The morning routine I had done in two hours a couple days ago I've cut somewhere between fifteen and sixty minutes off already. The neighbor's kid who shows up to take the dog out during C—'s work hours has worked out some new times with me — I appear to be bringing him in earlier in the afternoon Tuesday and Thursday and later, while I'm away at aikido, Monday and Wednesday. That will work terrifically.
The cats, meanwhile, have been treated to a couple new toys and a new filtered water fountain. Their old one was apparently discontinued, and I can't find replacement filters for it anywhere.
Some code is getting executed to get new results for the extension of my conference paper. This code represents the easy part, but at least it's something. Harder will be when I have to incorporate a new variable or six not included in the data set as formatted by earlier authors; this working version of the data also doesn't include the unique identifier from the original published version, so a simple join operation is out.
Thursday, June 9, 2011
Wednesday, June 8, 2011
C—'s home
C— is a generation older than I am, and has a research job at the same university where I'm a grad student. Her home is an adorable cottage in a beautiful, treeful, and old suburb with every building different from the next one over. If we're going to have suburbs at all, I'd like them to be more like this old place.
The home is pleasantly appointed and, for a place with a dog, kept terrifically clean. One feature of note is glass doors (with white wooden frames) between many of the rooms; I think they must have attracted C— in particular, who seems to enjoy glass decor and utensils quite a bit. She's got many glass dishes for eating from and so forth.
I'm slowly getting used to where everything is in the kitchen, where I have the greatest need of using the tools she's provided. One great idea that I can use when I leave here has already impressed itself on me in that space: from now on the counters are to be tiled with used paper grocery bags from Trader Joe's when not in use. This will be a much easier way of keeping them clean than actually teaching the cats not to get up and walk on them in the first place! This would never have occurred to me at my own apartment, but the change of space and the need to take care of a home I've been entrusted with by another helped.
I'll have more to write some time soon on the idea of living more intentionally — with more <i>ki</i>, in the terms of the martial art I'm a student of. This afternoon, meanwhile, I'm going to dive back into the conference paper referred to below, getting back into familiarity with the data set.
The home is pleasantly appointed and, for a place with a dog, kept terrifically clean. One feature of note is glass doors (with white wooden frames) between many of the rooms; I think they must have attracted C— in particular, who seems to enjoy glass decor and utensils quite a bit. She's got many glass dishes for eating from and so forth.
I'm slowly getting used to where everything is in the kitchen, where I have the greatest need of using the tools she's provided. One great idea that I can use when I leave here has already impressed itself on me in that space: from now on the counters are to be tiled with used paper grocery bags from Trader Joe's when not in use. This will be a much easier way of keeping them clean than actually teaching the cats not to get up and walk on them in the first place! This would never have occurred to me at my own apartment, but the change of space and the need to take care of a home I've been entrusted with by another helped.
I'll have more to write some time soon on the idea of living more intentionally — with more <i>ki</i>, in the terms of the martial art I'm a student of. This afternoon, meanwhile, I'm going to dive back into the conference paper referred to below, getting back into familiarity with the data set.
Third day, morning
How does anyone get along with a dog in the house, who uses up so much attention so much of the time? An older dog would sleep a great deal, but Naia, just older than a puppy, leaves me quite afraid I'll upset or hurt her just by having my mind on anything else for too long. After being away at work yesterday for four hours, and later at aikido for almost two, she all but burst with excitement when I returned home. That's less than a whole work day that I've been gone.
I didn't sleep terrifically, with Naia making various noises in pursuit of some kind of attention and later one or both of the cats repeatedly invading the bed — here at C—'s place the pets are not allowed on much of the furniture, including the beds.
I did a little flute practice this morning, for the first time in months and months. I will keep doing so the first time I let the dog out of the house into the back yard in the morning; none of the pets like the sound, but the kitties can get away into quiet spots downstairs, while the dog hasn't much of anywhere to go.
I didn't sleep terrifically, with Naia making various noises in pursuit of some kind of attention and later one or both of the cats repeatedly invading the bed — here at C—'s place the pets are not allowed on much of the furniture, including the beds.
I did a little flute practice this morning, for the first time in months and months. I will keep doing so the first time I let the dog out of the house into the back yard in the morning; none of the pets like the sound, but the kitties can get away into quiet spots downstairs, while the dog hasn't much of anywhere to go.
Tuesday, June 7, 2011
Upcoming work
I hardly did a great job with purposefulness at today's work hours. In a three-hour shift, all I actually got done was walking one fellow student through uploading his personal Web page to the department server. Other than that, my time was largely wasted. This is exactly the kind of thing I'm working on improving about myself.
In truth, there is a great deal of real work that I could stand to get done. The work projects I must prioritize include:
My macaroni and cheese is nearly done baking upstairs. Time to cut up a salad to eat with it and dig in.
In truth, there is a great deal of real work that I could stand to get done. The work projects I must prioritize include:
- Social science research.
- My dissertation in evolutionary game theory. Work on this, at least for the moment, still mostly consists of writing to one member of my prospectus committee and trying to get his attention to some additional material I sent him as long ago as the middle of March. When I learn whether and how well that work addressed the concerns he had at my original prospectus defense, the whole committee and I can move forward toward a revised prospectus and defense date.
- My conference paper. I presented a conference paper in April, one that's got nothing to do with my main line of work, but that I really didn't find hard at all. I want to expand the work done in the conference version, which wasn't much more than a demo, according to the comments I received in presentation and other goals of my own for the research, and, having done so, to turn it around for my first individually-authored publication. That expansion of the work will consist in nothing but adding terms to the code running my models to include more columns of the data set, and perhaps rebuilding the data set if the version I got from previous authors in this line of studies doesn't actually have all the variables I mean to use.
- Quiz bowl tournament organizing and writing. My school runs a large high school invitational tournament. Last year under two co-directors and co-editors, there were some complaints about quality; this year, I'm taking over directing and editing to keep any tasks from falling through the cracks. To get started on the questions right away, I'm going to have to do the following.
- Find three assistant editors, one each for literature, science, and history, and get them to start working with me. My history and science candidates are known, but I haven't contacted them; I don't have a good choice yet for literature. These will be people from my own quizbowl team who can commit to working a great deal, and doing so over the summer.
- Together with them, start compiling an answer document. The whole team will be involved in writing questions, but it's much easier for them to do so if some answers are picked out ahead of time.
- Contact some outside partners — other teams — to provide some supplementary questions. Those folks will get to run the same tournament in other locations for their assistance. Since they're outside normal editorial channels, though, I want to get started with them very early; last year, much of what we got from other schools was unusably badly written, and we got it too late to collaborate on editing it into shape.
My macaroni and cheese is nearly done baking upstairs. Time to cut up a salad to eat with it and dig in.
Skeleton of a schedule
This retreat time is to be divided, roughly, between time spent living my personal life deliberately and critically and time spent deliberately pursuing one or more of the professional or avocational projects I am called to complete — my work, so to speak.
Inasmuch as I've still got computer lab hours to attend on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 1:00 to 4:00, I've decided that mornings will be set aside for the former and afternoons for the latter, broadly speaking. I don't have many specific choices made, but my goal is to get them made over the course of one week and have them in place for the next two.
Early mornings will continue to look like the one I spent today. The whole schedule of attendance to pets and of waking up between 7:00 and 9:00 worked very well. I don't wholly know yet what the rest of deliberately living my individual life will mean.
I'm going to write a separate post about the other main goal, the work projects I'm pursuing. I started writing it here, but I've already got too much to write to include it in this otherwise short post, or to finish before I've got to be off making lunch and traveling in to campus.
I mean not to come out of the house to do much besides church on Sundays. Maybe, maybe for some really special events I'll emerge, but I won't let my evenings get spent on the first thing I get suggested every night. I'll still be going to aikido classes, though, including tonight at 7:15 and tomorrow at 6:30, back in the city. (Without choir practice to attend in the summer, I might even go to the satellite dojo for their Thursday classes, although I haven't decided.)
I will pray at least three times daily: once on waking between 7:00 and 8:00, once just after lunch at noon, and once in the evening. If I can schedule it well, I'll set aside both an evening prayer time and a separate one for compline, presumably right before bed.
Inasmuch as I've still got computer lab hours to attend on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 1:00 to 4:00, I've decided that mornings will be set aside for the former and afternoons for the latter, broadly speaking. I don't have many specific choices made, but my goal is to get them made over the course of one week and have them in place for the next two.
Early mornings will continue to look like the one I spent today. The whole schedule of attendance to pets and of waking up between 7:00 and 9:00 worked very well. I don't wholly know yet what the rest of deliberately living my individual life will mean.
I'm going to write a separate post about the other main goal, the work projects I'm pursuing. I started writing it here, but I've already got too much to write to include it in this otherwise short post, or to finish before I've got to be off making lunch and traveling in to campus.
I mean not to come out of the house to do much besides church on Sundays. Maybe, maybe for some really special events I'll emerge, but I won't let my evenings get spent on the first thing I get suggested every night. I'll still be going to aikido classes, though, including tonight at 7:15 and tomorrow at 6:30, back in the city. (Without choir practice to attend in the summer, I might even go to the satellite dojo for their Thursday classes, although I haven't decided.)
I will pray at least three times daily: once on waking between 7:00 and 8:00, once just after lunch at noon, and once in the evening. If I can schedule it well, I'll set aside both an evening prayer time and a separate one for compline, presumably right before bed.
Second day, morning
I awoke at 6:30 but didn't arise till as late as 7:00. That's still earlier than I've consistently managed, and should be how I operate for the rest of the month that sees me here. By 8:00 I'd fed the dog breakfast, showered, dressed, prayed, and made some tea for the morning.
The dog and I took a twenty-minute walk in the neighborhood to the north of the house. We were getting along nicely. I brought the dog back home and went into the center of town for a bagel, which I'd brought back and eaten by 9:00. The dog stayed in the yard during my breakfast.
When she came back in, she got hold of the paper bag my bagel was wrapped in, and took it into the living room to tear it up and eat it. I took it away in pieces as I could get them. Since then, she's been much more anxious. Either she just doesn't understand what happened to the bag of trash, or she thinks she's upset me somehow.
After I put the dishes away from the dishwasher I'm quite excited to use while here, it was a great deal of effort to convince and conduct her into the kitchen and sunroom, where she's allowed to stay while no one's home, in order to make my initial grocery run for the week. She also found a way to bust into the basement, where she isn't allowed at any time, for the second time in as many days.
I hope I'm treating her in ways she understands and accepts, but wonder if I'm confusing or upsetting her now and again just by not being familiar with the way things are done in this home.
Monday, June 6, 2011
Unto the Hills
Hi. I'm the Friar, a social sciences Ph.D. student in a Midwestern city. I'm on a small sort of retreat in the suburbs taking care of my good friend C--'s house and dog while she's away.
For as far back as I can clearly and continuously remember -- though that's not very far any more -- my life has been largely unexamined, largely undirected. I do what I'm told. When not told to do anything, I do whatever comes to mind first, unless it appears hard, in which case I start something else.
In the month of June, though, that won't work very well. No one will be around to tell me what I should do all that often. The obvious nearby places for me to go waste my time -- not working at my office, not working at the corner Starbucks, and so on -- will instead all be fifteen minutes away by car. The Internet will only be accessible from one inconvenient spot in the house where I'll have to kneel on the floor to use it, and there won't be any such thing as ESPN in here.
Over these three to four weeks, I'll be working to recenter, to demonstrate and teach to myself a renewed capacity for purposefulness that will be necessary for the home stretch of my doctoral work over the next two years. Perhaps I won't be here long enough to get very far, but I'll be at least a slightly better-working person when I emerge.
I'll also be working, but not very much, I don't think. I mean to get myself used to scheduling my activities -- caring for a dog will help me along with that -- and much of what I mean to schedule for this retreat period is not my proper work but setting myself up with the capability to both begin and finish those pieces of work with which I have had difficulty doing either of late.
I'll be stopping late in the evenings to do something else important. I'll be examining, recounting and reflecting on, my ongoing life. The examination may not be very deep, especially at first, but, like the rest of what I'm setting out to gain, even starting a pilot program of gains in examination-of-life will be of great value. Look for descriptions of what I've been up to each day and plans for the next day and the next week.
I'll be praying, regularly and frequently, perhaps as much as four times a day. Like everything else, when I start, it will be rudimentary. It will get better as it goes.
Of course, I'll also be watching over three furry friends, C--'s dog and my own two cats, who don't know or trust each other very well yet, keeping them out of trouble with themselves and one another. I'm sure they'll soak all my spare attention right up.
For as far back as I can clearly and continuously remember -- though that's not very far any more -- my life has been largely unexamined, largely undirected. I do what I'm told. When not told to do anything, I do whatever comes to mind first, unless it appears hard, in which case I start something else.
In the month of June, though, that won't work very well. No one will be around to tell me what I should do all that often. The obvious nearby places for me to go waste my time -- not working at my office, not working at the corner Starbucks, and so on -- will instead all be fifteen minutes away by car. The Internet will only be accessible from one inconvenient spot in the house where I'll have to kneel on the floor to use it, and there won't be any such thing as ESPN in here.
Over these three to four weeks, I'll be working to recenter, to demonstrate and teach to myself a renewed capacity for purposefulness that will be necessary for the home stretch of my doctoral work over the next two years. Perhaps I won't be here long enough to get very far, but I'll be at least a slightly better-working person when I emerge.
I'll also be working, but not very much, I don't think. I mean to get myself used to scheduling my activities -- caring for a dog will help me along with that -- and much of what I mean to schedule for this retreat period is not my proper work but setting myself up with the capability to both begin and finish those pieces of work with which I have had difficulty doing either of late.
I'll be stopping late in the evenings to do something else important. I'll be examining, recounting and reflecting on, my ongoing life. The examination may not be very deep, especially at first, but, like the rest of what I'm setting out to gain, even starting a pilot program of gains in examination-of-life will be of great value. Look for descriptions of what I've been up to each day and plans for the next day and the next week.
I'll be praying, regularly and frequently, perhaps as much as four times a day. Like everything else, when I start, it will be rudimentary. It will get better as it goes.
Of course, I'll also be watching over three furry friends, C--'s dog and my own two cats, who don't know or trust each other very well yet, keeping them out of trouble with themselves and one another. I'm sure they'll soak all my spare attention right up.
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