Final Semester: A Day in the Life

Today didn't start out as well as I had hoped, even though it's only 2pm. I woke up at 6:45am this morning because our placement officer from Peace Corps (they are in charge of having the final say of where you will get shipped off to and are all in charge of sending you an invitation) was meant to call us at 8am. 9:30am rolled around, I became very tired, both from lack of sleep and calling the placement officer but getting her voicemail each time, and Will had to leave for uni to get to work on his big thesis project. Right when he was about to head out and I was about to take a nap for "30 minutes", the phone rings and we both stare at it. Then I picked it up and the phone call resulted in setting up another arranged phone meeting later tonite around 12am.

After I awoke from my "nap" I sat down to get working on my own thesis project. I've been translating more or less steadily since 11am, that's about 3 hours worth of work. However, I've now translated enough to calculate how many words there are per page and how many pages of The Collected Short Stories of Roald Dahl I actually have to translate--the results have left me feeling rather unmotivated to work anymore for today. Here's why:

Each page packs about 430 words and I have to translate a total of 15,000 words. That means I have a 34-35 page allowance of stories that I can choose from. The short story I've been translating is a total of 24 pages, which eats up most of my allowance, and while it's a good story, there are ones that are considerably more packed with black humour. So I've translated a total of 1,300 words and I'm not even going to use them for my project. And to think I was going to translate ALL of the stories I found interesting first and THEN figure out how many words I needed!

So, I've decided on 3 short stories totalling 36.5 pages and approximately 15,695 words: A story called Pig, where a naive child ends up getting turned into ground meat; A story called The Man From the South, where a compulsive gambler from South America who's fond of chopping off the fingers of people who lose bets with him, and Lamb to Slaugher, about a pregnant women who kills her detective husband with a frozen lam leg and ends up feeding the evidence to the detectives who come over to her home to investigate the crime.

I quite like black humour and this is possibly the most boring blog entry I've ever written.