from a sunny Sunday in Galway

You know, even though it is generally a bit annoying to have a washing machine but not a dryer, there is something about the sight of clean sheets hanging on a line in the sunshine and blowing in the wind that makes me feel happy and summery and domestic.


In other news...

This week, I finished the first (draft of the first) chapter of my MA thesis! Yay! It's twenty-two pages long, 5,600 words, and as such is about a quarter of the required length. You know, 20,000 words sounded like a lot, but if I can write 25% of that without doing any original research, I have a feeling it will go by pretty quickly.

Anyway, it's more or less a literature review. I read about nine or ten books that are either directly or indirectly related to my topic and then wrote reviews of them, focusing on how they would be useful to me and pointing out areas where research hasn't been done-- basically, finding blanks for me to fill in.

Now, I can't really do any more for the thesis until I can go to Dublin for research. There are four Whitbread manuscripts at the National Library of Ireland, so I'll need to go there and read them, taking extensive notes. To do that, I will need to either get the money I applied for in my travel bursary or get paid for invigilating, so I can afford to spend five days in Dublin! Nessa gave me train tickets already-- apparently the Centre for Irish Studies has a stack of Galway-Dublin train tickets on hand for students who need to go there for research! So that is €30 saved already, but I still need funding for hostels and food.

It's cool, though, that the school will pay for me to do things like that. I mentioned to my adviser, Dr. Lionel Pilkington, that there are nine more Whitbread manuscripts at the British Library, but that I doubted I could get funding for two weeks in London for a MA project. He said "Well, you'll be doing plenty of that next year!" Awesome.


Oh, and if you like absurdism and dark humor, check out Blackpool. It's a BBC miniseries, with the Doctor David Tennant. I watched the first episode last night and I'm hooked.