almost done

Gee, for a while there, my life was almost as busy as a normal person's. Whew, glad that's over.

Well, okay, I'm engaging in a bit of hyperbole here (shocker!). My international seminar paper, which is completed and turned in, probably took me longer to write than any previous 20-ish page paper I've written. The section detailing the debate over what will happen to the Chinese economy if they significantly revalue the yuan was fairly technical, so I had to spend a lot of time rereading sections of journal articles and carefully wording my arguments (Prof. A has excellent attention to detail and he is one of those professors who appears to know EVERYTHING). It was and interesting topic, though, and it was (mostly) fun to work really hard on something fairly challenging.

Meanwhile, I did both some student tutoring and some grading in my capacity as TA, which was a nice diversion from the paper insofar as the tutoring confirmed that I really do remember how to do 2-firm strategic interdependence oligopoly game theory, and the grading gave me something to do when circumstances forced DWE to cancel on me for Sunday night at the last minute (it's a long story, but the salient point is that he left his car and apartment keys in Pennsylvania--I'd be more annoyed, but people in glass houses, etc--although, I haven't left my keys in another city since college, and I don't believe I've ever left them in another state).

So now all I have left is my econometrics paper and some grading. I played around with my regression model some more today, I checked for endogeneity problems (there aren't any, according to the data, but given that theoretically there probably should be, I find the lack of them equally distressing). I had hopes of writing my paper before I left for Portland on Thursday, but that's seeming less likely, given that I'm not highly motivated to work on it tonight, and tomorrow I have class and then a grad school function afterwards. I have more or less all the parts I need in terms of doing the econometrics, I just have to pick a final model, pull everything together, make it look pretty, and write up explanations and interpretations. It's not due until the 15th, so I'll have plenty of time when I get back, but it would be nice to have it out of the way.