had to! I was just catching up on my correspondence! ;) Besides, how else could a person watch all 35 episodes of their new favorite show, Chuck? It's so good! I laugh out loud and cry too... it's great. (You can watch Season 1 at thewb.com and the last half of Season 2 is on nbc.com -- in between, I bought them off of Amazon's instant viewing. Or you could be a not-crazy person and just wait for the DVDs to come out but that sounded lame to me.)

Meanwhile, there was this pile 'o' books to work through:

Thus far, I've only made it through the cooking magazines. (Well, and the book I'm reading for pleasure, which lives on my night stand upstairs.) Hey, it's the beginning of the break! :-) I am happy to say that I bought multiple rounds of groceries to cook myself actual meals, which is something I wasn't able to do as regularly in the past year as I would've liked. I tried to perfect fried chicken, for example, and kinda gave up because I think I need a fryer or a thermometer... in other words, it still ain't perfect. I'm writing a review of the book on the top of that stack for the journal Violence Against Women, though, so I shall have to begin working through that stack soon. I figure doing that will help me warm up my writing skills, which I will need when I switch over to doing more writing.

So I figured I'd start and finish one more little around-the-house project before getting down to business. That was to decide, once and for all, where to put these floating shelves and picture frames my sister and her husband got me for a housewarming gift (SEVEN MONTHS AGO):

Can someone please tell me: A) why those floating shelves are so hard to hang? (I messed up the paint on these cheap-o walls trying to get one up and I've yet to reattempt.) and B.) why I ended up feeling the need to rearrange all the other wall hangings before deciding where to finally hang them (between the two art pieces you see in picture 2 below)? I ended up moving the screen/room divider from its place lining the wall near the dining room table (which was also in a different place) to behind the futon. These wall hangings were originally elsewhere in the room (the black and white above the TV, the orange bird above the futon, the painting in between the futon and the dining room table now above the TV).

So that project remains ongoing, dangit. Meanwhile, I managed to drum up a tiny bit of press for myself (and to some extent, my study abroad trip to London/South Africa in 2010) on campus, start the planning of an on-campus student group event in fall, and finish organizing my office (at work) and finding homes for all the things that needed to be filed! Those pesky computer files still need to be filed/organized though.

Not too, too shabby.

Until we meet again...