Getting Into The Thick Of It

The term has begun in earnest and I am once again up to my eyeballs in work! Early this month I handed in my first completed chapter... all 18,626 words (52 pages). My supervisor was fairly pleased with it and said that the piece kept him interested from page one to page fifty-two! So interested that it got him wanting to know even more, so he suggested that with a bit more work, I could split the one chapter into two! I've been working on crafting the revised first chapter for the last couple of weeks and plan to have it completed, done and finally dusted by November 5th (Guy Fawkes Night!). And the second chapter should be done before Christmas!

While I have been rather diligently working on these chapters, I have not been without distractions. My housemate Katherine slipped a disk in her back two weeks ago was confined to her bed in extreme pain for the first 10 days. We housemates have rallied and have been acting as nurses with the help of our friend Claire, who spent all of last year working as a nurses' assistant in one of the busiest hospitals in Scotland. Please keep Katherine in your prayers. She is slowly but surely recovering. She is doing well, and has been moving about the house on her own for the last few days. But she is still in a lot of pain and has a long way to go...

On a less painful note (depending on your perspective) I have been given a teaching assistantship! I am officially a "tutor", although the job description is a bit different here than it is back in the states. Once a week I actually teach 2 groups of 6 undergraduates about "Early Modern Europe, 1450-1650". As part of their course, they are supposed to attend the three lectures each week, given by the School of History's expert on that week's topic (lecture attendance is NOT mandatory) and they attend the tutorial session, (of which I run 2 out of 36 sessions). The tutorial IS mandatory. In it we we discuss the assigned readings as well as anything the tutor feels is pertinent to the subject for the week. This week we are doing the Reformation. Muahahahahah! [That is my evil laugh] I warned my students that they better do this week's assignment properly, because I've read every book on this weeks "suggested reading list" (of which they are to choose one) so they better not try to b.s. anything. I think they departed my classroom with an appropriate degree of fear. Besides being the part of academia that I love the most , this teaching opportunity provides me with another type of satisfaction: while I may be the lowest rung, I am on the staff totem poll at the University of St Andrews!

As for my travels, I don't have any exciting trips planned for this term. I'm just staying in Scotland. A couple of weeks ago, I had the opportunity to visit my Scottish family, the Plenderleiths. It takes a three hour train ride to get there, but it is always worth it to spend time with family! I plan to visit them again the weekend after Thanksgiving (which is NOT a holiday here). I'm also planning to go to Loch Ness again, with my housemates Katherine and Ginger, and our friend Claire. We're going the first full weekend in November, and I am so excited! It is very much like going to Deep Creek Lake for me, except this body of water has a legendary inhabitant! Plus, I get to drive! I miss driving so much! Some of you might recall that I went up to Loch Ness last autumn with some friends (I drove then, too, and we all survived). Katherine and I loved the trip so much, that we decided to make it an annual thing. We're not planning to really do anything, just relax in a cabin in the woods!

Two weekends after we get back from Loch Ness, I'll be out of town yet again. My department has its annual Reading Weekend scheduled for the middle of November. Faculty and postgrads from Reformation History head off to a hotel north of Perth, on the edge of the Highlands, for an informal conference weekend.

So while I'm not physically venturing very far this term (mentally my studies take me all the way back to the 1520s-40s) and while all of the destinations are familiar, I guess I'm still going to be rather nomadic in November! So maybe my next post will have some photos to go with it!