Sunday, November 22, 2009

Papers, Rainy Days, New Moon, and Pat's Birthday!

This last week has been pretty busy! I am drowning in papers for my grad classes (my three final papers), it rained LOTS this week, the girls and I got to see New Moon, and yesterday was Pat's 29th!!! Whew!!! Davin missed all of this fun stuff because he has been working his butt off for a WEEK solid!!! We miss him sooooo much around here and can't wait for him to get home.

We are soooo looking forwad to this weeks activities too!!! Mimi and papaw are coming to stay with us tomorrow, my Aunt Jeannette is coming in too, Amber, Carson, and the girls are coming on Thursday and everyone is coming to our house for Thanksgiving!!! Oh...and Davin and I are going to go to a little football game on Saturday...maybe you have heard of THE FLORIDA GATORS!!!!!!!! Davin got tickets for us to the Florida vs. Florida State game for my birthday back in Feb. We will get up SUPER early Friday, drive to Gainesville, go to the game Saturday, and drive all the way back home on Sunday. Can't wait!

We have soooo much to be thankful this year: we welcomed our daughter into the world, our new niece Camryn was born, some of our best friends got married, some of our best friends just had an adorable little boy, and some of our best friends are having TWINS in April, my parents moved to SA, I could go on and on. I am so very thankful for my wonderful husband, my two precious babies, my parents, in-laws, brother, nieces, aunts, cousins, and of course our fabulous friends. Sorry to go on and on, but I think it's important to take a minute and appreciate all we have. I hope you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday with all of your loved ones!!!

Love to you all,
S:)

P.S. WATCH FOR US ON TV SATURDAY! HAHAHAHA!




Papers...

More papers...

'

Watching "The Grinch"

Little, teething monster

" I got you Mommy!"

He's really into the movie

Be afraid, be very afraid...

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Master's Exam

I finalized my reading list for my Master's Exam with my Chair today. Dr Lopez will serve as one of the three professors who will sit on my panel for my Master's (MA) exam that I will take on March 29, 2010. Regardless of what your GPA might be, if you do not pass your MA Exam, you do not graduate. I thought I'd post my list to give you guys an idea of what exactly I will be responsible for on my exam. I have to read every single thing on the list below and be held accountable for everything I learn from all of these. Soooooooo over Christmas break, I will be reading, reading, reading. I am also going to ask Santa for gift cards to Amazon or Barnes and Noble because I have LOTS of books to buy.
Love to you all,
S:)





English M.A. READING LIST


A. Pre-1500

1) The Beowulf Poet, Beowulf
2) Geoffrey Chaucer, from The Canterbury Tales: “General Prologue,” “Knight’s Tale,” “Miller’s Prologue and Tale,” “Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale,” “Clerk’s Prologue and Tale,” “Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale,” “Nun’s Priest’s Prologue and Tale,” “Parson’s Prologue”
3) The Gawain Poet, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl
4) Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyd



B. 1500-1600

1) Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene: “A Letter of the Authors,” Book I (all), Book III (Cantos 1, 5-6, 9-12)
2) a) Sir Philip Sidney, The Defense of Poesy; Astrophil and Stella 1, 7, 9, 20, 29, 45, 106, Second Song, Fourth Song
b) Queen Elizabeth I, "Speech to the Troops at Tilbury" and the "Golden Speech" (both are available in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 7th ed., Vol. 1)
3) William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part I, The Tempest, Hamlet
4) William Shakespeare, One history play (Richard II), one tragedy (Macbeth), and one comedy (Twelfth Night)



C. 1600-1700

1) John Donne, “The Flea,” “Song” (“Go and catch a falling star”), “The Canonization,” “A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day,” “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” “A Lecture upon the Shadow,” “Twickenham Garden,” Elegy 19 (“To His Mistress Going to Bed”), Holy Sonnets 10 (“Death Be Not Proud”), 14 (“Batter my heart”), and 17 (“Since she whom I loved”), “Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward,” “Meditation 17” (from Devotions upon Emergent Occasions)
2) John Milton, Paradise Lost
3) a) Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, The Rover
b) Margaret Cavendish, Blazing World
4) Anne Bradstreet, “The Prologue,” “The Flesh and the Spirit,” “The Author to Her Book,” “A Letter to Her Husband, Absent upon Public Employment,” “In Reference to Her Children,” “ In Memory of . . . Elizabeth Bradstreet,” “Some Verses upon the Burning of Our House July 10th, 1666”


D. 1700-1800

1) Henry Fielding, Tom Jones
2) Alexander Pope, “The Rape of the Lock,” “An Essay on Criticism,” “An Essay on Man,” “Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot”
3) Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or
Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself
Phillis Wheatley, “On the Death of . . . George Whitefield,” “On Being Brought from Africa to America,”
“To the University of Cambridge, in New England,” “To S.M., a Young African Painter,” Letter to Rev. Samson Occom (Feb. 11, 1774)
Jupiter Hammon, “An Address to Miss Phillis Wheatly [sic]”

4) William Blake, “All Religions are One,” “There is No Natural Religion” [a and b]; from
Songs of Innocence: “Introduction,” “The Lamb,” “The Little Black Boy,” “The Chimney
Sweeper,” “Holy Thursday”; from Songs of Experience: “Introduction,” “Holy Thursday,” “The Chimney Sweeper,” “The Sick Rose,” “The Tyger,” “London”



E. 1800-c1850

1) Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or The Whale
2) a) Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
b) Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
c) Sojourner Truth, “Ar’n’t I a Woman? Speech to the Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, 1851”
d) Frances E. W. Harper, “Ethiopia,” “An Appeal to my Country Women,” “Woman’s Political Future.”
3) William Wordsworth, The Prelude, Books I & XI, 1805 (not 1850) [Recommended text: Norton Critical Edition The Prelude, 1799, 1805, 1850 ed. by Jonathan Wordsworth], “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey,” “Michael,” “Resolution and Independence,” “The Ruined Cottage,” Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1802)
4) Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus


F. c1850-1915

1) Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” “O Captain! My Captain!” “In Paths Untrodden,” “When I Heard at the Close of the Day”
Emily Dickinson, [Recommended Text: The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson. Little, Brown, 1955] “Why—do they shut Me out of Heaven?” (Poem 248), “Over the fence—” (251), “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain” (280), “Some keep the Sabbath going to church—” (324) “After great pain a formal feeling comes—” (341) “Much Madness is divinest Sense” (435), “I was the slightest in the House—” (486), “They shut me up in Prose—” (613), “I dwell in Possibility—” (657)
2) Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
3) George Eliot, Middlemarch
4) Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Ulysses,” “Tithonus,” “The Lady of Shalott”
Robert Browning, “My Last Duchess,” “Fra Lippo Lippi,” “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” “The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church,” “Andrea Del Sarto,” “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister”


G. 1915-1945

1) T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” The Waste Land
2) Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
3) Americo Paredes, George Washington Gomez
4) Zora Neale Hurston, “Sweat,” Their Eyes Were Watching God


H. 1945-1968

1) Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot
2) Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
3) Flannery O’Connor, “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” “Good Country People,” “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” “The Artificial Nigger”


I. 1969-present

1) Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon
2) a) Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 2nd ed., Introduction and Chapters 1-7
b) Lorna Dee Cervantes, from Emplumada, “Uncle’s First Rabbit,” “Cannery Town in August,” “Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway,” “For Virginia Chavez,” “Poems for the Young Man...,”
c) Cherrie Moraga, From The Last Generation “Queer Aztlán: the Re-formation of Chicano Tribe”; From: Loving in the War Years, Expanded 2nd ed., “Loving in the War Years,” “La Güera,” “A Long Line of Vendidas,” “Looking for the Insatiable Woman,” and “Out of our Revolutionary Minds Toward a Pedagogy of Revolt”
3) V. Nabokov, Pale Fire



J. ADDITIONAL LISTS

1) All students must include at least one numbered item from Section J on their individual exam list.

12. Gender Studies And Queer Theory
Virginia Woolf, From A Room of One’s Own: [Shakespeare’s Sister, Chloe Liked Olivia, Androgyny]
Adrienne Rich, From “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence”
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, From Between Men and Epistemology of the Closet
Monique Wittig, “One Is Not Born a Woman”
Judith Butler, From Gender Trouble: Preface, “Subversive Bodily Acts”


Elected Works

(1) William Congreve, The Way of the World
William Wycherly, The Country Wife
(2) Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Young Goodman Brown,” “The Minister’s Black Veil,” “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” “The Birth-Mark,” “Rappaccini’s Daughter”
(3) Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin
(4) Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
(5) Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie
(6) Robert Frost, “West-Running Brook,” “Design,” “The Death of the Hired Man,” “The Oven Bird,” “Birches,” “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” “The Gift Outright”

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Peyton is 8 MONTHS OLD!

Peyton turned 8 months old yesterday (11/9/09)!!!! It seems like yesterday that I was in the hospital with her...time flies!!! She's getting so big and really coming into her own personality. She LOVES to smile for the camera, she is getting TONS of light brown hair (that looks a lot like her Daddy's), and she picks up toys with her feet. She is still crawling like a soldier and I guess she will continue to until she learns how to walk. She did get Roseola over the weekend and had a yucky rash because of it but she's feeling much better now. Her first Thanksgiving and first Christmas is coming up soon!!! This is our first Christmas together a our complete family of four; we are soooo looking forward to it! OMG, then Peyton will be celebrating her FIRST BIRTHDAY before we know it....right after Hayden turns THREE!!! Holy cow!!! Anyway, here are some 8 month pics below for you to enjoy.

Love to you all,
S:)



I'm 8 months old!!!!
Holding her rattle with her toes...monkey feet!

SOOO cute with Aunt Erica




Monday, November 9, 2009

Weird Weekend...

We had an interesting weekend to say the least. Davin is one about 5 out of 7 days a week this time of year and we are starting to get used to that, but taking care of two kiddos by myself and working on all my grad school stuff is pretty hard. Anyway, Davin was away except for Saturday because he was working all over the state pretty much. He's got to be tired! So we thought we would have a relaxing Saturday and not really do anything other than watch football, until I got a very unexpected phone call. Mom called, inconsolable, to tell me that Hunter, my brother, had either had a seizure or a stroke. Luckily my dad was in Nacogdoches, so he got to go to the hospital with Hunter. Long story short, Hunter had a seizure. The CT scan he had done came back "normal" so they still don't know what caused the seizure. He's going to his doc today and a neurologist later this week, so hopefully we will have some answers by the end of the week. Another stroke of luck is that one of Hunter's friends was with him when he had the seizure and he called 911. If Hunter had been by himself, it could have been a lot worse. Please keep him and my parents in your thoughts and prayers this week!!!
Love to you all!
S:)