This week we've worked on survival. For today, we each prepared a lesson for our classes and a talk for Sacrament meeting, and were glad to hear they didn't need us to speak in the East Lake care center after all. I guess they have a branch in the local care center, and each ward in the stake alternates who is responsible for providing people to talk, pass the sacrament, and help the folks to the meeting room (down the hall from all of their rooms). They had booked two sets of speakers accidentally, so I just attended with the young women and got to listen. Giving a talk once a day is more than enough for me. :) But it was fun to go with the young women to the branch and visit with the people at the care center a bit.
The rest of the week was school as usual. We did a bit of window shopping on Saturday. Karl and Angela are coming over later today. We almost went to SLC Friday for a walk through some of their galleries, but felt too rushed and ended up vetoing the idea.
We're also working on compiling a final list of schools for Wayne to apply to, so we can hand the list over to professors writing recommendation letters soon and get applications put together before the end of December. I think most of the applications are due mid-January to mid-February, but it can't hurt to start now. It's just tricky finding time for MFA applications in the midst of finishing the semester and trying to propose a thesis.
I'm getting closer to proposing a thesis (why does this have to take so long??). I have half of the paper written, and a couple more weeks of "preliminary results" stuff to work through. It amazes me how much they want me to have done before even officially proposing a topic, but whatever. I guess they think of it as a "contract" (if you do everything you proposed to do, we'll have to let you graduate), so the more evidence you have that your idea is a valid one and a good one, the better. The current thesis topic I'm working on is a narrower scope than the original idea I started with a year ago. Specifically, how to generate unique paraphrases given a sentence; rewording a sentence to somehow still "mean the same thing." I'm using a combination of machine translation tools and statistically identified syntactic structures to create them. Well, right now I'm trying to get the baseline system in place, and struggling because the tools are meant to be used on a different type of computer than the one I've been given to use in the lab. Fun huh? :)
I can't think of much else going on right now. But hope everyone has a happy Thanksgiving!
-Becca and Wayne
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