Less than Three Weeks Until Graduation

Miss Caitlin was awarded Honors in English. Whoot. Oh Joy. Feel the love.

Miss Caitlin turned in her paper for Dr. Stuart, which leaves only the final to be concerned about in that class, which she's not really. Dr. Stuart has quite fair tests, and since Miss Caitlin's good at tests, it means she'll only have to study a little to be prepared for it.

The major hurdle of the week is her senior seminar presentation. She does a practice presentation for the class tomorrow, which she is preparing for tonight, and then the real thing on Friday. She will be presenting on the changes in the genres of science fiction and fantasy as indicated by winners of the Hugo Award for Best Novel. Interested parties might look at this year's nominations, though Miss Caitlin will not be considering them in her paper and presentation. Miss Caitlin is excited that the Doctor Who episode "Blink" made it into the nominations, as well as a two parter from the same season. Tipsy's rather intolerable about it.

In any event, after the presentation, she will have only the play to worry about, which is still on track. She has costumes now (more or less). They are a little flamboyant but in keeping with Miss Caitlin's show.

Somehow, Miss Caitlin has volunteered to teach Kara-chan how to use a sewing machine . . . which she will do only after her work for the presentation are over. Miss Caitlin is happy to actually, as she will greatly miss her younger friends who will still be in school here while she is leaving.

Introduction to the New Semester

I have exciting news to share. First off, Clem has recovered well from his surgery. As Miss Caitlin's Father would say, Clem is once again a fat and sassy pig.


In other news, we have several new friends. A lovely sow was presented to Miss Caitlin by Miss Kitty from across the street. Ruth is a very amiable pig. She likes to be social and cuddles with Miss Caitlin often.


Josie was found for us by Miss Shelly. She is more shy - she was happy enough to take on the responsibility of guarding the extra key, but overall, she has had very little to say. I do not find this to be much of a problem, since Tipsy says more than enough for everyone involved . . . However, I am sure with time, Josey will blossom into a good friend. I feel I should also point out in the above picture that Miss Caitlin salvaged the waterfall from her term project and added it to our landscape on the desk.

Miss Caitlin is again studying Japanese this semester. She is currently struggling with conjunctions and distinguishing the correct circumstances for using each one. She is also making a survey of some recent award winning books for her English Senior Seminar class. For the first book, the class read The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing, in Honor of Mrs. Lessing's winning of the Nobel Prize. While Miss Caitlin admires Lessing's ability to convey a large amount of information with only a few words, Miss Caitlin feels (and I rather agree) that the book is not of great quality otherwise. Perhaps a better selection might have been made so the class could appreciate the body of work that resulted in Mrs. Lessing's being awarded a Nobel Prize.

Miss Caitlin is also taking Play Direction, which fills her with not a little trepidation. However initial classes have not taxed her too greatly, as they are mostly discussing theory. In addition to these, she is taking a class about the history of the English language. Already this has proved a fascinating class. Her professor, Dr Stewart, is a very . . . unique individual. Miss Caitlin decided she enjoyed him as a teacher after he encouraged his students to split their infinitives in order to spite the people who believe that English should have a grammar somehow related to Latin.

Tipsy will likely have something to say soon, as Miss Caitlin will be refereeing another game of Traveller this semester. They start tomorrow. I am to tell you that while the ship is yet unnamed, Master Gabe is the owner of it, and he is the Marquis of Megalmatree. Make of that what you will.

Adventures of the Snowdrop

Cat has been working on grad school stuff - slowly but she still has plenty of time. She was delayed by getting sick last weekend. It was a weird little thing - she was really sick for like 36 hours, and then she was fine, just a little tired. Anyway, not much got done over the weekend. Just the absolute necessities. But now her references have everything they need to reference for her, and she has most of a resume and most of a personal statement. Those things are going to get hammered out this week so she can have everything ready to put into applications in one go. She's also studying for the GRE with Sean (big Sean, not Spud - Spud wouldn't help her very much . . . ), and some on her own.

Today was a Traveller day! Almost as much fun as DnD days! Anyway, two weeks ago, the Snowdrop (a modified noble's pleasure yacht owned by Sera Richelle Llewellyn, Baroness of Umkahkuu) was employed to make use of the not-so-famous-but-very-intelligent Professor Van Hawkins's latest experiments - aka chemically enhanced weapons and explosives. The thing they were supposed to make use of this on was a base for insurgents with a free-Earth agenda (not very popular in an Imperialist setting, alas). There were grenades, and a really big fire, and the ship's hired gun was badly injured (no one was surprised) and the engineer was almost killed (everyone was not happy - engineers are important! Not that hired guns aren't . . . ), and Sera Llewellan had to bad mouth the nightside starport manager. But everyone made it out okay in the end and they retreated back to another system - one far enough away to hopefully not raise suspicion.

There they played on the fancy space station. Drake Reed (the hired gun) got in a bar fight over a not happening pool game, Chester Mannix (the pilot) and Chad Ahron (the engineer) went shopping, bought toys, guns, and candy, and saw a news report about they haven't been caught yet for blowing up buildings elsewhere in the sector, and Sera Llewellan lost her artificially intelligent robot when some navy sneaks wanted to see what kind of info he had inside of him. After paying off the port security for Reed's misdeeds, and kicking them into gear to help with Sera Llewellan's problem, Captain Gerrick Ransly and the rest of the crew (minus the delinquent Reed, who was kept on the ship by the Baroness's hand maid and her tranquillizer gun) got together to muster out the robot from possible harm.

After a bit of speculative buying, the Snowdrop is preparing to depart to deal with some pirates several systems away, hopefully for more profit this time. I know everyone will wait anxiously to hear the continuation of the Snowdrop's exploits, to be continued three weeks from now, when people are mostly done taking stupid tests and things. (Cat won't be, but that's okay - the next Traveller game is the week before she takes the GRE - which isn't a big deal since she has plenty of time to prepare for both)

Discussions of the week: New nouns in Japanese since they've learned basic sentence structure, the syntax of African American English, resumes in Theatre Seminar (convenient, eh? It's supposed to be), and measured perspective in scene design.

Onset of Fall

This week, Miss Caitlin is discussing the history of the development of African American English, Theatre Graduate Programs, Japanese Adjectivals, and circles. It is sort of a full week, but Miss Caitlin is enjoying a little more free time because she is not leading a game this week. Instead Miss Adrien is, therefore allowing Miss Caitlin to play. She has to organize the next week's space adventure, but she already has some ideas for that. Perhaps Tipsy will regale you with more information about the starship Snowdrop at another time. After all, she is far more interested in that than I am.

Miss Caitlin is enjoying her work at the library. While she mostly just shelves books, she also has the opportunity to do other things, like discussing with an eleven-year-old the pros and cons of reading Brian Jacques' Redwall books in chronological order versus in the order in which he wrote them. She hopes that they will eventually give her more involved jobs later.

The weather was beautiful today, with a high of 70 degrees. The whole week is projected to have highs in the low to mid 70s. It is Miss Caitlin's favorite weather. She plans to enjoy it while it lasts - keeping last winter's ice storm in mind.

University

I cannot say how much I regret the lack of information I have provided this summer. Miss Caitlin has been enjoying work, though it leaves her overheated and fatigued. This week she has spent preparing for our departure.

Tomorrow, we return to University, though Miss Caitlin's classes do not begin until the week following next. She is in for a busy semester, though she has only thirteen hours of credits. She will also try to write most of an essay to receive Honors in English, as well as resuming her work on her novel series. This she has promised to Miss Allison (friend of my dear friend Gip) and Miss Courtney (companion of the esteemed Hamlet the Younger). Everyone in the room, humans and pigs alike, had been disappointed to hear of Miss Caitlin's lack of diligence concerning her own writing. I remained silent, though I was secretly overjoyed when the young misses extracted the promise from Miss Caitlin - I feel it will do her much good. I only hope that Miss Caitlin's friends will remember to encourage her, remind her, and guilt her into working.

Miss Caitlin will also be working on a science fiction role-playing game with at least some of her friends. I feel this will detract time that she could otherwise be working on her novels, but Tipsy is extremely excited about it. She keeps babbling about "space cows." Like Miss Caitlin would allow something so ridiculous in her game.

In other news, the beautiful Comfort will be accompanying us on our trip to University. Miss Caitlin has greatly missed her oldest friend's company and is glad to have her traveling with us. I only hope Comfort does not get into trouble.