[I have to interrupt myself to say that we're watching All the President's Men right now and looking at that newsroom full of papers and files is making me shudder! I'm so glad I live in the age of computers so I don't have to look at that sort of clutter all over my office mates' desks all the time. There's enough clutter in the 21st century as it is! Also, I can't imagine doing all of that research without the internet. Unbelievable that that was the US less than forty years ago.]
- My dissertation committee approved my prospectus! For those not familiar with PhD program jargon, the prospectus is basically the plan for the dissertation: what I'm planning to write about, my plan to do the research, and the approximate timeline for completion. The great thing is, that's the last hurdle I had to jump. Now the only thing that can stop me from completing the PhD is my endless ability to procrastinate. It's nice that the only major block I have to overcome now is myself. The hard part is actually forcing myself to work now that there are no deadlines at all whatsoever (other than really, really distant ones, like the fact that if I'm not finished in some absurd time frame like 5 years I'll have to re-create my committee and effectively start the approval process all over again). Some friends and I have created a writing group that meets every two weeks. The sole purpose of the group is to keep the four of us on track. I'd start feeling lame if every two weeks I showed up and was like, "Still no progress to report and nothing for you guys to read. Sorry guys!" I think (I hope) that will help. Other than that, I'm trying to figure out a good routine so that I can do a bit of dissertation work every weekday.
- I've really picked up the pace with my part-time jobs to try to bring in as much extra money as possible. With the wedding and honeymoon looming (just a little more than 9 months until my wedding day!) Penn and I agreed we need to be saving up as much money as possible right now. So in addition to my regular teaching assistantship I've been taking regular tutoring jobs (I'm going to be working 3-5 hours a week every week from now until early June) and I've been baby-sitting. I have a friend at school who has a one-year-old son. His wife works full-time "normal" hours (9-5) and he's like me: a researcher with a part-time, pretty flexible job, so he's doing the bulk of the daytime baby duty. He teaches Mondays, though, so I baby-sit on Monday afternoons while he's teaching. Apparently I've been so helpful that he and his wife now want me to come for a second block of time each week so that he can have some baby-free time to work on his own dissertation project. They pay me $20/hour (!!!) and I don't feel like I'm in a position to be turning down that kind of money for what is basically a fun and (mostly) easy job. Having said that, I'm not the one who had a baby while trying to dissertate, so I'm not going to compromise my own research agenda to watch his baby. Still, most weeks I have the time to help out and I'd like the extra cash so I'm baby-sitting as much as I reasonably can. I'm also going to be my cousin's full-time nanny this week while the regular nanny is off resting following a surgical procedure. So basically between my two baby-sitting charges I get to play mom all week this week. It's good practice, I guess!
- I bought some amazingly, fantastically awesome plane tickets this week. First of all, Penn and I purchased the tickets for our honeymoon! We're going to New Zealand!!! We've been talking about wanting to go there for a while, and long before we even got engaged we had decided that we wanted to go there for our honeymoon. Last week tickets happened to drop to an amazingly low price, so we bought them on the spot. It feels like a wild, crazy thing to buy a plane ticket to freakin' New Zealand. As I told Penn, "We're really committed to doing this now!" Penn still has a lot of planning to do (he's in charge of planning the honeymoon since I'm at the wheel with wedding planning) but it's so incredibly exciting to have our plane tickets and know that in January we'll be in New Zealand for three weeks (or New Zealand for part of that time with a side trip to a South Pacific island for part of that time; that's still TBD). This is one of my dream must-do-before-I-die trips, so I can't wait to go. What a cool way to start our married life!
Today I also bought a plane ticket to Missoula, Montana. Jen (my friend from college) is getting married there in August. I've never been to Montana before, so I'm excited to cross another state off my list. Unfortunately Penn can't come to Montana with me (he can't take too much time off work this year since he did that long Europe trip with me in November and he'll need to take three weeks off in January) but I think it will be a fun solo trip. - I biked sixteen miles yesterday! I had to stop at an Exxon around mile 9 to buy a granola bar because I was starving (note to self: prepare better next time!), and my time was pretty dismal--it took me just over two hours, not pushing myself at all--but when I finished I felt like I could have gone further. My goal is to do a 20 mile bike ride this season, and that definitely seems feasible.
- Last weekend I saw my first presidential motorcade! I didn't actually see the president (too much window tinting) but it was absolutely, 100% him and his entourage. Pretty cool.
That's all I have to report, really. Things are very good. This is a weird position to be in, to be working on several long-term projects (my summer project, our wedding, my dissertation) that won't give me any visible payoff until several months from now at the earliest. It makes it hard to stay focused and to keep powering on when sometimes at night I get in bed and just feel like I spun my wheels in place all day. But I know logically that I am, in fact, making forward progress toward all kinds of worthwhile things, and that's a good feeling.
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