the home stretch

I am in the home stretch of my paper; one and a half paragraphs of near-final draft left to go, and then as much editing as I can manage before I need to go to sleep. Tomorrow on campus, between my entertaining 11-12.15 class and the 15.30 due date, I will sit in a lab and do a final editing pass, spurred on by the knowledge of almost, almost being done -- which thought reminds me that unless I want to take seven books with me to campus tomorrow, it would behoove me to do my Works Cited page tonight, and to double-check all my citations before I go to sleep.

This paper being done, I will spend the weekend whipping up the tidy little one page paper on Nella Larsen's Quicksand, which ought to be a pleasure; I seem to like doing limited, in-depth writing much more than sprawling surveys of material. I also need to start researching for my two Shakespeare projects; I am doing a presentation on the treatment of Shakespeare in China & Japan, and a paper that is going to have something to do with Shylock and Malvolio. Both of these will need a great deal of research, but I have fine web access to all sorts of exciting sources, so I ought to be able to curl up with tea and enjoy the process of assembling my materials.

Academic work aside, I am thinking once again about how very, very messy my house is, and how difficult it seems to make any headway on this point, despite an extremely helpful and hard-working husband. At the beginning of the year I had been planning to do the dishes every evening after dinner, but that has quickly fallen by the wayside; when I'm in school I often need that time to study, and when not in school I don't want to spend the first half-hour of my time with my husband cleaning. Also, several evenings a week we have to zoom off to someone's house as soon as we're done with dinner, or otherwise we're having people over and I ought to be interacting with them instead of in the kitchen cleaning. So, what to do? The obvious solution seems to be to make post-breakfast the dishes time, with byes on the two mornings I have to leave immediately for class. There will certainly be the occasional morning (such as, she says with mild bitterness, every morning in the last week) in which I must start typing on a paper the second breakfast is over, but if I am sensible with my time otherwise those mornings will be rare. And now that I have shared this plan with you, gentle reader, perhaps my determination to see it through will be increased sufficiently that not even laziness will stand in my way.

This afternoon I drank far too many cups of vanilla jasmine tea (a gift from C. I am finally taking proper advantage of), for which I am now becoming profoundly grateful, as the hours creep on and still I am not yet too tired to think clearly. Caffeine can be the bane of my sleep schedule, and thus I rarely indulge in it after the morning, but tonight I think it was a wise (albeit unplanned) choice.

It rained this morning, and the streets are still just damp enough that the cars swish as they drive by. I love that sound -- especially when I'm lying in bed, warm and cozy, and don't have to get up for a while. I'm looking forward to falling asleep tonight with that sound in my ears.