back in the saddle agaaaaaaain

did ya miss me?
the conference on the whole was pretty lame...they somehow thought 1200 people were going to show up and 1600 showed up, so everything was crowded beyond belief. (which, btw, i don't know HOW they screwed that up, since everyone had to register) i got sick of it by the second day, b/c i'd walk into a session and people were sitting in the aisles and standing up all along the back, etc. LAME. i didn't pay a boatload o' money to not be able to get into the sessions i wanted to. i guess a lot of hotels just don't have enough bigger rooms to accommodate that many people, so they put a bunch of sessions in really tiny rooms, and everyone and their dog tried to get in the door. plus, a lot of the sessions i did attend were boring and/or we already knew the material from our program here at ksu. i did get a few good contacts that i'm going to follow up on, but were they really worth $500? dunno. i did get my rings welded together, since braden bought them out in WA, and i like it much better. i also got to see a little bit of the in-laws, which was nice.
some happy news: my waiver form went through! i only have to take 2 classes next semester (sci/tech/med translation and case study in translation). the latter class is pretty much an individual investigation, so i'm reasonably sure we don't have to meet for that, which means i'd only actually have to physically go to one class. SWEET. i'm planning on devoting christmas break to my case study, since i haven't really had any time this semester to work on it, even though technically you're supposed to. i only know a handful of people who have, though, since we're all so busy. i found out that we're allowed to defend our case study as early as we want to, so i'm going to set a goal to get mine done early. we'll see how that goes. i'm considering not working at all during the break, so i can entirely devote that time to translating. i also want to start researching translation companies and start sending out resumes... it occurred to me this morning that i could see what internships are available for the summer and see what i could get...you never know. everything depends on where it is, for how long, how much it pays, etc, but braden's open to it as well. i wasn't able to apply for anything this past summer, b/c of my GA-ship, but i could next summer... we'll see.

so i saw the night before i left for the conference that we have this huge project due today: a 30 term bilingual glossary, plus 5 hospital forms translated into Spanish. And of course, i couldn't work on it while i was gone, so i started on monday. not only did i manage to get the entire thing done by tuesday night (with some help from braden, who went and got some forms for me and was freaking awesome), but i also finished our regular homework, which was doubled, since we didn't meet the week of the conference. that is some HIGH productivity. i love that sense of accomplishment. i still have plenty of work to do, as always, but i really didn't think i'd get all that done so quickly. YAY!

an fbi guy came and spoke to us yesterday. he was pretty funny, and had a lot of interesting things to say about becoming a contract linguist there. it sounds pretty interesting, but there are some drawbacks to it that i don't know if i could handle (i'll explain in greater detail later), plus the clearance/background check process takes at least a yr, but more like 18 months, so people have to apply and then get another job and quit that one if they finally get cleared.

well, i need to prepare some stuff for today, so peace out.