This post is boring.

So I'm going to follow Sarah's lead and write about what I've been up to lately.  Unfortunately for you guys, that means this post is going to be incredibly boring, because all I've really been up to lately is school work.  It's end of term here, so this week is insane with tests and exams and papers and things.

Mostly what I've been working on is my honours thesis, which is about missionary work in seventeenth-century New France.  I'm looking at how improvements to the methods of communication between the missionaries and the indigenous peoples were related to increases in the amount of conflict between the two groups (because better communication = more successful conversion/assimilation = more sources of conflict).  It's actually a really interesting subject, but I've been working on it for eight months now, and I'm just bored of it at this point.  It didn't help that my main source were the Jesuit Relations, which are literally tens of thousands of pages long, which I had to slog through.

Fortunately, I'm almost finished!  The final version is due on Friday, so I'm into final edits at this point.  Currently I'm working on re-writing the conclusion, where I look at how themes of communication and violence continued into the present day.  It's sort of brutal because conclusions are my least favourite parts of papers, and editing is my least favourite step of the process, so editing the conclusion is a double-whammy of things I dislike.  But, once I get through it, I've just got to edit for clarity, style, and grammar, and I'll be done!  I'm really excited not to have to work on it any more, but also to be able to say that I've completed a real, serious piece of academic work.

Anyway, so that's what I'm doing right now.  Once I get through my thesis, I've just got a few exams, one more paper to write, and then my thesis defence (ugh, I don't even want to think about that part), and then I'll be done for the year and hopefully will have exciting summery adventures to tell you guys about instead of writing awful posts like this.  I promise to never write about school work ever again, okay?