End of the year Posts roundup

Hello! It is December! 2011 is almost over! And nobody is posting blog updates to distract me while I am angsting about angsty things, so I have been amusing myself by reading my own archives!

(You think that's dull, go ahead out in the living room where you can watch Very Loud TV commercials being flipped through just fast enough for you to not follow anything. If you go out there, though, my dad is going to tell you to take out the garbage.)

Anyway, in case you missed what I have been up to at my postdoc, here are the highlights: I taught the same freakin' classes and was totally overwhelmed by grading in spring, I decided to write a new article not from the dissertation at all, I taught a summer class (on line and from my parents' home in California) came back and did a lot of hiking because we had a dry fall, taught the same freakin' classes and was even more overwhelmed by grading (though Fruit Studies went very well and students told me they liked me), and we finished up the semester with a death in the department which made everybody depressed and upset and I ended up taking a fifth (!!!!!!!) class as an overload because I am stupid and nice and ohmygod you should have seen the end of this semester's grading. To say nothing of the fact that a family member thought the gradebook was part of the prof's financial papers (???) and took them home to the parental household and we thought there was no record anymore of all the tests and papers the students had done. Luckily, it all worked out in the end. Whew!

All of this means that this was not my most prolific or interesting year of blog posts. Sorry. I went through them to find what funny stuff I had put up and was a bit disappointed in myself:


My Crazy Film Reviews:

Baby Doll
The Unknown


Humor:

D-90X Dissertating Challenge
Prose Polisher ad


In happier news, I wrote an article this year! I am quite proud of myself, considering the amount of teaching I had to deal with. I named my article Floyd, if you remember. Now, he's not really ready to fly yet --- though really, if you're flying, does it matter if you're missing a leg? --- but I reread the article today and it is looking pretty good! And approaching finished! I promise to be done with it soon!!! I will push him off a cliff to see him fly if it kills me!


Baby Pics of Floyd, the article:

A New Idea
Growing Up Into a Big, Bouncing Draft
Floyd and the Boneless Chicken Problem
Discovering the Perils of Interdisciplinary Research
Floyd Can Fly But Not Steer
I Contemplate Epigraphs for Floyd
Someone Else Already Wrote Floyd! (Luckily, I finally read the article and discovered it was on Froyd, not Floyd. Whew!)
I Join Another Damned Notorious Writing Group

As you can see, Floyd consumed the bulk of my non-complaining, non-procrastinatory blogging. Sure, it would look less impressive if I stacked up all the lookit-the-pretty! windowshopping posts I did and compared them to Floyd Work, but I'm not gonna do that, hah. You can go look back through my archives on your own.

Contemplating Pedagogy posts:
I want a framework for longer comp essays
I approve of the book Writing Analytically
I find a brainstorming exercise (from WA)

At some point soon I will amuse myself by making various lists and perhaps some new year's resolutions, but for now, all I can deal with is grooming up Floyd and obsessively refreshing the wiki.