8/15 God, I'm dumb, and slightly richer-- 2 things:

SPOILER ALERT: BORING INFORMATION FOLLOWS

1) New economics experiment today! Not by the same group, so the money-making options are incredibly limited, but easy money is easy money. The game was daft anyway-- they 'team' you up with 2 people who you don't know and everyone draws either an X or an O (each person having 2/3 chance for X and 1/3 for O each round). Then the computer shows you what your 'teammates' have AND tells you if at least one person has an X. Then you decide to play or not play, and if you play and have an X you win $1. If you play with an O you lose $4 (you start with $9). If you don't play, you don't win or lose anything. I drew up the odds for each outcome between rounds and found that you'll win roughly a 70% of the time. But because you lose so much more than you win, it's not feasible to play every round. So you take your chances, knowing that if one of your 'teammates' has an O, you might play because the probability of the 'team' getting 2 O's and an X is half the probability of getting 2 X's and an O. Some people did horribly, and they couldn't have gathered good data because the game HAS to tell you if someone has an X. If NO ONE does, it tells you that NO ONE does, meaning NO ONE can possibly win. Yet one of my dipshit 'teammates' chose to play on both occasions that we all drew O's. The trouble of attracting foreign students to experiments: good English skills are not guaranteed, and the instruction sheets are written by jackasses. But these shits are local, take about 45 minutes, and there's nowhere else down here I could legally make $16 tax-free in less than an hour.

2) Genius me felt confident enough after a good class to volunteer to workshop next week (originally scheduled for Sep. 5), which gives me exactly 72 hours to pull a scene from the novel out of my ass and tart it up enough to be presentable. Super. Especially since there's another experiment in the morning, and Jane is giving a talk in the library tomorrow night, and the old Friday seminar is on like Donkey Kong. I got a good start after class (~1,200 words of a projected 3,000) but then drank a huge cup of coffee and started to feel really weird and bad and had to quit and go to bed (which is also why this is 12 hours late-- mea culpa... mea culpa...)

Drink Count: 1

Two album covers tonight if'n I reach my personal goal of a complete first draft today... wish me lucks. Better lucks than Falkor, at least.