Finished! (well, sort of)

ost people spend Labour Weekend doing fun stuff, or at least relaxing a bit. I spent it working on my assignment, which is due on Friday.  But it was worth it, because I finished it!  All six thousand and something words (yeah, I may have gone a bit overboard there…)  I even got to spend at least part of today quite pleasantly, because I finished the final draft just before lunch, so I printed it out and headed to a nearby cafe that has a nice outdoor seating area, and spent a couple of hours sitting in the sun there while I proof-read everything and checked my quotes.  Then I zipped back to my office and made the final corrections, so all I need to do now is one more last-minute proof-read, and I’ll probably hand it in tomorrow, with plenty of time to spare before the deadline.
So that’s all the official assessment done for my paper, which theoretically means I can relax for the summer.  Except that we have to give a presentation to the Vanuatu community the weekend after next about the research we’ve been doing (it’s not an official part of the assessment, but it’s considered good form to give feedback to a community when you’ve been researching their language, so it’s part of our training to be good linguistic citizens), so I’ve got to try and work out how to convert all the technical complexities of my assignment into something that will make sense to non-linguists.  Oh, and my lecturer has invited me and one of the other students from the class to have coffee with a visiting academic
(I was just interrupted by a loud crunching noise from outside, which when I went out to investigate turned out to be one of our local boy racers crashing into a tree on the other side of the street.  He’s ok (but looking rather sheepish, and his car is a mess), and a few of the neighbours are looking after him, so I’ve left them to it.  At this rate, there’ll be no trees left on this street…)
Anyway, as I was saying, we’re meeting with a visiting academic tomorrow.  She’s an expert on the semantics of Pacific languages, and as Clare (the other student) and I both did our projects on semantic topics, apparently she’s really interested to hear what we discovered.  Which is exciting, but also a little bit intimidating – I know very little about semantics (despite just writing 6,000 words on the topic!), so I’m scared she’ll either tell me I got it all wrong, or that the interesting discoveries I think I’ve made are actually really obvious and boring.
Plus, the lecturer mentioned that she’s really keen for us all to write up our projects into proper articles and submit them to an academic journal, because so little has been written about Bislama that anything we can add to the literature will be important. (Which is another equally exciting and intimidating prospect!)  So there’s that to start work on too.
And of course I really need to make a start on some reading for my Masters, because I haven’t got a topic yet, and I start in January.
But other than that, I’m finished with study for the year! 🙂
(PS. Ok, maybe I spoke too soon when I said the boy racer was ok, because there’s an ambulance out there now.  Hopefully they just called it as a precaution, though.)