Happy new year!

Happy 2009!

I am back in Ireland, after an enjoyable and relaxing break. Perhaps too relaxing, because it's been very difficult to get back in the swing of things back on this side of the pond. I have actually been back for about ten days, but I spent the first week sleeping and watching movies online. (More on that later.) I have been under the thrall of some pretty bad jetlag-- the last couple days, I have been falling asleep at my desk during the day, and lying awake in bed at night. My classes have finally begun, though, so hopefully the demands of an external structure will help get things back on track. Also, my mother sent me some melatonin.

My classes, thus far, look interesting. I have two: "History of the Book" and "History of Colonialism and Imperialism." Now, if you saw my report card from last year, you would wonder why I'm taking two history classes, when it is clearly my weakest subject. Happily, PhD school works rather differently than MA school did: I don't actually have to write papers on the subjects! Any assignments are going to be something that is directly useful to my thesis-- like a chapter, or a literature review, or a conference paper. So, rather than memorizing details that have no relevance to my work, the classes are much more knowledge for knowledge's sake. As one of my classmates pointed out, it's like watching the History channel!


One unfortunate thing has happened, though. My internet connection at home has a limited bandwidth allowance per month-- 10 GB. On their site, it says "most people never exceed this." I have been using it now for three months, and the first two months I came in under the limit. Apparently, though, if you spend a week doing nothing but streaming videos for like 5 hours a day, you will burn right through it. Monday night, I ran out... but it kept letting me use the internet for another day, before cutting out and slapping on a €50 charge! (Ouch.) And now I am internet-less at home until the 27th. Two whole weeks. The reason I'm using this service is because it's much cheaper than any others I've found, €20/month instead of €40. But I'm not sure it's worth it, if I am going to be so limited. Of course, normally I don't spend 8 hours a day sitting around and streaming movies... normally I spend all day working at school, and then maybe use a couple hours of internet at home in the evening. I didn't go over the limit in the first two months I was using it, so I'll live with it this month. But if it happens again, I will switch to one of the more expensive but less limiting services. And now that I have some idea how much 10 GB of bandwidth is, I will pay better attention and won't get slapped with another charge.