Friday 21 July 2017

Just about getting there! - Book submitted on time, but 'Turn-it-in' was down, creating a day of opportunity.

It's been an uphill struggle this week, and in reflection, the best-laid plans of mice and men fell apart a little bit at the weekend as I had to attend a 75th birthday party for a dear friend of many years, and ended up spending much longer there than anticipated.
This put out Sunday for much writing and reading, but I spent Monday concentrating on finishing my Peregrine essay.

There is a bit of uncertainty in my mind as to whether I am hitting the mark with regards to trying to thread all of the various voices of my research into this, now "short book".
While I have tried to incorporate the main players of research into the document, I am conscious that I have had to leave many of them out. This is because (while they are relevant on my influence), I feel that it is inappropriate to simply list the various contexts of power and juxtapose them with the references that I have chosen to include, (such as Prof Tim Ingold, Donna Haraway, John Berger, Thom van Dooren and others).  The inclusion of other sources in any detail will make the work far too big, beyond the 14,000-word limitation set by the module criteria.  I'm therefore taking a bit of a risk, but I need to leave them out!

The intention was to print my book completely at the University on Tuesday, but having lost a couple of days at the weekend, I ended up going right to the wire and finally finished formatting, proofreading and correcting minor errors until midday on Wednesday. I was then able to print out a draft copy on Wednesday afternoon for myself, and a hardcopy was lodged with the ADA office precisely at the deadline time of 4:30 PM!

Phew!

I'm generally quite pleased with the final outcome of the book, although having now submitted a hard copy, I was unable on Wednesday night to upload the digital version to Turnitin (the University's online essay submission repository)! This was because some unforeseen maintenance on their system had overrun from Tuesday the 18th which meant that we were unable to submit work electronically at all. Thank goodness I had been able to leave a hard copy with the secretarial staff!

However, having now had a chance to review and read my draft version, to be expected, I have found some typos and minor errors. Thankfully, I have used the extra time that Dr Bailey has kindly given us (until next Monday 24th July) as a result of the system maintenance outage to make corrections in the electronic version. I have therefore been able to submit the document a little earlier than the new deadline, this morning (21st), a corrected digital version through Turnitin.
Feeling quite pleased and relieved, I thought I'd write this quick blog this morning before taking a couple of breaths.

Conclusions:

  • Life has been very hectic over this past couple of weeks with our new cottage, and the travelling time of 3 1/2 hours each way is somewhat exhausting. Nevertheless, I'm also conscious that my wife Julie has seen very little of me for the past nine months or so whilst I've been focused on my master's degree. So I am trying hard to make sure that she is happy, while at the same time driving up and down the A1 from West Yorkshire to Northumberland on a regular basis. 
  • To cap it all, this weekend, were off to a wedding in a remote part of Wales for three days, which again is going to eat into my production time for the presentation I need to create for a week on Friday! Nevertheless, I'm reasonably confident that as I had started the presentation a couple of weeks ago, the format is reasonably fixed. The content is very much based on a replay of the development of my book, and so I should be able to finish this off on Monday and Tuesday next week, before driving Julie back up to the cottage late on Tuesday evening so new furniture can be delivered! 
  • I can then stay there for Wednesday, keep polishing the "Prezi" before returning back south on Thursday morning. 
  • Any small adjustments I need to make to the presentation can be made on Thursday evening before the actual formal assessment that I have on Friday the 28th July.  A lucky day maybe? It's the Peruvian Independence Day (La Veinti-ocho de Julio) and national festive day there, and being a Peruvian born subject, I hope it goes well there, and for me here in the UK! 

Phew, it's gonna be a busy week!