*pfffffffffffft*

Hello blog,

It’s been a while.  I realize that if I don’t write in you, it kind of defeats the purpose of having you. But you see, this thing called life happened, and I had to set you on the back burner.  Will you still love me, even though I’ve neglected you?

I’ve had a lot to write about.  There’s the normal research, and the dissertation, and the job search, some other happenings, and normal life.  And there’s a lot tied in to all of those things that I just didn’t want to publish on the intertubes.  It’s not that I lost my blog voice…it’s more like it got laryngitis.  I admire the people that throw it all out there on the internet for the world to see, but that’s just not me.

It’s the end of the semester.  Friday I submitted my last formal assignment for the semester.  There’s still plenty to do, but there’s more wiggle room.  And writing room.  Because I’ll admit it – sometimes after writing for 10+ hours per day, I just don’t want to write here.  No offense.  But enough with the writing already.

There’s been plenty of stress.  This whole job search?  Sucks.  It’s a lot harder than I thought it would be, and it’s brought all sorts of self-doubts to mind.   Recovering from surgery, and potentially facing another?  It threw me out of whack.  Dissertation data collection?  I didn’t want to do it.  At all.  I did it though, some is still trickling in.  I’m ready to analyze the data and be done with it.

So rather than turn this into a pity party or a major whine (because I still love my life, and I’m very happy), I’ll just blow the rest of the cobwebs off of you, and spend the next couple of days recapping some of the more fun adventures I’ve had.

And probably do a meme or two.  Because that’s easy.

Forgive me?

Smooches,

Annie

The recovery is still going.  It seems like in the past week, I had a sudden surge of healing, and I’m feeling much more like my old self.  At least stamina-wise I am.  I seem to have my normal energy back and that’s a good thing!! Physically I’m still not there yet, but I’m (still) trying to be patient.  I am thinking I might go back to the gym this week.  I think all I’ll be able to manage is walking on the treadmill – and walking slower than normal – but it will feel good to get back and do something.

I also realized last week just how behind I got in my schoolwork.  I knew I was going to get a little behind, but when I actually sat down and looked at what needed to get done, I had a huge “Oh, shit!” moment.

My boy and I are heading up to Canada in another week ago to a big sports conference.  I’m really excited to go to it, since it looks like there’s going to be a lot of interesting panels and presentations.  I mean, it’s a whole conference that revolves around sports – how can I not like it?  I’ve also never really been to Canada.  I say ‘really’ because I did go to Niagara Falls a few years ago, and walked to the Canadian side of the falls, but I don’t count that as legitimately going.  This time I need my passport.

I had one solo paper accepted, and we had one joint paper accepted.  The solo paper is the pilot study for what became my dissertation; I looked at how commentary during the 2008 gymnastics competition in Beijing might have a had a very nationally biased slant to it.  I found evidence of some bias, but I’m honestly surprised that it wasn’t bigger.  I still need to analyze the individual event finals, but I’m not sure I’ll be able to do them before we leave.  I’ll try, and if not, I think I have enough data to present with just the team and all-around competitions analyzed.

My boy and I did one where we analyzed the school newspapers of all the schools in the SEC to see if there was a gender bias in the coverage of sports.  I have almost all those numbers run, and there is about a 60/40 split that favors men in actual articles, but the word count of articles about men versus articles about women is just about equal.  The bias isn’t as big as it is in for-profit papers, but (I think) it’s still significant.  I’m excited for that one.

Plus, in the honor of going to a sports conference, I scored us tickets to the Ottawa Senators vs. the NJ Devils hockey game.  I LOVE hockey, and now we’re going to go to a hockey game in Canada.  It’s the land!  I’m a Rangers fan at heart, but I never get to see hockey anymore, so I’ll take the Devils too.  We’ve seen two MLB games so far when we’ve been to conferences, so going to hockey seems like a good fit as well.  One day we’ll have to go to a conference that enables us to hit up an NFL game.

It’s research, right?

I meant to talk about my research, and thought I had a good plan for the next couple of weeks.

Then there was a problem.

It was a pain in my lower right side that started, oh, in July.  It was more annoying than anything. Because I’m awesome, I figured I’d bring it up at my next doctor’s appointment.  In September.  So the ache stayed.  Sometimes it got worse, but mostly it felt like I had been kicked in the right side.  Then it conveniently ramped itself up about a week before I went to the doctor.  Now I could go in complaining of stabbing pains that were now hurting, not just annoying.

I went from one doctor, to the ER, back to the same doctor, then to a new doctor, and it was decided that I needed a diagnostic laprascope done to figure out what the hell was going on.  One doctor said appendix, the other said adhesions or something else.  They both performed the surgery, and the only thing I knew for sure was that my appendix was most likely going to be coming out.

That was two weeks ago tomorrow.  My appendix did go, along with a lot of adhesions and scar tissue.  My mom came down to be my own private nurse (it works out nicely that she has been a registered nurse since 1970).  I have been mostly laying on the couch, recuperating, and not doing much research.

I’m  recuperating nicely from the surgery, and my three incisions apparently look ‘beautiful’.  This was said by both my parents, as the three of us pulled up our shirts this weekend to compare stomach scars.  I, as the beneficiary of the least invasive surgery, and 2009 technology, do have much better looking scars.  Or I will, once they heal.  They are still skeeving me out a little bit.

I still get tired more easily than I’d like.  I can’t pick things up that I normally would (because I like to pick up heavy stuff).  It’s hard to go from being the independent do’er of things to being the one that asks for help.  When I do try, I am either quickly reminded by the healing stomach to stop, or am quickly reprimanded by my boy.  I’m trying to remember to ask for help all the time.  Considering how I normally am, I don’t think I’m doing that bad.

I drove today, for the first time since the surgery.  I’ve been a passenger in a car, and that’s uncomfortable.  Driving was not making me happy at all.  My head should be cleared from the anesthesia, but you apparently use a lot more of your stomach than you realize when driving.  Well, that and the seat belt doesn’t help.  I’m glad I only drove 10 or so miles today.  By the time I got back home,  I was ready to be done.

So I’m still resting, but there’s a conference in a little over three weeks that I’ve got two papers to present at.  Which means I should do them.  One’s going to look at a nationalism bias in commentary of a sporting event – which is actually the pilot study for my dissertation – and the second is a comparison of how much coverage boys versus girls are getting in college newspapers.  One lit review is currently done, the 2nd is being worked on.  The actual research needs to be done, so I’ll have a nice little project to work on as I continue to try to let myself heal and not overdo.

I’m in a wedding in a couple of weeks, and despite losing a bunch of weight (and keeping it off) for my own wedding, I decided to buy a Spanx bodysuit anyway.  It’s not that I even really need it for the slimming effect, but more because the top portion of the dress isn’t the most flattering on me, so I figured I’d just make sure all my lines were smooth underneath.

In the greater Birmingham area, there is one place to buy Spanx.  One.  Sak’s Fifth Avenue.  You know – the place that isn’t exactly student budget friendly? (Or any budget friendly, for that matter.  Budget and Saks do not go in the same sentence unless you are talking about your unlimited budget)  So this is not a place I frequent oh, ever.   I went in on Friday, and they asked me for my phone number or email address.  I picked the lesser of the two evils, and gave my email.

Today I received my first email.  I promptly clicked on the ‘unsubscribe’ link, and hopefully ensured that it will also be my last email.   I don’t know why I found that so funny, but I  did.  That’s a big marketing fail.  Maybe they should just not email people that only go in and buy one thing.  That might be a sign that the people a) aren’t really that interested, or b) don’t have the wallets that are being targeted.

My birthday was Saturday, and I had just the most perfect day ever.  I got to spend the whole day with my boy, no interruptions, no schoolwork, and no stress.  We stopped in Clanton for some fresh peach ice cream (which we hadn’t had in over a year) on our way to Auburn for the football game.  Despite the monsoon that delayed kick off for an hour-ish, it was a great game.  I say that now, because Auburn won.    I had my doubts during the first quarter.  We got home obnoxiously late, which left us nice and tired for a visit with our friends and their absolutely tireless four year old.  I couldn’t have asked for a better day!

I’m debating making some changes to the blog here, as I’m determined not to let it die, and it’s been pretty sad around here.  I’ve started in the past 6 months or so to really get interested in sports research, and I’m debating starting to talk about it on here.  It’s pretty interesting stuff.  To me, at least.  I’m pretty focused on gender differences in sports, and I’m tossing an idea around in my head for a new paper that I think would be really interesting, if I can get the right direction on it.

If nothing else, perhaps pictures of scantily clad male and female athletes will attract some attention.

I’m working on the revisions for the dissertation proposal.  My plan was to have it done by last Friday.  That didn’t happen.  Today I had to email my chair and say “If I’ve switched the experiment to this type of design, then that means all of my old independent variables are wrong, so are my new ones this and that?”

The fact that I’m writing the dissertation and I still don’t know for sure what my independent variables is just one example of why I’m having severe buyers remorse with my program.

My new hope is to finish up the revisions tomorrow.  They asked for clarification on a few things, and asked me to add a couple more things that I’m about convinced don’t exist in the literature.  But because I’m a compulsive overachiever, I’m going to kill myself looking for it.

**********

Tonight I took part in my first fantasy football draft.  It’s an all girls league, and I’m pretty excited.  How’s this for role reversal?  My boy is working late tonight, and I got to go drink beer, eat pizza, and play fantasy football.   Our life is good.

I have no idea how I’m going to fare in fantasy football, because I don’t really understand it.  In the 6th round, I apparently snagged a running back that everyone else was gunning for.  I wasn’t 100% sure who he even was, I just liked the way his stats looked.  It’ll be interesting.  At the very worst, my team will suck, but I’ll still go to the mid-season watch party.  More football and beer, oh darn.

**********

I’m having a complete failing when it’s come to working out lately.  We decided to suspend our Y membership to try to save money, figuring we’d alternate between the gyms at our respective schools.  So far, for me at least, it hasn’t been working out too good.  I’m apparently too battered and beat up to use most of the machines at my boy’s school, and my school is too far to just make a run to.  It’s so frustrating to me, because I was in a really good groove of working out.  Now I just feel lazy and unhealthy, and I hate it.  I wish I could figure out the magic answer.  If I don’t figure something out soon I’m going to be really cranky.

That, or I’m just going to take over the darn Y membership and pay it for my own sanity.

*************

In the bestest news (besides my ABD status), my friend WENNYBROWN has accepted a job with a big company and is relocating to Birmingham.  I am SO excited she’s going to be here.  She came over last weekend, we scoped out apartments, she signed a lease, and she moves in this weekend.  The best part of it?  She hired movers.  She’s smarter than we are. 

I’m a slacker.

Anyway.  To continue on with the pictoral series from my summering…

We went up to New Haven to meet the fabulous and wonderful Paige (who is not only my fabulous friend, but an amazing photographer, and the photographer that shot my wedding, so check out her site at PH Photography!).

She took this shot of my boy and I that I love…

And he got this shot of us that I also love.

We hung around for a few more days (ok, I hung around, he was all scholarly and got himself invited to a bunch of different panels for a conference).  I couldn’t be outdone, so I submitted some papers to another conference.  So much for ‘vacation’. 

Friday we went on a dinner cruise of NYC to celebrate birthdays’ – my parents, and our friend John.  It was the perfect night for it, and it was so much fun.

The cruise gang…

My mom caught a Twit Pic in action…

Us, with lower Manhattan behind us…

Sunset…

I didn’t bring a tripod or my long lens, but I’m still pretty proud I managed to snag this shot:

Saturday we headed down the shore to New Jersey for some

A) Beach

(That’s my neice, but she’s way cuter in a bathing suit than I am)

B) Boardwalk

(That’s my boy, playing his first ever game of Frog Bog.  He did not get a frog on a lilly pad.

We did.  And we won a prize!)

and

C) Bridal shower fun

(That’s the first bow hat I’ve ever made in my life).

Isn’t the finished product smashing?  I’m thinking she may forgo her veil all together now that I’ve made this masterpiece.

And there you have it.  There are the highlights of my two weeks of summering in New England, and the surrounding areas.

I’ve been back in the South for about a week and a half now, and there’s only one thing to say:

Bring on the football.

So how exactly does one ’summer in New England’?  It’s a good thing there are pictures. 

First you go to Boston.  You do Boston all wrong, and by all wrong, I mean that you go for a total of 4-ish days, and only manage to leave the conference hotel for one afternoon to walk the Freedom Trail.  Then, despite the absolutely gorgeous weather that is occuring, you spend the rest of the time cooped up in the hotel, doing presentations, job interviews, networking, and being all responsible.

Sheesh.

The beginning of the Freedom Trail.

Chandelier inside one of the churches along the trail…

The State House…

Taking a rest before heading to Bunker Hill (or, in other words, stopping because I’m the dope that decided I’d rather not carry my sneakers with me all day, so I wore flip flops to walk the 3+ miles of the Freedom Trail.  Yes. I got blisters on the bottom of my feet.  So not fun).

Bunker Hill:

We finished the walk with a tour of the USS Constitution, which I’ll admit, I wasn’t too enthusiastic about doing, but ended up being so glad that we did.  It was a really incredible tour of the ship.  I’m only a little sad we didn’t get some of the grog.

That’s the highlights of my Boston foray.  I didn’t take any pictures of the inside of the conference hotel.  Maybe I should have.  I could have live Twitted an interview.  “Oh, excuse me, let me just take this picture of this interview.  Multimedia prowress and all…”.

We took the train down from Boston to CT on Saturday.  It was my first time taking a train other than Metro North.  I was really nervous.  I enjoyed it – we sat in the first row, and had endless leg room.  I read My Sister’s Keeper and tried not to cry a few times.  However, there apparently had been some train track incidents earlier, because we ended up getting in almost 25 minutes late.  That was agony – watching the familiar landscape appear before my eyes…and the train was barely moving.

Back to the summering.

Then you spend an afternoon out on a boat fishing for bluefish off the ‘gold coast of Connecticut’.  That’s not a joke.  I learned that day that’s actually the part of Connecticut I grew up in.

That’s me and my dad.  If you look really hard, you can actually see the blue in the water.   It’s about halfway up the rod.

Or I could just show you this:

My boy says he caught the biggest fish that day.  Because he’s cute, I’ll let him keep thinking that.  Of course, I caught the biggest.

Here we are, in all our pretend yuppie glory, on the boat that day.

I say pretend, because if I was a real yuppie, I would have been wearing my cute little straw hat, a cute little sundress, and I’d probably be holding a cocktail.  Instead, I have on my Dad’s trusty Yankee’s hat (which he said I wasn’t allowed to steal), a Georgia Highland’s t-shirt, workout shorts, and sneakers.  *gasp*

The next day we did absolutely nothing all day, but got to go up and spend the evening with my former diving coach, Dan.  We had dinner at his house, and then headed to an evening of free entertainment provided by stand up comics.  There were three – usually the best is last, but I actually thought the middle guy was the best.  There were some thick New York accents that night, and I wished my friend WennyBrown had been there to hear them.  I didn’t take any pictures that night, so you’ll just have to take my word that it really happened.

I’d go on and tell you about our adventures attending Yale, but I need to have a picture emailed to me to complete that set.

It’ll just have to keep you on the edge of your seat with anticipation.

]]> http://anniesplace.wordpress.com/2009/08/20/pictures-of-summering-part-1/feed/ 4 ren1977 DSC_0031 DSC_0045 DSC_0053 DSC_0064 DSC_0067 DSC_0070 Dad and Ren Dad and Ren1 IMGP0707 http://anniesplace.wordpress.com/2009/08/19/summering-in-new-england/ http://anniesplace.wordpress.com/2009/08/19/summering-in-new-england/#comments Thu, 20 Aug 2009 02:45:53 +0000 Annie http://anniesplace.wordpress.com/?p=2290 ]]>

That’s pretty much where I’ve been for the past couple weeks or so that I’ve been sadly neglecting my little blog corner of the world.  There was adventures here in Alabama that left me sans internets, then a conference in Boston, then the death of my laptop, and finally, some quality time at home with the family.

The laptop is back (sort of, kind of, but not really fixed), I’m back home in Alabama, and life seems to be settling back down to a semi-normal pace.

Today was the first day of classes of the semester.  Since I’m writing my dissertation, and I’m not officially taking classes anymore, and I’m not teaching, I got to sit at home and kiss my boy as he headed off to school today.  It felt very strange.  I do plan on spending two days a week at school this semester (which will coincide with his classes so that we can carpool), but that won’t start until next week.

In the meantime, I’m on a deadline to turn in my dissertation proposal and get my defense date set.   My plan was to have it turned in by last Friday, but when the laptop goes on the fritz, it makes it kind of hard.  Thus, I’m plugging along now, working through some earlier criticisms and adding new material in.  I spent a couple of hours working on my introduction earlier, then spent a couple more completely re-doing it.  Who knew that much effort needed to go in to 4 pages?  That’s the portion that ’sells’ the rest of the paper, so it needs to be spot on.  I realized that my first draft went off on a tangent that I’ll never even talk about in the actual dissertation, so it had to go.  Currently I’m at 42 pages, sans references.

The trip home was much needed, and wonderful.  My boy and I decided that since we had just spent 5 days being all academic and nerdy with the ‘white tower academic elitists’ we should name our vacation appropriately.  Thus, we decided to say we were ’summering in New England’.  We even gave each other yuppy and preppy names.  I originally went for “Bunny”, but settled on “Lehr” later.  Sadly, I can’t find an oomlat here on WordPress to correctly write out “Lehr”.

There we are, on a dinner cruise of NYC (which yes, I know is not New England, but it’s us on a boat) to celebrate the birthdays of my parents and one of our friends.  I put this here as a teaser picture – I have more that I’ll use to do a picture dump over the next several days or so, because let’s be honest – that’ll probably be more interesting that writing about the dissertation.

There’s two things that I’ve fallen out of the habit of doing lately: blogging and photographing.  Blogging has fallen by the wayside, mostly because I just don’t feel like there is truly anything interesting to write about with me right now.  I have a decent group of students (the joys of teaching upperclassmen), and my days pretty much consist of trying to navigate my way through the dissertation proposal, and trying to get organized for an upcoming conference.  I mean, I hate to blog “Today I wrote.  Again.”  Thus, I stay mum.

The photography, well, there’s just no excuse.  The quality of my pictures has gone down (I feel) and the only reason for that is because I never pull my camera out anymore.

So I decided to kick start both back by doing a daily picture.  That way, I get to both pull out my camera and challenge myself to be creative again (which I’ve missed terribly), and try to get back in the habit of blogging.  I appreciate you who have been faithfully sticking with me through the long silences.

Therefore, today I’ll present the cheat picture to kick off this experiment.  The cats are easy targets.  I changed the sheets and made the bed this morning – this requires Allie’s help.  By help, I mean I put the sheet and blankets on the bed, and she attacks them.  As I was finishing, she jumped down and got her toy, and brought it up.  We played.  I call this “Attack Cat”.

We think she likes it so much because it looks like Emma, but she doesn’t get in trouble for whacking the crap out of it.

And I like it.

Before the wedding, there was a spin class at our local Y that had morphed into a spin/boot camp class.  I never tried it, but heard good things about it.  The week of our wedding, the instructor changed it to spin/horizontal training.  I was intrigued, and it sounded really hard, so I figured it would not be smart to do this new class the day before I got in the car and drove 6 hours, lest I end up limping my way through the wedding week.

However, upon coming home, my boy and I decided we’d give it a try.

Holy crap.  That’s all I can say.

Some people call it extreme conditioning.  The premise is that you spin for 30 minutes, and then move to this horizontal training portion for 45.   Here, you do multi-faceted exercises that require your entire body to execute as opposed to muscle isolation.  So in English, one example would be you get in a plank and then do shoulder raises/rows or some other arm-lifting exercise.  Or else you get these little felt pieces and use them as ’sliders’ – so your feet can slide easily on the floor – one thing she has us do is do a push-up, and then you hover at the bottom, and slide your feet in and out (kind of like a jumping jack motion, but your feet just slide on the floor).  A lot of the exercises build from a plank of some sort, so there’s a lot of core, a lot of balance…and a lot of pain.  The last two classes I got to a point in both where I seriously thought I was going to throw up.  You do one routine all week, and then change it up the next week.  Apparently it gets harder and harder – the advanced people apparently do all of this stuff on a stability ball.  I think at this point if I tried that I’d break my head open.

I really like this class.  Is that sick?  Probably.  But I feel like I’m getting more of a complete workout than I’ve had in a looooooong time.  My body is re-discovering muscles that haven’t been used in a long time.  BioFreeze has been my friend.  I’m seeing muscles start to pop out again that I haven’t seen in years.

After I explained this to one friend, she asked why I didn’t just shove bamboo shoots under my fingernails. 

I think I’m going to try to get my professor who is a marathoner and fitness guru interested in this.  Maybe I’ll get bonus points on my dissertation if she likes it.

Then again, if she hates it, maybe I’ll lose points.  Hmmmm.