Stack o’ Papers

Well, here it is. This is my dissertation. 440 pages. Second photo is the stack of three that were mailed off today to my committee.

Phoo. Also found out today that I had an article accepted to a journal I submitted to back in November. It’s quite a good journal, a nice step up from what I’ve already been published in, and a good stepping stone to the next tier. Annnd, probably the most exciting news is that we bought a new bed today. A real growd-up bed with a frame and box spring and everything. It was quite necessary, since our former bed was literally hurting us. Badly. Very badly. I can’t even tell you how excited I am to go to bed tonight. And then to get up and NOT work on my dissertation! It’s like a whole new lease on life. You think I’m kidding, but…

Hangin’ In…

Yup, I’m still here, grinding my way towards the first week in March, when I’ll finally send off the draft of my dissertation for the defense on March 31 (confirmed now, tickets bought). It’s been an okay grind, actually, with only a sightly more than usual work schedule. Pretty doable for the most part, and only mild panic in occassional spells. Of course, I still harbor the persistant fear that I’ll get all the way to the defense and my committee will say, “uh, seriously, it took you three years to churn out this steaming pile?” Or, “well, it’s basically sound, but before you can graduate you just have to change everything about it.” Or something equally devastating.

The weather has been wonderfully wintry around these parts lately, with rain, wind, chillyness, etc. It’s nice, especially considering it was in the 80s last month and probably will be again next month. Supposedly, we’re actually ahead of our rainfall totals for this time of year. This bodes well for wildflowers in a couple months, so I’m planning a canyon tour by bike for sometime after the diss is done.  I might even be pesuaded to go out to the desert (not by bike, though), where there are supposedly wonderful wildflowers in the spring, especially in wet years. I don’t know about that–we’ll see.

I’ve started volunteering on Saturday mornings at the local historical society, doing some reprocessing of one of their collections that is of relevance to my research. I’m thinking I’ll probably take on another project there when this one is finished, too. It’ll help me broaden my experience base a bit within my profession and hopefully give me a slightly broader range of employment options.

Anyhoo, back to work.

Dreams Mean Nothing

Right? Because I dreamt last night that I forgot to hand in the paperwork to schedule my dissertation defense and apply for degree. I realized this the morning of my defense, then had to run all over Chicago (which had sprouted steep hills to thwart me) trying to get the paperwork in order while my advisors were impatiently waiting to get started. Of course, it was impossible. So, that was just my subconscious putting a sticky note reminder on my brain that I need to get that paperwork in, right? Not some sort of vision of the future? Right?

Partial blog hiatus continues. Partially.

January 12, 2009

January 12th?!

12th?! How did that happen?! Hmm. Well, anyway, I’ve got mixed results from my Great Work Habits Experiment over the last few days. First, I remembered why I don’t work in a totally free-form way: I hate it. I need the structure, so sue me. I need to work like I’m at work: like I’ve got a boss and deadlines and performance quotas, etc. It’s too hard for me to measure progress otherwise. My dad and wife asked, so how did it go? Did you get lots of work done? And I said yes, which is true, but without a set schedule, I can’t really say how much I got done.

This has been a theme for me, all through college and grad school. I don’t necessarily want to have every aspect of my life scheduled to the hilt, but at the same time, I really thrive in a schedule. My wife is the same way, which is good. In fact, we’ve decided to schedule other aspects of our lives, too. We both suffer from a pretty profound laziness (which anyone who knows us will doubt, but really it’s true), and without a schedule, we tend to take paths of least resistance that quickly become ruts if we don’t occassionally try to shake ourselves out of them. So, we’re working on work schedules, recreation schedules, social life schedules, etc. It sounds a bit OCD and soccer-mom-y, but I think it’s what it’s going to take, at least initially, for both of us to shake the inertia we’ve both been feeling lately.

Work Habits Experiment Day 2

I’m in the second day of my “free form” work habits experiment, and I have mixed results so far. On the one hand, I have gotten a lot of work done, but maybe not as much as I would have liked. I’m also finding that my blocks of non-work are quite a bit longer than my blocks of work, although when I do work, it’s usually pretty intense and productive.

I’m still basically on my same sleeping and eating schedules, and although my original intention was to only sleep when tired and eat when hungry, I’ve found that these pretty much correspond to my regular routine anyway. I added a cup of coffee to my mid-afternoon routine in the hopes of beating my after-dinner sleepiness, which put me out like a light for about an hour last evening and totally screwed up my evening work idea and made it hard for me to sleep when I did go to bed.

We’ll see what happens tonight, whether I can keep going through the 7pm-9pm crash that I usually have, and actually get some work done. I’m starting to think that this is really going to be the key to getting everything done on time over the next two months. I’m going to try to get all of the brain-intensive work done during the day, and especially the morning, when I’m more mentally alert, and maybe try to save some of the more mundane busy-work-type work for the evening when I feel less on top of things.

Also, starting tomorrow, I’m going to throw regular exercise into the mix again, which is something I’ve been badly neglecting for far too long again. I know that being in good shape always gives me more energy, but it’s a matter of making time for it, which is not something I seem to be consistently good at.

Okay, back to work.

The Great 2009 Work Habits Experiment

Ladies and gentleman, you are bearing witness to a little experiment I’m currently conducting. While my wife is away on a conference (in Iowa in January, mind you), I’m being left to my own devices. As the, er, “under-employed” half of my marriage, I have traditionally been the cook and general workabout for chores and errands that need running during the week. This is most typically a pretty bearable burden, but there are some days and weeks where it feels like all I do is busy “administrative” work without really getting a chance to settle down and write.

Well, with only myself and the cat to keep track of for the next few days, and no where in particular to go, I’m going totally free-form with my work habits, just to see what develops. I’m going to need to work harder in the next three months than I have for a long time in order to get my dissertation finished, and I’d like to try out some new work habits and see what sticks.

First, I’m eating, sleeping, and performing other necessary functions only when I feel I need to, not according to some pre-set schedule. Also, I’m not setting aside specific “work” hours, but am going to try to work only when I feel the urge or need to. It turns out that this is quite often, so I’m not going to have to worry about not getting anything done. I’m also going to take time off to do non-work things whenever and for however long the urge strikes me. This way, I’m going to try to get all of the procrastination urges and goof-off urges taken care of all in big blocks, leaving other big blocks free for work.

I don’t know if all or any of this is going to work, but it’s going to be interesting. I’m especially interested in the prospect of working in the evenings, and perhaps late (early?) into the wee hours of the night/morning. I’ve traditionally done some good work during this time, but have gotten out of it recently. Hopefully, by Sunday, I’ll have some better knowledge about how I’m going to need to work over the next few months, what works, and what doesn’t. We’ll see how it goes.

January 5, 2009

I just made my to-do list for the week and probably 80% start with “email.” I wonder how many emails I’ve written in the roughly 12 years I’ve been regularly sending email? It’s going to be a busy week. My wife is away at a conference from Wednesday through Sunday, and I’m pretty much going to become a work hermit. We go to Oregon the week after for our postponed Christmas, which has turned into a Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration, so I’m going to try to get way ahead on work, as much as that is possible. Of course, I’ll probably still be taking some work with me, but I can at least make a good start on the year this way. I’m happy to be working toward a March dissertation defense deadline, which gives me some feeling of a schedule, and also terrifies me just a little. It’s good to be busy.

December 31, 2008

Gurg. Now I have a cold, too. It seems to be a fast-moving one, though, so hopefully it will pass on before too long.

I got back to work yesterday after our vacation(?) during the last two weeks or so. I’ve been mostly working on reading and preparing some comments on a colleague’s chapters. Whenever I read drafts of someone else’s work, I can’t help but think about what process they went through as they wrote. Was it anything like mine? How many times have certain sentences been rewritten? Paragraphs moved around? Specific words deliberated over? It’s also good to see someone else’s work in a draft stage because it reminds me that we all go through a process as we write, not just pop out a finished product, which is what you most often see of someone’s work. It’s the writer’s equivalent of being reminded that we all put our pants on one leg at a time, as my mom used to say.

Today is going to be some serious work on my diss and preparing some materials for a fellowship application. And drinking a lot of green tea and probably blowing my nose a lot. Happy New Year!

December 14, 2008

I’m still basking in the glow of the good news received last week. On top of that, the weather has turned “wintery” here in SoCal, which means it’s cool, cloudy, windy, and a little rainy. We actually turned the heat on yesterday for the first time, and I’m about to really enjoy a nice warm bowl of oatmeal and cup of coffee (which I’ve only recently started drinking in small amounts). It’s funny how much better days like this make me feel after days and days and days and days and days of the same bloody thing. I never thought clear, sunny skies would get tiresome, but boy, do they ever. I know, I know, most people wish they had that problem, especially this time of year, so I’ll stop bitching.

It feels so good to be moving forward with my dissertation. The fact that I now have some distinct goal and some good feedback is really wonderful, and it has really energized me to get things done. Not just diss things, actually, but it makes me want to make progress on all my projects. I guess nothing succeeds like success, right?

I’m about to head off for Oregon for a couple of weeks, and I’m getting together what work I want to take with me. It’s nice to feel like there is actually a reason to work while on vacation, instead of just some vague mandate to get stuff done. Of course, it will also be wonderful to just relax in Oregon, a place which has the much-appreciated ability to take my mind off of just about all of the everyday stresses and worries.

Everything’s Coming Up Milhouse!

Yesterday was an unprecedentedly great day. I mean, it was probably hands-down my best day since finishing my diss draft in June. Not only did a bunch of stuff not go badly, it actually all went really well, and there were even some very pleasant surprises. First, I finally had a two-hour phone conversation with my diss advisor, who thinks a defense by March should be quite possible. Woo hoo! Not only does my diss not suck, it actually could be finished within a quarter! That’s crazy!

The rest of the stuff sort of pales in comparison to that, but it was all really good: 1) the bike shop got the stuck pedal off the Runwell finally; 2) one of the readers of my Old Bike Blog sent me this incredible poster he made; 3) I finally won an eBay auction (even though I swore on this blog that I would never eBay again) for a replacement handlebar/stem for the Huffy/Raleigh at a really good price; and 4) some long-awaiting microfilm arrived by inter-library loan. By the end of the day, part of me wanted to explode with glee, while the other part kept looking over my shoulder, waiting for the other shoe to drop. I’m still a little worried that the universe is just getting me in a good mood ahead of some epic disaster of cosmic proportions, but hey, even if that’s the case, I’ll take the good stuff while it lasts!

PS–If you don’t get the title of this post, please hand over your credentials and exit the blog without incident. We don’t want any trouble.