Neighborhood Noise

It's actually quite pleasant around the vast grounds of Chesterley this morning (um, right...I can count about five houses from where I sit, but anyhow...). I sit outside on the back deck, and I'm going to get a few more points done on the intro outline. It's rather peaceful. Chester sits here at my feet and we listen to the birds and occasional dog barking. Oh wait, Chester is barking now to...Chester, no. Thanks buddy. Anyhow, aside from regular neighborhood noise here, life is pretty good. I could get used to getting work done out here.

Onward, then.

Monthly Goals and Smaller Chunks

Alright people, this is it. I'm completely finished with any other acacdemic task now, other than writing this dissertation. Not that I've been intentionally wasting time or anything, but I now have absolutely no excuses or other invening reasons to not get some major work accomplished on this beast during the next few months.

I'm experiencing a feeling of relief, in that life has become a bit more simple. No more classes, no more tests or papers, and no more incompletes or other lingering projects. Heck, I've even let go of one of my side jobs that earned a small bit of cash. All of these things were being put on a higher priority than the dissertation because they were more urgent. No longer are these things factors, and this is good.

If I want to start collecting data this fall, and thus have any hope of walking at graduation in a year, then I absolutely must defend the proposal (1st 3 chapters) no later than mid-September of this year. My goal for the summer is to have at least a decent draft. A decent draft can still SUCK, but at least it's a draft! Edits don't take me all that long to complete, and the work doesn't need to be perfect to pass the proposal defense. It just needs to be done.

So I've revised my schedule so that I do a chapter a month for the next three months. That is:

• Introduction by the end of May
• Literature review by the end of June
• Methodology by the end of July

That gives me August to edit and attempt to get some feedback from DC, who has told me she'll be in and out of town this summer and would be happy to look at things when she has time (I'm VERY lucky in this regard. Many professors simply disappear during the summer months, which is their prerogative being that they aren't paid in the summer time).

Deep breath. Hoo boy. Here we go. In the past half hour I've completed a few lines of the outline of my introduction, so we're getting somewhere.

I actually finished something EARLY!

I'm a bit stunned. I just submitted my proposal for Presigious Research Conference online, and the deadline isn't till 11:59 PM tonight. I'm right on schedule: am now heading home from the Cafe to hang out with Wife and Moose for a bit. Then, Wife goes off to be social while I hang out with Moose till his bedtime.

After his bedtime, I will hunker down and complete my take-home exam for "multivariate statistics in educational research." Am just about finished. Just a few more things left to tweak, and it's not even due till Noon tomorrow!

If all goes according to plan, then the only thing I'll have on my plate for tomorrow morning before turnning into a Good Little Graduate Assistant in the afternoon is (gulp) to work on my dissertation. Yeah, that's all.

That's ALL? Zoinks.

Week's End Report

I CRANKED this week. Finally! Got the Beast Paper finished and shared with DC. I await feedback from her before submitting it to Prestigious Journal. Well, OK...I await her feedback, and I also need to finish the paper's conclusion! It just sort of trails off at the end at this point, but that's OK. It needed to get it the hell away from me for a week or so!

Yesterday I made a draft of my stats final exam (take-home), which is due Tuesday at Noon. I hope to finish up that puppy tomorrow during the day, if possible. On Monday, a proposal to Prestigious Research Conference is due, and I'm going to submit Beast Paper to that group. Why not? The more feedback I can get at this point, the better. Besides, it all informs the dissertation process.

I guess I was able to kick "it" up a notch this week, as I had hoped last Sunday. And I must admit, I'm feeling rather scholarly lately. It's kind of fun. Let's hope I can keep up this energy for the next month or so.

Music Ringing in my Ears

Thanks to Hugh for posting on pandora.com ! LOVE it, and it's probably going to help place a soundtrack along side of my dissertation proposal-writing time this summer. Check it out when you have a chance (it's FREE).

Working day

Here I sit on the vast south veranda of the Chesterley manse. Yep, I'm on the wooden back deck underneath my new porch umbrella we got at K-Mart. But it's quite nice & peaceful, for the most part. Before 10 AM, a neighbor who moved in yesterday started up with a chain saw on a couple of branches in their back yard. I almost went over to them and said, "Can you please live here quietly for a week before disturbing the rest of us? Thanks." But I resisted temptation. Guess I'm so careful not to disturb my neighbors, that I think others should behave the same way. Perhaps I should just stop thinking so much about that stuff?

Anyhow, I'm here on the back deck, connected wirelessly in terms of power and internet. Finally got a new laptop battery that works for more than 10 minutes, so this is good. I'm plowing through the aforementioned edits (see Friday's post) and it's going OK. Moose and Wife are on their way home from In-Laws' house, so I'm trying to get things done before their arrival, when I'll want to play with them.

We've head a few tragic deaths recently in SCT. I hate it when college students die. They're not old enough yet. Hell, I'm not old enough yet either, but I have at least 10-15 years on most of the people who died. Very sad.

In other news, I'm trying to kick "it" up a notch for my work between now and the end of the summer. Not quite sure how to describe "it" right now, but I do have a few more thoughts on the writing process that I'm working on putting into words here sometime soon.

Been a while

Lots going on lately, mostly surrounding typical end-of-semester events and such. Also, the home-life has been scheduled to the hilt. While I enjoy this enormously, it's not all that conducive to a timely completion of work. Oh well: better to lose a little sleep than to not enjoy hanging out with the family and friends.

Speaking of the family, Wife and Moose are visiting "gramamama and grampa" (Moose's words) this weekend, so Chester and I are home alone together for now. Today he's at doggie daycare while I'm away at work, meetings, and a couple of other things here & there. Am looking forward to a relatively quiet Saturday, I must admit. I plan on cleaning the home office/prison (boy it needs it) and then plowing through an edit on this @#$% pilot study paper. I considered just putting it aside for a while, but it's going to drive me nuts if I don't at least get it into a finished form and send it to Prestigious Journal for consideration. It will most likely get rejected, and then I can use the feedback to improve it more and try again (probably at Not-as-Prestigious Journal). OK by me, just lemme move on from this! Pink has offered to take a look at it next week, so there's the motivation I need.

Pink and I have started our weekly meetings once again. She's finishing up her first chapter, which is great. We both are trying to have proposals done by the end of the summer. It will be easier for her since she has a 10-month appointment with the summers off. Not the same for this 12-month boy, but oh well. Hopefully I'll get something done on the thing on a regular basis and be able to feel like I'm making some progress.

Another colleage is defending her dissertation as I type this post. Hard to believe! Am going to go over there and help her celebrate a little later on. Hard to believe people I started with are now finishing up. I feel a little bit behind, but of course I'm happy for my friends.

Third Floor

The farm house around the corner that I referred to in this post already has the frame of a brand new third floor with a completed roof on top. It's good to see. I find it remarkable how quickly this type of renovation work can be accomplished when the weather turns for the better and there are very few other major instances of wind damage around the neighborhood. It's a big contrast to the time it's taking B.Rox to renovate his New Orleans home. Everything takes forever there due to a very different new urban infrastructure which appears to be turning into almost a completely different sort of culture. We should not take for granted the fast rate at which things can be patched up here when it's all they can do in New Orleans to repair their land line phone system, for example.

Finally back on track

I hope I didn't just jinx myself by typing that.

I am back at the cafe as per my "normal" "schedule" (both terms said with the inflection of Austin Powers's Dr. Evil when he referred to his original invention, the "Laser").

This has been anything but a normal semester, though, so a little normalcy is nice...for a CHANGE. Wait, perhaps it ain't normal, then? I don't think I can wrap my brain around that very well.

Anyhow, I worked my assistantship hours this morning like the good little efficient graduate assistant that I am. Since lunch, I've plugged through the beginning of a stats assignment due in about 10 days, and now I'm prepping for a class I'm probably going to end up teaching tomorrow night (DC is attending a conference) in an area outside of my expertise. I'm mildly concerned about this, but I'm going to plug through. I feel like I've not been able to find my good "teaching legs" this semester. I guess I'm grotesquely out of practice. This makes me laugh: I'm a doc student who feels he's out of practice teaching from when he was a full-time administrator? Strange, but true. I did much more teaching when working full-time than I do now. Now I spend much of my work-time alone. Just another thing to reassure me that the doc student experience usually ends up being the entire opposite of what one might expect. Bettter just go with it, I suppose.

The cafe is way too quiet today. Perhaps people are buckling down on final projects and papers, and they wanted to focus elsewhere? More likely, the weather's too damn nice to study (finally above 60 degrees and sunny today), so I bet many others are out throwing around a Frisbee or something.

Speaking of spring, I mowed Chesterley's vast (ha!) acreage (ha!) yesterday, and I set up our deck furniture from its winter storage spot. I even got up those damn oak leaves that fell in the winter (nice) and I fertilized the front lawn (the back never needs it: lots of trees). Nice to see the table umbrella out there again. I can't wait to be able to hang out there for long periods at a time. In reflection, I was pretty darn productive on the home front last weekend, in spite of Wife being sick and my caring for Moose much of the time solo.

Alright, must stop procrastinating from prepping for this class and get it done.

Automatic Lights

I did a little home improvement task I've been wanting to do here at Chesterley for a couple of years: I installed a timer on our outside lights. One of the things I like about this neighborhood is that it's far enough out of town that it's genuinely dark. Plenty of starry nights here. There are no street lights on the winding lane leading to Chesterley's front gate (OK, winding lane my ass: it's a two-block long straight-as-an-arrow street in a suburban neighborhood). Approaching the house at night is really dark and a bit scary dark at times. I like to have things lit up out front; I just feel safer. Call me a city boy, that's OK by me. But there are many nights when I forget to turn those lights on, and the times we're out before dark and come home after dark, it would be nice to come back to a house with lights. So, there it is. All done, thanks to a little coaching from my brother-in-law who works as an electrical engineer. I managed to complete the project without frying off my body hair and burning down the stately old walls of Chesterley. Remarkable! There are a couple of pictures to prove it under the "diy" tag on my flickr site.

And while home improvements are nice, nothing academic happened today. Life happens, academics do not. Wife was sick this morning, so I was unexpectedly on Moose duty for most of the day. Not that I mind this.

There's always tomorrow for academics, assuming life can stop for a while.

Eye Hab a Code

Eye hate habig a code. By dose is all stubbed, ad I ca't breade! It's dot fair! Today id stats class, I sdeezed ad it bade a really high-pitched soud. By buddy ad I had a good laugh.

Sprig codes are the worst! I should buy stock id tissues, but that would require havig $.

*SNIFF*

Rest in Peace

The weekend wasn't so bad, in terms of how funerals tend to go. It was good to reconnect with my cousins, sister, and others in the family. Most important we spent a little time remembering our grandmother and the good family times we had. There was a little bit of Family Crap, too (Cousin Dave will understand), as all families have on some level. Most of it was expected and not very difficult to handle, so it's all part of the family experience, I suppose.

Anyhow, it's good to be home, and it's good to have a roof (see the previous post)!

That was a little too close for comfort

We were still in Chicago last night after my grandmother's funeral earlier in the day. It was probably a good thing that we weren't home here in SCT. Anyone approaching Chesterley from the south has seen this farmhouse out at the main road, and it was severely damaged in what appeared to be a tornado last night. The paper called it not a tornado, but "straight line winds." Not sure exactly what that means, but this looked like tornado damage to me & Wife. This was a three-story house, dating back to the Civil War (picture was published in SCT's local paper). We walk Chester and Moose by this place all the time - it's only about 3 blocks from us. Fortunately the current owners/residents were not hurt.

Chesterley is just fine, though the power had been out about 24 hours prior to our homecoming. It came back on around 8:30 PM. No complaints here: our place is still standing, and the efficient folks at yonder power company appeared to have done a great job restoring things.

Whew.

Statistics Test

I have a take-home exam in multivariate statistics this weekend. Yay!

Whatever.

I know I'm taking this class "for fun," but there ain't much fun about a test administered over a weekend. Oh well. I suppose I dug myself into this hole when I signed up for the class. The professor said it will only take two or three hours to complete. So if I crank on it now, then perhaps I'll be done by lunch? Yeah, done with about 50% of it. Everything always takes longer in a Ph.D. program.

At least the spring snow is finally melting.

I'm Missing People & Places

Gram's Greenhouse
Originally uploaded by chesterley.

My apologies for the multiple edits on this post to those of you using blog aggregators. I've had trouble with posting pictures from Flickr this week...

My mind has been wandering a lot this week. Mourning the loss of my 98-year-old grandmother I expected to die is odd: On the one hand, I'm happy for the prospect that she's moved onto a better place without the aches and pains of a century-old body. On the other hand I do miss her, stubbornness and all.

One strange thing is that the mourning process for my grandmother also brings me to miss, of all things, her house. It's an International Style ranch house in the woods that has always sparked my interest in architecture. I really love it up there, and we would spend time there in the summer when I was a kid. Whenever I'd speak to my grandmother on the phone, she'd provide all the updates like, "the weather is doing this," or, "the deer came to visit the bird bath today," or even, "the storm blew over 5 trees, but thankfully none hit the house." I miss those updates on one of my favorite places in the world. I sit here in the Midwest wondering what's happening up at the house right now. I find it sad that the house is empty. I can hear the wind blowing through the trees, the chirping birds, an occasional car out at the road, and even a distant heavy wave hitting the beach down the road. It's odd that my grandmother isn't there to see and hear it all, and to report on the goings-on.

Funny how years of connection with an individual is leaving me attached to the place where that individual lived. Not sure yet what that means, but I'm finding it rather odd.

Spring?

It snowed at least three inches in Small College Town yesterday. Here is the vast, winding pathway to the front gates of Chesterley, showing our daffodils covered in snow. I posted just a couple of other pictures under the "spring?" tag in my Flickr site (to the right). Yes, I actually had to shovel the driveway yesterday morning: March 21. Oy. I miss living in the Southeast.

I'm having trouble finding academic focus this week, but I find comfort in the fact that I can still be productive at my job (which doesn't require the highest level of brain power all the time...just some of the time). Perhaps it's because I essentially lost my spring break to being with my grandmother. I could use a vacation! Perhaps my lack of "thought" is just part of the mourning process. Not sure. Sometimes I feel like it's strange to mourn the death of a 98-year-old, since her death was expected and anticipated for some time. However, I know it's never "strange" to mourn someone I will miss, so deep down I know this is natural and I will regain my ability to think once again sometime soon. Looks like the funeral will be in a couple of weeks, so it will be good to have that closure.

One more thing: light a couple of candles for Lemming this week as she finishes her dissertation!

On Death

My 98-year-old grandmother died this morning. I feel fortunate that I was available to be with her all of last week. A week ago Friday my mother and I hurried across the country to be with her, as we were told her end was iminent. I think my grandmother surprised herself more than the rest of us by living an additional week. We moved her from the hospital to a beautiful hospice house last Wednesday afternoon. I traveled home this past Friday after we knew she was settled there. She died this morning. She led a long and very full life.

It's not a surprise to anyone that she waited for the family to leave before she died. She moved to her summer place in the woods years ago, away from a lifetime of friends and relatives, to live out the rest of her life in a peaceful environment. She enjoyed living alone, and it appears that when people die from natural causes, they hang on to take control over the time and place where they decide to take the next step.

Cheers to your long life, Gram. I hope your journey was a peaceful one.

Interference

I'm feeling a bit depressed, so don't read this if you don't want to learn more about it. Hey, it's my blog and if I want to be depressed, I have that right. So there. :-)

Too much interference in my head today. Probably because I'm coming out of a weekend that wasn't as productive as I had hoped. And now it's almost 4PM on Monday, and still I feel like I should be eating breakfast instead of having an afternoon cup o' java at Cafe right now.

I need to ignore the interference. I think my scholarly thoughts (if I do say so myself) get clouded by trying to set life priorities. I mean, I'm doing this degree to get myself and my career to a "higher level." Higher level of crap, perhaps? Who knows. But right now I'm just hoping I'll have a full-time job next year to be able to support the family and myself. Life will just go on: I'm not feeling like I'm waiting for a job to "get my life back," or anything like that. At the same time, am I a failure for wanting a full-time job? Did I fail this year because I've not yet finished up this proposal and can't seem to get over the hump posed by this pilot study?

I would like to have complete control over how I spend my time for one entire day this week. So far that ain't happening. At least spring break is next week; I think I'm going to take a day or two off...so I can work.

I hate college.

Progress & Plans

This was a pretty good week. I made good progress on the @#$% pilot study, and I've even crafted a visual model of my theory. We'll see how DC likes it.

Today I'm planning an office/prison work attempt. I'm actually kind of excited. Perhaps the prospect of yard work, spring-cleaning, and house-sprucing have inspired me to feel like a homebody today. Not sure. Regardless, it's been a while since I've had a good work session here at home, so I'm going to attempt it.

Got some feedback from a local journal to which I've submitted a different paper, and I need to complete revisions by Friday. So that's on my list for this weekend. Also, DC is traveling in a week, and she always likes to have reading material with her when she flies. I MUST finish up the @#$% pilot study by Friday as well so I can get feedback from her prior to when I submit that to A Prestigious Journal. I figure I'll get rejected from that journal, but I hope the rejection comes with some helpful feedback. So, busy weekend: wish me luck here in the office/prison today.

writing
planning

Spring is Springing!

I can't believe the daffodils, tulips, & crocuses are already coming up in our rather messy front yard. Note the "gumballs" that fell out of our next door neighbor's tree in the wintertime. Thanks alot, neighbor! Anyhow, I must get started on the yard work routine again sometime soon. In celebration of the first weekend in March, I brought our lawn mower into the shop for its annual tuneup. I'm looking forward to spring! This year I'm determined to just do a little bit of work every couple of days instead of letting it pile up (literally) till the weekends. Half of the weekends it rains, so things can really pile up. If I can get into a schedule, then the yard will stay clean and I'll be less stressed about it. I love yard work, but it stresses me out if I don't feel like I have the time to do it. It's the grad student guilt factor, I suppose.

Homeowner