Fits and Starts

My life feels a bit unreal right now. I think it's because I'm doing things that I haven't done in years - liking it - but have got out of the habit of doing, so it feels a bit odd. I actually did very little studying this weekend. In fact, I've done very little reading for about a week.

What have I been doing instead?

Well, on Thursday afternoon, I drove up to New Hampshire to meet with a woman who's working on her PhD in educational psychology. She's researching and writing about Americanization programs in the early part of the century. I met with her because I answered an ad for an academic writing group, and even though most people would only join such a group if they were already working on the dissertation, I thought it would be worth checking out a group while I'm still slogging through the comps proposals. Of course, now that the comps proposals have been scrapped, I have no need to write anything till at least next spring, which makes joining the group a bit of a moot point. But her chapter that I read was very interesting, and we found a lot of points of intersection to talk about. And she gave me some great feedback about a paper that I've been working on sporadically for the last year. Gave me a good reason to get off my ass and do some work on it too - which is part of the reason why writing groups work! Don't know if we'll keep working together (right now, the group is pretty much non-existent with just the two of us), but I enjoyed hearing about someone else's experience in academia - particularly because it was from someone in a different discipline and at a different institution.

Friday was just messed up because I spent most of the day tagging along behind D - I certainly didn't expect the day to go to waste the way it did.

Saturday was cool though 'cause I went with some friends to see a soccer game. The Revolution were playing D.C. United, and although the game was "lacklustre" (good word use, R) I enjoyed myself immensely. I had intended to go home and get a whole bunch of reading done in the evening, but one of the kids ended up grounded by the end of the night, and the circumstances surrounding that grounding made it pretty much impossible for me to concentrate on reading that night.

Then on Sunday, some good friends introduced us to a great little pub in JP - I had steak & eggs, something I haven't eaten since the last century, so it was about time I had some - and they were fabulous. We had a good time, though I felt a little distracted by all the crap the night before, so I'm afraid I wasn't terribly good company. Then you'd think I'd go home and read, but instead I spent the night making room for our new bed - we still have to arrange for delivery, but we found a really good place to get it from, and we're hoping to get it brought by in the next couple of days.

Weird part about the whole weekend is that I did very few student kind of things, which is something I haven't done in a long time... or at least feels like a long time.

But now I need to get back to work!