This dear, dear man spent his birthday evening cleaning my house for my party tomorrow night! Smooch!
I stopped working on my final paper and presentation at 3:53PM this afternoon. That was the official end of my grad school homework.
Robert arrived just before I headed out to my final class, and he was pleased with my birthday gift to him, which consisted of a hand-made photo album that we had seen and both liked in the gift shop on Heron Island, and which I went back and purchased later without him. I had chosen 40 pictures (of the over 400 we took), and filled the album with them. I also gave him a 2008 calendar with various pictures of the Blue Mountains area for each month, several of which are sites that we saw while there.
Happy Birthday, my sweet.
Just before leaving for class my final paper in Rhetoric of Science and Technology, worth 40% of our grade, came back in my e-mail. Final paper: A+ Grade for the Class: A+ This is the only class I’m getting a numerical grade in that affects my GPA. The other class is only Pass/Fail (or Satisfactory/Unsatisfactory). That makes my final grad school GPA above a 4.0: 4.074074074, who’s counting to the ninth decimal place?
I did a quick Happy Feet dance (1 minute long, and too cute as it progresses) before leaving for my final Verbal Data Analysis class.
Class tonight was three hours long (6:00-9:00) tonight instead of the usual 1 hour 15 minutes. We had 7 people presenting, though we did have 9 people yet to present according to the roster when classes ended on December 9th. I knew Michelle was not going to present, but another person, David, also did not present, which surprised me.
The professor had invited other people in the program to come to the presentations, but on the first round, last Thursday, only one non-class member was there, and he was a colleague of one of the people presenting that night. Tonight there were three guests there, Nick (a presenter) had invited two friends of his friends, and Carolyn Miller (another professor) was there.
It’s kind of ironic, because a couple of week ago, I sent her this e-mail in response to one that she had sent me saying she was sorry to have missed our STC Student/Faculty Roundtable event due to having just returned from a trip abroad:
| Hello Dr. Miller,
I wish I felt warm enough with you to greet you with “Carolyn,” and I suppose the fact that—and it’s one of the few regrets I have about my time in this program—I never had you as a professor contributes to that. Oh well—sorry—I’m feeling a little “wistful” as I come down the home stretch of my time here, and a little in the mood, rhetorically, to overuse dashes (and commas), I suppose. 🙂 Anyhow, thank you for this note. I missed your insights tonight, though I would say that your colleagues “did you proud.” In admiration of your intellect, |
To which she had replied:
| John–
Thanks for this unexpected fan letter! Since you’ve been such an active student leader, we did get to know each other a little—there are many students who complete the MS program that I never get to meet at all. And you can’t take a course from every professor, so it’s just the luck of the draw—and of course all of my colleagues are excellent, so you can’t go wrong! Carolyn |
So, all that is to say, after never having been in her class or anything, to have her show up in my final class to witness my final graduate school presentation was a little ironic. And it was not my best presentation. In fact, well I’m not going to beat myself up over it.
I was the last one to present, and though it wasn’t my greatest presentation, Jason did compliment my Further Research and Future Research Questions, which were at the end of my presentation, so that ended it on a positive note.
I walked, endorphins flowing, back to my car. That fat lady has indeed sung.
When I got home, the house looked and smelled immaculate. Robert did such a thorough cleaning job. I ran out to get some soda, as I was all out, and when I returned we had a toast to my grad school completion and to his birthday. Life is good.