I passed

Not surprising, given that I don’t think any one fails the qualifying exam in my department 🙂  But at least now I’ve officially been given the go-ahead for the dissertation and I have a Master’s Degree in English, for what it’s worth (not much, by the way).  My advisors asked a lot of difficult questions about where I’m intending to take my project, whether I’ve thought about the implications of x, how I intend to handle problem y, but overall they seemed interested in what I had to say and desirous of asking difficult and nearly-impossible questions only for the purpose of furthering my thinking for the dissertation–no being difficult just to be mean.

I’ve now been released into sloth.  Well, not really, but I’m going to emphasize fun reading, cooking, gardening, seeing friends and family, and being a good partner to Sydney more than my work for the next couple of weeks.  I’ve made a good start.  When I came home from the exam today Sydney greeted me with lunch and home-made black currant ice cream (yup, he’s good), which we ate in the hammock, and I enjoyed my first few minutes of sun-on-closed-eyelids in a good long while.  Then we gardened hard, ate a lovely dinner as I read the first chapter of a novel, and now I’m baking a small batch of cookies.  Plus, Ithaca in May is quite a pleasure in its own right.  So glad to be able to get out in it now!

Erin