Finals week

It's that week that some people dread and other people wait for with anticipation...finals week.

Today I had my French final. It was probably one of the easiest tests I have ever taken, primarily because it was not cumulative. I don't think any of my French finals at this school have been cumulative. Anyway, the test was two pages long and took me like 15 minutes to do, including the time I took checking over my answers. Basically, there was the typical vocab section, which is fill-in-the-blank using a given list of vocab words, and then 4 structure parts. The first structure part was on the passé composé, or past participle, which I basically sais par coeur (know by heart) and involved a girl talking about her vacation. I think it was an adaptation of some previous worksheet exercise because the sentences looked awfully familiar. The other three structure parts were on relative pronouns - qui, que, lequel, and dont. The first one involved picking which relative pronoun would fit between the two parts of a sentence by matching numbers to different pronouns. The second one gave sentences with the relative pronoun missing, and you had to mark the right one in a list of choices below each sentence. The third one was a text - the story of "Tristan et Yseult" (Tristram and Iseult) - with fill-in-the-blanks for the appropriate pronouns. This was followed by a little true-or-false bit of facts from the story. (I had to fix my answers on this bit because I put "T" for true like I usually do instead of "V" for vrai, the French word for "true").

I also had my take-home final for History done already, so I dropped it off by my teacher's office on the way to my French final. That's taken care of at least.

After this, I went to Kinko's (a.k.a. FedEx Office) to make copies of the chapbook I'm making for my Creative Writing class final (which is on Thursday). It took some help from the employees to get me started, but eventually I got it down and about an hour later I was done copying (even though I had to make 5 more copies because I was short). That cost almost $60, after they took off my 82 bad copies. Then I took my copies across the room to another counter and got things set up to have the books folded and stapled. This cost 25 cents a booklet, or $10.88 for folding and binding them all. I arranged to pick them up tomorrow, since there were people in line behind me. So I'm going to do that after work tomorrow and take them home to hand-number them in the colophon, an idea I got from the sample chapbooks my teacher had us look at. Basically this involved putting a bit in the colophon (a publishing term for a bit in a publication to put info about the publication, like the fonts used and such) that says "Selected Tales of Walden was printed in an edition of 40. This is number __." I thought it would be a nice touch.

I did have some mistakes even in the version I finally decided to accept, so I had to fix these with a pen. They're kinda obvious in the copies. Oh well. I couldn't figure out how to not have any words cut off on the right-hand margin on the stories. Darn inDesign.

So I'm going to have to read something from that on Thursday. I'm not sure what I'll read. I'll have to think of something.

I also have my final projects for my two MiraCosta classes to do still.

Not much else to say. Oh I finally watched last week's American Idol results show today (fast-forwarding through the Lady Gaga performance, since I don't really care for her) and was surprised to see Aaron eliminated, but secretly glad cause he's not my favorite. I thought for sure Casey would be eliminated though.

Watching this week's American Idol performance show right now. I'm gonna go.