Hoping hoping

Tomorrow I am meeting with my manager to discuss my application to reduce my working hours (so that I can have a day a week to write my thesis, before I entirely forget what it’s all about). So any prayers, candles, good thoughts and vibes, etc much appreciated, thanks all.

[Tues 9th pm. Thanks everyone. Here's an update: meeting was cancelled, am hoping to have it tomorrow instead. Sigh]

Getting there

I had an email today from the editors of the volume for which I wrote a chapter ages ago following the conference I went to and spoke at in Helsinki ages and ages ago. It’s good news, they have found a publisher so contracts will be signed soon. I might have to do a final bit of tweaking here and there, but basically it looks like I will soon break my publishing duck. Which in the scheme of things isn’t a massive thing, but it gives me hope that there is a way out of my day job And also reassures me that I *can* write when I put my mind to it (and when I’m not so knackered from the day job that vegging in front of the internet is all I can manage). Hooray!

Nonsensical

So I have to write a summary of a conference paper to include in an application for financial support to enable me to attend the conference to present said paper. The conference is not till the end of July. We all know that this means the paper will not be written till mid-July at the earliest. The summary has to be written tonight.

Logically (I think HD’s influence is starting to show) a summary of a non-existent paper would be pretty short. Somehow I don’t think that is quite what the funders are looking for, however. Sigh.

In other news, my supervisor has said some very nice things about the chapter I submitted (at the last minute, unsurprisingly) just before we went on holiday, and which had stressed me out because I’d felt my revisions were so superficial. Though apparently there are still lots of very long sentences in it. As if I’d do a thing like that.

Guilt

Today I went into uni rather than work (this has been planned for a while, using up some annual leave). I had a good chat with a fellow PhD writer-upper, who reminded me (this was a rehash of a regular conversation we had, but I’d not seen her for a few months) how the PhD process seems to be as infused with guilt as any religion. However much work you do, you’re convinced you haven’t done enough. However much work you do, everyone else seems to have done more. However interesting and original your research is, it’s contrived and unoriginal compared with everyone else. “Good enough” is never good enough. No wonder it’s stressful.

In other, utterly unrelated news, after only a few days off the chocolate and alcohol I have so many zits I look horrific! If you see someone driving round Glasgow tomorrow with a paper bag over their head, you’ll know who it is.

Holidays

I haven’t blogged for a couple of weeks as last week (as many of my usual handful of readers are already aware) we were on holiday in Venice for the week. I took about 400 pictures which will take a while to get sorted and online (not all of them!), ate too much, walked all over the place (Venice being that kind of a place), read more than usual, relaxed, enjoyed spending an entire week with HD (that was the best bit!), chilled, usual holiday stuff really. Now I’m back I’m trying not to think about going to w*rk tomorrow morning, and that I have to mark OU essays in the next couple of days and submit another chapter revision as well (the chapter should be OK, it’s the methodology chapter which was my favourite to write – it was very therapeutic as a lot of it was All About Me ). I have just spent the last hour and a half sorting out a problem with my OU students who are doing some online group-work (which I have to say is on the whole infinitely preferable to the real-life equivalent!) – nothing serious serious but awkward and couldn’t be left. So now my (admittedly red wine-related) headache is showing no signs of disappearing, so I think I might be off to bed in a minute. Photos and holiday musings (of which there are a fair few) will have to wait a few days, I think.

My poor neglected thesis

I haven’t written much about the student experience (after all, the main point of this blog) recently. There is a good reason for this.

(excuse me while I cower with guilt at the thought of my poor neglected thesis).

I had a long conversation (well, one-sided ramble if I’m honest) with HD today about how I feel my job is exhausting me to the point that the last thing in the world I want to do is my thesis (even though if I’m honest, really the last thing I want to do is actually my day job). I have set myself a few mini-targets to get me through being at work – end of this week we have a holiday (YAY), end of Feb I will have done enough hours to be able to reregister as a health visitor when my registration next comes up for renewal (not for over 2 years, but it’s good as a first short-term goal), mid-June the OU course finishes so I’ll have one less thing to take up my time away from the thesis, end of June I will have been in the job the same amount of time as my first health visiting job after I qualified so if I can stay longer it will be better for my CV, end of July I have a conference to attend so moving job before that would be too stressful, same sort of time I’m aiming to submit my thesis (eeeeeeeek) so likewise it’s silly to be jobhunting/changing before then. Of course if HD gets a permanent job somewhere else in the meantime then all this will be academic as I will have an excuse to leave earlier, but in the meantime giving myself these short-term goals will hopefully make life a bit more bearable.

It doesn’t change the fact though that I am spending far too little time on my thesis. I know I was a world champion procrastinator the 4 years I was at uni actually being paid to do the thing, but now I’m too tired to procrastinate.

Which is a shame as this evening I discovered an opportunity to procrastinate in a way that would actually look good on the academic side of my CV, but I don’t think I’m ever going to have the time. I might make a discreet enquiry (it involves blogging) but I probably need to be realistic and manage the plates I’m already juggling rather than taking on anything else.

Creative chaos

If this article is true, then my PhD will be a shoe-in

And I’ll be a professor in no time!

New Year not-resolutions

Rather than do either a. a scary list of things I aim to do this year which then make me feel inadequate because I will fail to live up to them or b. a long rambling screed of streams of consciousness over why I want to achieve the unachievable anyway, I’m just going to put up here, for my reference as much as anything else (so it won’t be the great writing you’ve come to expect from this blog ), a kind of combination of the two which hopefully will be neither scary nor rambling, but more a kind of wish-list or stuff I’d like to see happen but not stuff I’ll get too obsessive about. We’ll see.

To get the elephant (or in my case perhaps more accurately hippo) in the room out of the way first, I’ll at least mention weight loss. I’m aiming for about 1lb a week, which will hopefully see me lose about a stone by Easter. There are a few reasons why I want to lose weight, none of which I particularly want to go into here, but I want to end the year feeling better physically, and feeling better about myself physically, than I have started it.

I want my PhD to be over and done with this year. And get back to writing for the fun of it (yes academic writing can be fun).

I’d love to have cleared my debts this year. I should have one card cleared in the next couple of months; the other one will take longer but I have just increased my payment so hopefully I’ll start making a dent in that soon and get onto the parental debts too. That would be good.

I don’t really want to end the year in health visiting if I can help it. Though at the moment that’s a bit out of my hands – while I’m paying off debts and HD is in temporary work I’m not going to give up permanent work. Whether or not I’m still in health visiting, by the time I finish the PhD (hopefully in the summer) I want to be starting a course which will get me qualified in the area of nursing I want to go into (more of which later if it actually happens). If I do manage to leave this current job, maybe I’ll try and do some more OU tutoring if I can.

I want to get back more into my faith, and what it means for my life. I was very challenged by conversations with HD’s sister and brother-in-law over the holidays, and although their vision is not mine particularly, their heart and commitment is something to which I aspire (and from which I’m still a long way away).

I want to be a better wife. HD says he’s happy with the one he’s got (he’s very lovely like that), and I don’t mean total personality transplant or anything, but I think I can aim to be less selfish and more loving without causing him too much consternation

Creatively, I’d like to get to know my shiny new camera better and maybe start another photo project as I think my Glasgow blog is running out of steam a bit and the Sibiu blog is running out of photos! And I’d like to draw a couple of pictures at some point as well, it’s been ages (over a year) since I last drew anything.

There’s other stuff as well, like wanting to know where we’ll be living and for HD to have a permanent job and for us to be together all the time and all that sort of thing, but at the moment that’s all a bit out of our hands. I can start to do some of the stuff above though.

I feel pretty good about 2010, all told

Still here

… just being boring and unblogworthy.

I had supervision this evening after work; this is the first time I’ve been back to university since starting my job. It felt very strange being back, but was good to get some positive feedback on the chapter and to talk about something other than the colour/consistency/amount of nappy contents*.

What was encouraging was that my supervisors both felt that with the thesis as it is now – all the chapters except the Introduction and Conclusion in draft form – if my deadline was the end of the year they would be more or less happy for me to submit it, and would expect a tough viva and considerable corrections, but not a fail. What I’m doing instead (aiming to submit next summer) is revising and rerevising to make the viva a more positive experience and to ultimately have fewer corrections. So I felt good about that, although there is still a fair bit of work to do. We also started throwing a few names of potential examiners around – it’s starting to get a bit more real now!

In other news, last night at our least successful book group yet, 3 people (none of whom had read the book and at least one hadn’t started it) didn’t come, and of the 3 of us that did go, one had nearly finished (few pages to go), one (the one who is usually ultrakeen and reads the book and several others beside in the time it takes me to manage a few chapters) was only a quarter of the way through due to the book arriving late from amazon, and I had been so snowed under with marking essays and writing the chapter that I hadn’t even bought, never mind read the book. So we have decided to stick with the same book for the next time we meet, and hopefully more of us will have read it by then. I really like my book group, it’s full of unscary people who are human and not book obsessives. I’d find that sort of group a bit stressful. Ours is as much about eating cake and drinking tea as it is reading the book

* can you tell I’m loving the new job.

This week I shall mostly be …

* marking OU essays, and
* writing a thesis chapter, and
* working full time, while
* trying not to cough up any more of my lungs (a fine image for a professional health promoter, no?).

No wonder I’m knackered.

But, excitingly, today HD and I booked our first proper holiday since our honeymoon almost 2 years ago. We are off adventuring in February, I can’t wait!