Final Friday

Yep, today marks the beginning of the last weekend before my first finals week of grad school. I started working on my second take-home exam earlier this afternoon. I wrote a short (2 1/2 pages) essay on Lord Byron's Don Juan, Canto I (1819). It was a character analysis of Donna Julia. I've got two other essays to write for the exam, one on Percy Shelley's The Cenci and the other on the poetry of John Keats, whom we're concluding the semester with. (As I did with the first exam, I'll post and discuss my answers to these questions here sometime next week.) We'll finish up our discussion of Keats Monday night, and the in-class final exam will be Wednesday night. I'm not terribly nervous about it. I've done my reading and basically get it. Speaking of Keats, author of "Ode on a Grecian Urn (1819)," he died sick and lonely in 1821 at the tender age of 25. I know that's a little heavy for a Friday, so I'll try to end this post on a decidedly lighter note: I received my first Google AdSense check today. $102.87! I'm not sure what I'll do with it yet, but I'm very happy about that. It's the beginning of a (hopefully) successful business enterprise.