Alice shares...
skookumchick | December 8, 2008I'm fried. Tired, irritated, avoiding work. Note I have not posted on my dismal failure of InaDWriMo. I was so relieved to make it to Friday evening, I was just gasping.
Mark Bittman holds a secular sabbath for himself (a term he attributes to the blogosphere), where he turns off all his technological gadgets for a day. That may be a new year's resolution for me. In the meantime, instead of (a lot of) work this weekend, we did laundry, moved furniture, and decorated our house for Christmas instead. And we wrote almost all of our Christmas cards - 44 so far. :-)
Now it is Monday morning…
skookumchick | November 26, 2008Well, my data collecting trip could have gone better. Besides the 2" of snow, and the fact one participant had to bow out (hopefully to be rescheduled soon), I discovered that one of my participants was not actually at the company I was visiting, but at a competitor's company. In another state. Needless to say, I didn't make that interview, and had to embarrassedly confess and reschedule, and then somehow pull myself together to carry through on the remaining meeting and interview. In the end, I learned a lot about how companies work and how I might be able to investigate various things,…
skookumchick | November 19, 2008Since my public confession, I kind of have gotten my writing groove on. I think I'm ready to turn revision-paper #1 around (at least, send it to my mom to see what she thinks), and I've made progress on the gender-diss paper. Yay me! Now moving on to class prep, and meeting prep...
skookumchick | November 4, 2008And now Obama's real work begins. Indiana is still too close to call. (I didn't think I would ever say this, but thank goodness for Bob Barr!) But it doesn't matter. Breathe a sigh of relief, and now roll up our sleeves and start fixing this global mess we're in. And please please please keep Obama and his family safe while he gets down to the real job now, and some crazy big problems we all need to help solve. Let's hope we can.
How we spent election night. That black square in the upper right of my screen is my video iChat with my parents in Wisconsin - they were sitting in the dark…
skookumchick | October 31, 2008I've been tagged twice to tell you 6 random things about me. Here are the rules:
The Rules
Link to the person who tagged you.
Post the rules on your blog.
Write 6 random things about yourself.
Tag 6 people at the end of your post and link to them.
Let each person you have tagged know by leaving a comment on their blog.
Let the tagger know when your entry has posted.
Number one for me? My favorite holiday is Halloween. :-)
It really is. I've loved Halloween best since I was a kid. Okay, kind of because candy was involved. Kind of because I got to spend it with my friends. Now that I'm…
skookumchick | October 27, 2008I'm very very behind on blogging. I have two conferences to write up for you, 3 blogs to share with you, and 3 update posts. But I have another migraine. So they will have to wait. But feel free to donate money to DonorsChoose in the meantime. And I am indeed sad for the little pre-engineering kids. And the blind kids who also need to learn science.
For an uplifting time, however, you can check out how Annika is doing. In 3 words: pretty darn good.
skookumchick | September 12, 2008I saw this meme over at at Jane's, who saw it at Janet's: The Vegetarian's Hundred, a veggie response to the Omnivore's Hundred meme. Here are Jane/Janet's rules:
If you want to play along, here's how you do it: copy the list, including my instructions, and bold any items you have eaten and strike out any you would never eat, and then post it to your blog.
I'm going to add the following rule: italicize items you have made (or grown) yourself. (Presumably, you've eaten those as well.
Fun! And I'm in avoidance about work too. Best think about food!
1. Real macaroni and cheese, made from…
skookumchick | August 26, 2008The Scientiae theme for September is "my summer vacation." My first week of class started today, so perhaps this is a good way to remind myself of what I've done this summer.
We had dinner early in May at a friend and colleague's house to acknowledge my husband's decision to step away from his tenure-track job.
I went to a co-PI meeting in Washington DC for a grant we are hoping to get in mid-May - learned a lot, networked, and got all jazzed up to get the grant. Unfortunately, at the end of August, we're still waiting to hear. We have made progress in the meantime, however - we have…
skookumchick | August 12, 2008As I'm transitioning away from an academic/personal life of long-distance commuting, I thought this would be a good time (or perhaps the last good time?) to share some of my tips for how to help one's marriage/partnership survive two academic careers in two cities.
Of course, I only have this last year as experience with faculty life (although my husband has been a faculty member for 5). But before that, there was 4 years of my commuting as a grad student (a 3.5 hr commute), and 1.5 years of LDR (a plane trip) as an undergrad. But that was a long time ago, and I was a different person then…
skookumchick | August 10, 2008
Photo from 2005, before many paint, gutter, and plant upgrades
I'm sitting at our dining room table in Illinois, and the sunlight is slanting through the windows onto the wall where a favorite print used to live. The moving truck comes tomorrow to move the rest of our furniture to Indiana, and we close on the sale of the house on Thursday. So this is the last night we'll spend in the house that we moved into in 2003 (before we were married, or even engaged!).
I'm a little sad. Not because we're facing the end of the long-distance commuting (on and off for most of the 10 years we've…
skookumchick | August 6, 2008ScienceWoman blogged about her thoughts about going into Tenure Track Year 2 in time for Cherish's August Scientiae on transitions. I've been thinking about it too, and in particular with respect to how I accomplish some of those academic goals - good teaching, good research, good citizenry - without killing myself. Having my husband in the same town and only one house to worry about will be a start, and it is that latter aspect which makes me propose a new book to discuss this fall.
I was packing a bookshelf this weekend, and I came across a book a friend gave me when I graduated last year…
skookumchick | July 27, 2008I'm a This American Life junkie - I completely agree with the woman in the TAL ad who says she can't eat crunchy foods while listening to it in case she misses something. I always seem to be doing something else Sundays at noon when it is broadcast on my local NPR station, so I tend to download it as a podcast and listen to it as I drive back and forth between Indiana and Illinois. (This means I'm sometimes a couple weeks behind the broadcast episode.) And while I invariably find the stories compelling, gripping, moving, and educational (such as the episode on the Giant Pool of Money which…
skookumchick | July 21, 2008
W00T! Although for a lower price than we had hoped, oh well. But a really good closing date, woo hoo! Now on to the inspection drama... apparently we are to anticipate 4 inspectors: radon, termite, general paid for by the buyers, and the bank's inspector. Keep your fingers crossed...
skookumchick | July 10, 2008
We've been in Davos, Switzerland for almost a week. I've been attending the Research in Engineering Education Symposium, and my husband has been hiking his little feet off. Before the conference, we had a gorgeous day of hiking, including past this meadow. The flowers are spectacular, as are the rest of the mountain views. At the end of this hike was a little restaurant, along with a bunch of cheerful Bavarians who bought us local beer and taught us the prost song.
I'll blog about the conference (along with the NWSA conference from mid-June) once I get back to the States. Tomorrow…
skookumchick | June 30, 2008
Some of you may remember that my summer turned into a very busy travel and conference season. The Big Trip has now started - a trip to England, France and Switzerland (England and France to see friends and family and because we planned on doing this trip after I finished my dissertation but didn't have time then, 'cause I was starting a job or something, Switzerland for a conference).
We flew to London-Heathrow arriving about 6 am Monday morning, spent time finding out my English money is so old they don't accept it anymore and we didn't have any new money, and making our way to…
skookumchick | June 30, 2008This is another excerpt from our travel journal to Isle Royale. The first day is here; second day here; third day is here; fourth day is here. Photos by me, text by my husband.
Thursday May 29
Rock Harbour to Raspberry Island and Scoville Point, and return
It is the last full day on the island, and once again we had great hopes and plans for awaking early in order to go do much stuff. Atop the list was Raspberry Island, a one-mile canoe ride away over a not-very protected part of Rock Harbour. We had been foiled in our attempt of this trip by the wind on Wednesday, but were hoping that an…
skookumchick | June 23, 2008This is another excerpt from our travel journal to Isle Royale. The first day is here; second day here; third day is here. Photos by me, text by my husband.
Wednesday May 28
Rock Harbour to Lookout Louise, and return
So let me digress to the future again. [What was going on again? Oh yeah.] I write today from the point of Raspberry Island, looking out over the big lake, having just practiced Alice and my Rule #1: everything tastes better outside. The writing is better outside too - a good view, a comfortable rock, and a warm sun to heat my toes, still a bit chilled from wading in the…
skookumchick | June 13, 2008This is another excerpt from our travel journal to Isle Royale. The first day is here; second day here. Photos by me, text by my husband.
Tuesday May 27
Rock Harbour to Mt. Franklin and return
I write this on the night it actually happened [hah], with Alice slowly peeling the tape off her feet behind me. [What can I say? My boots tend to give me blisters. You know, perhaps I should edit these more to avoid the TMI factor...] We're both beat from a long hike today, but her foot tape was a success. Sore muscles, but no blisters. [Yay!]
We slept in this morning, I think mostly out of fear…
skookumchick | June 11, 2008I had a meeting yesterday at 4, but was stood up (by a colleague who is now completely apologetic). I had another meeting today I thought at 1:30, but no one appeared. I went back to my office, saw I had got the time wrong and it was at 2:30. The meeting had been scheduled for 2, and I had misread the change of time email. In addition, I scheduled another meeting at 3 so I would have ended up talking to the 2:30 person for only 30 minutes. So I swapped my 3:00 meeting with the 3:00 person's 3:30 meeting, which worked out well for the 3:30 meeting person as she had the meeting on her…
skookumchick | June 7, 2008Note: When we travel, we keep journals. My husband writes, and I take the photos; he skips the back of every page, and I put in photos. The next few posts from me will be from our journal of our trip to Isle Royale at the end of May. Note also that the "I"s are my husband, and the "Alice"s are me. :-)
Sunday May 25
Madison to Copper Harbour
The trip begins today, as we move from the real world into a few days of removal. We're up to getting away -- forgetting all of the issues and troubles of home. No thoughts this week of the job(s), the new job at Purdue for me (maybe) the impending…