Greek is Finished

Well, last night, I turned in my last paper for my last Greek class. Including the title page, two page bibliography and appendixes for the final translation, text criticism, sentence diagrams and word/translation analysis, it rang in at 26 pages. (The actual main body text was something like 14-15 pages.)

It was the culmination of the most intense class I've ever taken. I worked countless hours on it, spending as much time as I could in previous weeks trying to assemble it (although the group project that included a presentation and 25 page paper, as well as translation of 1 Corinthians took precedent since they were due first), and basically did nothing but work on it over the last week. Despite that, I've never cut a paper so close to the deadline as this one: I finished the final draft at 5:35 and it was due at 6:15 yesterday — and I'm the type of guy that likes to have a paper finished at least 24 hours in advance.

That's when my computer started acting up and the printer messed up.

I caught the first set of errors, but not the second set after I sent the print job to my printer from my laptop. A lot of the Greek on the second print had been replaced with little square blocks. I did catch it on the way to Covenant, went to my godmother's house and e-mailed the paper so at least it would be in on time in some form. She journeyed with me to Covenant and gave me some moral support as a desperately tried to reformat the paper (it turned out the second set of errors was from the lack of various fonts on my laptop that I did not have easy access to install). The paper's sentence diagram was all scrambled up and had to be reformatted for the fonts on my laptop before it could be printed. Finally, I got the hard copy to print and delivered the paper to my professor's mailbox.

What a relief. This has been a Greek “bootcamp,” I do believe.