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I was really tired this morning and my stomach hurt (too much chili last night?) so I stayed in bed. It feels really odd to have skipped a class for the first time since school started a year and a half ago. But it was statistics and I feel ok about it and have emailed the professor to ask about anything I ought to know. Stats I can mostly catch up on from the book; I often find it a little clearer anyway. *grins*

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Today, the first part of my "create a culture" paper was due for my anthropology class. I created a culture of tribal pastoralists who herd chocobo! I gave it a once-over this evening and submitted it to the online drop box, along with a picture of Cloud from Final Fantasy VII riding a chocobo. I think my professor will be amused.

On the way home from school today, I stopped at the Salvation Army store. I won't donate to them due to their anti LGBT agenda. Maybe I shouldn't shop at their stores either. I'm not really sure. They do some good things, but also some bad ones. Anyway, I found an old mechanical scale there. Since I'd just written yesterday about how much I wished I had one, I was quite pleased at the serendipity. Yesterday and today have brought a real run of what might be described as good karma.

As well as the scale, I bought a couple of big (about fifteen inch diameter) faux-Asian paper lanterns. They had a bunch of them for $5 a piece, so I picked up two matching ones for my room. The lighting in my room right now is a single ceiling fixture with two light bulbs inside a generi-modern frosted glass disc enclosure. It's nice, but a little cold, especially with CF bulbs in it, and it's a little dim at the sides of the room. So after finishing my homework today, I got the two lanterns hung. One is above my bed on one side of the room, and the other occupies a corner on the opposite side, near my bookshelves. The combination of the yellow paper and the frosted incandescent bulbs adds a lot of warmth to the room, and if I turn off the other lighting, they makes the whole space look warm and inviting. Since my room is under the sloping roofline of the house, there's a big open space above me, especially toward the inside wall, and having something in that space helps the room feel a little cozier too. I need to get the electrical cord tucked flat to the ceiling and out of the way, but I think it'll look really nice in here. I've been warned that these have been known to be a fire hazard, so I also won't have them on when I'm not here. But I turn off lights when I'm leaving the room anyway. I'll try and get a picture of them some time.

I've also done short analyses of six journal articles for my research methods class, which were due for tomorrow morning. It seems that this class is primarily focused on helping you understand the methodology that goes into sociological research and on how to interpret and understand sociological literature. I feel like if the course catalog had been a little clearer about that, I would have better known what to expect. Not that it's a big issue; I just feel like the course catalog is often not as descriptive as might be hoped. There's also been some amount of overlap, at least in methodological theory, with my statistics class. It's fun to see that, even within a particular discipline, terminology for the same concepts can vary pretty widely, and that people writing in the field may well have a very different vocabulary from those writing textbooks.

Peer review on the history paper was fine. I feel like I had some useful comments for the person whose paper I looked at. I didn't get the chance to go through the whole thing, but most of the class was done with theirs. I really suspect that all most people got out of it was some mechanical fixes, but I tried to do a little more than that. I think I've learned a little bit about what kind of advice is useful from the extremely helpful and thoughtful advice I've received from danaeris when I've asked her to look through a couple of papers I've written. She's a wonderful resource, and I'm lucky to have her in many ways!

I have some things on my plate for tomorrow. Stats homework. Correcting my history paper and creating a bibliography (the professor gets my corrected draft in class on Thursday and we're going to talk about each student's paper a bit individually in class). Finding some pictures to supplement my text in the astronomy wiki page on the Apache. But I feel like the major end-of-the-semester projects are finally in the finishing stages and soon I'll be able to start getting ready for finals. It's a good feeling.