Friday Five: Procrastination Pro

I very intentionally set my schedule this term so that I'd have two full days free from classes and TAing and other obligations. The intention was that I'd use those two full days to work on my preliminary exams, which I've been putting off for almost a year now. For those of you who aren't graduate students in the anthropology department of UW, prelim exams are a series of four papers---three extended literature reviews and a project proposal---that need to be submitted and approved in order to attain the status of "doctoral candidate." Also known as, ABD status.

I have one of the lit reviews and most of the proposal done; the other two lit reviews have grown into giant, psychotic, unconquerable octopuses.

In the meantime, my two "free" days wound up being Mondays and Fridays. And instead of using these days to get loads of work done, I've mostly thought of them as extended weekends and use those days to run errands and clean the house and generally do all the things I should have done on the actual weekend.

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This weekend, I'm giving cross-country skiing another try. I'm hoping that the fresh snow we got this week---paltry though it was---will be enough to cover the ice and slow down the trails a bit.

Perhaps I'll manage not to face plant this time.

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I've become addicted to LibraryThing (madknitta, if you want to look me up). A friend had mentioned it a few times. Then, I found myself checking out books from the library that I already owned but didn't remember that I owned and couldn't find even if I had remembered because I have way too many books on too few shelves with no discernible organization, other than separating fiction from nonfiction. So, I thought I'd try to clean up my shelves a bit and create a database so that I'd at least know whether I owned a book, even if locating it might still require a dowsing rod, a headlamp, and a shovel.

I'm currently at 298 books, with two shelves of fiction and scattered piles left to be cataloged.

On the plus side, my shelves are much neater.

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Now if I could just get my desk to be as neat and semi-organized.

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Go Saints!