Getting back in the writing box

1. Clean Christmas off the desk
2. Stare at Pinterest
3. Get crackers
4. Chase cat off desk
5. Make nest for cat on desk
6. Open chapter file
7. Reinstall bibliography software
8. Put cat back on desk nest
9. Reinstall wordprocessor software
10. Get more coffee, stare at Pinterest
11. Take nap with cat on couch
12. Give up on actually writing, transcribe research photos instead

I'm trying to get back into the swing of writing daily, which is tough coming out of the move-and-holiday induced torpor, and looking at leaving town again soon for research travel.  The cat desk nest actually helps with this, because the cat only sits at the desk for as long as I do.

Christmas was good, if hectic, because I rush between three different celebrations for my side of the family and then J and I rush out of state for his family Christmas, and we're only just back now, and still not all unpacked.

Not much Christmas baking got done this year, except for this amazing easy delicious gingerbread cake.  Seriously, this is the easiest, tastiest cake I've ever made from scratch.  The candied lemon peel, whipped cream and pomegranate seeds aren't in the linked recipe, but the colors and flavors made the ginger pop a lot more.

We had needless drama making it, since we were trying to cook it at the same time as a duck in our tiny, tiny kitchen, but it turned out really well, and we're going to make another for friends later this week.

Hope your 2012 is off to a pleasant and productive start!

Where have I been?

Out of the stockpot, into the fire?

It's been since July since I posted!  It got so easy to push off posting until next week, then the week after, then the week after.  Mostly this has been because of anxiety over two big issues that came up over the summer.

J has done lots and lots of applications, and even got a job offer, but the place that offered him the job stopped responding to phone calls or emails before he had a chance to start.  He's currently in limbo at another place where he got to the final round of interviews (as in, he was one of three candidates), but the hiring committee has pushed off notifying for two weeks running now.  Both of these would have meant major interstate moves for us, as would all the other applications he's put out without hearing back about.  Right now we're contemplating a move back to Snowy State, where our parents live and J has a network for finding freelance work because we went to school there.

The other big issue has been a threatening-to-become-major medical issue for me, some joint pain which has started to impair my mobility and ability to do things like type, knit, and sew for long periods.  I thankfully have insurance coverage for it, despite J's work situation, because I'm still insured through my family due to my student status, so that at least has not contributed to the anxiety.  The good of it has been that my doctor hasn't found indications of rheumatoid arthritis or anything else which would cause long term damage, but not having a diagnosis means also not having a treatment plan.

So while nothing actively bad has happened to us, the lack of forward motion, the looming certainty of our January get-out-of-town deadline, the uncertainty of where we would go, and the possibility of losing my ability to do both my job and my favorite hobbies for an undiagnosable medical reason has made for a lot of anxiety and fear here at chez Construct.  That the joint pain may be itself a symptom of anxiety over the whole situation hasn't helped.

I'll be trying to get back into the swing of blogging again.  AB's posts over at Secret Confessions of a Trailing Spouse have always been encouraging, so I know this too shall pass.

More Deaccessioning

The cat and I have been spending some time in the guest bedroom going through things to get rid of before we move.  Currently it's sewing patterns.

I learned to sew mostly on my own and later working in the costume department of a living history museum, like Plimouth Plantation or Colonial Williamsburg on a small scale.  (It was an 1840-1890 midwest town and I also worked as an interpreter, so I was the young lady school teacher.  Also a lady blacksmith.  Also a male soldier. Basically it was the best high school job ever.)

The costume department made our own clothes and the clothes for the rest of the staff and the volunteers, and the museum either couldn't afford bulk licencing from pattern companies or couldn't find patterns correct to the costuming director's standards.  The more experienced folks drafted patterns from their own research, original clothes in our or other museums' collections, or modified slopers.  That was probably the most long-lasting benefit I got from that job--I stopped working there after my second year of college, after four years working there, and never worked up the skill/nerve to draft anything more complicated than a lined jacket, but it definitely gave me the confidence to try later in college and grad school.  (Not trying to brag, but re-reading that, I can't believe I drafted my own lined jacket at 17.  Working with ladies who whipped out whalebone corsets and full hoopskirt dresses and Victorian jackets sans patterns definitely put things in a different perspective at the time!)  I also did some volunteer reenacting in the 17th and 18th centuries and sold clothing to people for several years, so I have a lot of other self-drafted and commercial patterns from that as well.  I kept almost all of the patterns, slopers, and muslins which fit me, and since I haven't done any more reenacting in grad school, they've just sat in a box for the last three years.

I've sorted things to get rid of and keep, getting rid of things that either just wouldn't fit me now or which I could easily redraft.  Do I need a 17th century cap pattern or an 18th century corset pattern in the near-term future?  Probably not.  Will J and I get back into reenacting some time period once he's working a job which doesn't require 80 work weeks in the summer?  Definitely.  In the mean time, what I kept now takes up four manila envelopes in the file cabinet instead of a whole box, so that feels better.

I felt sort of sad going through everything, because those patterns represent a learning experience I didn't really appreciate at the time and cutting ties with an activity and subculture that had and has a lot of meaning for me, which I don't have time to participate in any more.  But deciding to get rid of patterns which I could easily redraft also felt pretty good:  I hung onto them when I moved because I wasn't confident of being able to recreate the clothing which I had given away or sold when I moved to Overcast.  I've grown a lot in my sewing, and if I did it once I can do it again.

A placeholder

I did a lot of academic work today which did not directly result in writing (translations, organizing photos, etc) and a lot of hand wringing over my grant status.  The grant which was supposed to notify me around May 15 is now saying July.  July!  This is a university organization, and I have to file my fall status with the university by June 15 or pay a massive late filing fee to the university.  

The left hand knows not what the right hand does.  If this were a completely outside organization making this grant, I could understand that they might work on a different schedule.  I've applied for grants at institutions in the United Kingdom, which are on very different schedules; I know how that goes.  But this organization is within my university, and makes the same grant to many, many graduate students every year.  Presumably they would have knowledge of the schedule said graduate students work under.

So, in lieu of actual content or progress, I give you a cat picture.  Please enjoy.

(Yes, he's leaning on the screen; yes, we've checked it to make sure it's sturdy and he won't fall through it).

The questions we ask

I'm starting to think about the questions my dissertation asks, and the problem I see with the existing scholarship in my field is sometimes not that it answers important questions incorrectly, but that it asks the wrong questions.  Like a cat who likes to sit squished between both a window screen and a couch, the scholarship is awfully comfortable and doesn't want to go anywhere.  (Is that too much metaphor to put on one cat?  Sorry.  Had to work in the cat photo somehow).

I've been going round and round in trying to frame my dissertation, because I do find the way that the current scholarship answers the big questions to be wrong, but I also find the questions wrong in a way I couldn't articulate until recently.  Graduate education, or at least my graduate education, has focused on learning to engage with the terms of debate as they stand in the field.  There's nothing wrong with this; I think it's necessary to know how to engage a discussion as it stands in order to recognize your position in it and the limits of that debate's frame.  What it doesn't teach you is how to reframe the debate.  Some of the best scholarship does that, and while it may be overly ambitious for a dissertation project, at least in my subfield, the terms of debate are so broken and retrograde that I'm beginning to feel they're unusable for what I think my evidence is telling me.

Example:

Why Groceries?

Here's a kitty chaser after the heavy polemic of the last post: why is our cat named Groceries?  J and his college roommate got the 3-year-old Cat-Soon-to-be-Known-as-Groceries from the shelter at the beginning of their senior year.  J and I had been dating for almost two years at this point; it was discussed and decided all around that the cat would move with J into my house in Overcast after graduation.  

Cat-Soon-to-be-Known-as-Groceries was named something stupid like Greyboy at the shelter, and who knows what before that (he came from the home of an animal hoarder, although we haven't noticed any behavioral problems because of it).  J's roommate got naming prerogatives, and named Cat-Soon-to-be-Known-as-Groceries after an indie band.  

The name didn't stick, though, because Cat-Soon-to-be-Known-as-Groceries sat inside of grocery bags all the time (still does) and J's college friends started calling Groceries Groceries.  This means, of course, that all the cat's adoption and medical forms have different names on them (who know a cat needed so many forms?)   

So there's your daily cat blogging.

Projects under construction

Sewing kitty is hard at work

Let's take a break from my political ranting, and get back to what really matters: sewing, grad school, and pictures of cats.  This week is shaping up to be very busy, in part because our department is bringing newly-admitted but not-yet-committed grad students for a visiting weekend, and I'm hosting one, hosting the department wide party for all of them + all the current grad students, and buying booze for said party.  Plus I've got a lot of my own projects floating around half finished.  

The first gratuitous cat picture up top is the fabric I'd like to use to recover our office chairs; this second one is their unfortunate current state.  Two chairs for a grand thrifted total of twenty bucks isn't bad, since the casters are really smooth and the frames of the chairs are both solid, but the upholstery is just terrible.  The ikat fabric up top is a good upholstery weight, and I don't think it'll pick up too much cat hair.

Speaking of reupholstering things, J and I are gearing up to reupholster our yellow velvet couch,  We've reupholstered armchairs before, including the green one here, but the couch is a much bigger commitment, and it has mock tufting.  The yellow velvet has really grown on me, but it's worn off in big patches all over and there's tears in the velvet where the stuffing is coming out.  I think we could get through it in a weekend, but it would mean being couchless for a weekend, and that's where we live most of the time.  And by we I mean my library books and I.

And I apologize for turning this into a cat blog, but short of J holding on to a struggling ball of unhappiness, there was no way to keep the cat out of the pictures today.  Wherever the camera went, he wanted to be, so that's where he is.  Illustrating the cat hair repellent qualities of the new fabrics or something.

So here's a picture with no cat in it:

Return of the Mannequin

Here's fellowship dress #2.  What's with all the slim skirts?  I don't own any other pencil skirts or slim skirted dresses; I don't know where these last two came from.  I also don't know where I'll ever wear this, since it's too heavy to be a summer dress, too sleeveless to be a fall dress, and too short to be a winter dress.  And I rarely wear anything short sleeved when I teach.  

Anyway, this is from the same pattern as the last fellowship dress, with the princess seams closed and turned into regular waist and bust darts.  I'm not totally happy with the dress, since it's WAY louder than what I usually wear, and it's lined with a bright blue that makes it feel a little cartoony to me.  I'm going to let it sit for a few days while I think about it/do some academic work for a change.  

Right now it's at that stage of the project that I was complaining about a while back with my State Capitol research--most of the way through, but not quite sure if it's going to be worth it on the other end.  I think part of the problem with this dress is that I'm happy it's stash busting (I have an entire dresser + full of fabric) and I like the look as an idea, but I'm not sure I'll wear it.

But maybe I can wear it to an archive or something--I just got my first acceptance letter for one of the fellowships I applied for, at an archive in southern California.  I've never been.  Maybe they wear sleeveless, heavy wool dresses in California?  I'm just so happy to have one that I'll wear whatever they tell me.  Two more of these short term ones and I can put off a semester of my grad school funding; if I get a big one I can take off a year.  That might be too much to hope for, though.

When is research worth it?

Scholarly cat thinks your research is good enough
to sit on, but that's all.

I'm slowly working my way through the State Capitol research photos to which we sacrificed a car.  They're very boring, individually.  My research looks at the material culture (clothing, houses, food, etc) of a Native American group from the 17th century through the mid 19th century, and what changes in material culture say about how the group views itself through time, since the documentary record is mostly written by white people about what white people thought about Indians.  The 19th century for this group is especially under-studied, and State Capitol Archives have a collection of documents that have literally only been accessed once since they were created in 1857.  Besides archivists, I am only the second person to look at these since they were written and put in boxes.  And there's a ton of them, over 600 individual records, all from the reservations I'm studying.

But they are sooooo boring individually.  They're forms, reporting individual losses of personal clothing and equipment during war service, which makes them perfect for my project and not very useful for anyone else.  They're also interesting in that they report the veteran's date of death and age at death, which is hard to come by in the early 19th century for any Native group, and they have signatures of the veteran or heir when literate, so these records are an interesting index of literacy.  (I also study the intersection of material culture and education).  But they're forms, so except with small variations of place, the individual differences are sometimes just the name and maybe a 50 cent difference in the price of a piece of clothing.

I love me some digital quantitative analysis, so I've been entering all of these forms into a spreadsheet so that I can go through later and click some buttons and find the averages, means, and all those good meaningful patterns.  This has worked out good before: I work with a lot of merchants' account books, which get passed over because they're mostly lists of prices and quantities, but some interesting patterns come out when you can see what type of person is buying what type of thing.  And that's hard to do without a computer to tell you, so I've gone through several hand written account books, written before double-entry bookkeeping (so they're all crazzy with notes about things everywhere), digitized them, and found really interesting things.  One in particular is so good that it's probably going to be a dissertation chapter all by itself.  But the process of entering the info into spreadsheets is soooo booooorrrinnnng.  I work for about five hours today, with some snack/internet/cat breaks, and only got through 150 of these forms.  And there are about 400 left.

So I'm in this place right now where the act of research sucks.  The archival part is fun: I get to discover things that no one has seen forever, and decide if it's important to my project.  The end of the digitizing is fun, because I finally get to see the patterns shake out.  But right now I'm trudging through something that I think (hope?) will end up being significant enough to form the basis of a chapter, but I have no way of knowing.  With humanities departments being shut down, and the humanities job market what it always has been (bad) it's depressing to think of this work as going nowhere fast.

This post is dedicated to

Just a regular evening, "hiding" in the couch.

J, and Kyle, the tow truck driver who rescued us from freezing to death in rural Cloudy State and gave us a scenic tour of State Capitol while driving us to a repair shop.

This post was going to be about the stress of planning for a research trip with partner in tow (no pun intended), but now it's about the stress of having a minor single car accident during a research trip. I am ok, J is ok, we didn't really nearly freeze to death. What we did do is decide to try to leave Cloudy City for State Capitol before Snowmageddon '11 was supposed to start, and spun out into a guard rail on the interstate without hitting any other cars. We broke a headlight, a turn signal, most of the front passenger corner, and probably the radiator. At any rate, when started back up, the engine runs but belches a lot of anti-freeze smelling steam/smoke, makes horrible noises, and spills antifreeze everywhere.

We have AAA, who called a tow truck for us, but because we decided to drive in Snowmageddon '11, there were a lot of other people who needed tow trucks also, and we had to wait for two hours for ours. But at least that gave us time to call J's sister and have her look up the best-reviewed mechanics in State Capitol on the interwebs, for us to call them, and find one that had space to look at the car tomorrow. Right now the plan is to see if they can make it safe to drive so we can be back in Cloudy City by Friday (both J and I are scheduled to work), rent a car to get to the state archive in the mean time, and if it's not, arrange to drive the rental car back to Cloudy City and come back for the broken car later. It may get sold or scrapped once it's repaired-ish. We're not sure about that, it depends on how much the repairs get quoted as.

So far the cost of repairs, towing, etc, is not going to break our budget. I got a very generous research grant to look at collections at this archive, and we've been very frugal with the hotel and other expenses, so my research grant will probably cover the accident and our hotel and rental car, maybe with a little bit out of pocket. Of course, I can't report that the research grant money was spent on the car repair, but it makes me feel better to think about it as replacement of the money spent on the very foolish car accident.

So that's why there's a picture of our cat sitting with his head in our couch. It's a cat blogging kind of day.  At least today will make a good anecdote on the dedications page when my dissertation gets published