Mourning books

While the move over all went well, the lead up was horrible.  We had a tiny tiny budget for the move, since J didn't have steady work when we moved, so we piled everything into the cars and what didn't fit got mailed.  Besides gas, we ended up spending about 280 on mailing all of our books.  Because of the cost, and because most of the boxes of books had to be carried so much, we were pretty aggressive about getting rid of books before the move.  That meant agonizing and agonizing over what to get rid of and what to keep.  We ended up getting rid of quite a lot, but nothing we're sad about losing.

What I am a little sad about, and what still makes me feel a little unsettled in the house and in my writing, is that the Post Office lost two boxes of our books, one box personal and one box professional.  We had trouble for a while figuring out exactly what was missing (in order to file a claim) because 1. it was the holidays 2. we hadn't had all the boxes delivered yet, so it was impossible to know what was missing and what was just in the mail and 3. we own more than 300 books and don't use all of them every day, so the missing ones kind of blended in.  The Post Office seems to be working hard to track down our boxes, but what makes me a little unsettled in my writing is that I usually write with a stack of relevant books on my desk.  I don't always read them, or really even look inside them, but it's just become part of my method to build a little fort out of the books I'm talking to in whatever I'm writing and then write.  Maybe this just all goes to how much a creature of habit and stuff I am, but I want my book fort back.

RBOC: Self Distraction

• It is much easier to do academic tasks which are not writing when there is writing to be done.
• Cutting down a big piece of writing to fit length requirements for writing samples for grant applications is easy to start but agonizing to finish: no matter how many times I do it, I always think before I begin that it will be easy because I'll just skim and cut out the junk, and then spend way too long arguing with myself about whether to leave something in and then get side tracked into looking at my research files and end up not cutting anything.
• A friend who is self employed and works alone says: I hate arguing with that jerk out in the shop because he always wants to do things the hard way and he always wins.  
• [An aside: this friend is your go-to guy if you want a historical bucket made.  If you've watched Pirates of the Caribbean, Deadwood, or Hell on Wheels, or been to Jamestown or Plimoth Plantation and seen a bucket, he made it.]
• The jerk I work with wants to endlessly go through research files instead of actually writing, and is winning right now.

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!

Visibility and Women's Work

Since finding out our moving plans, I've had a bit of a blah.  Like emotionally just being relieved to have a direction, but not having the energy to do anything about it.  So we've made booze (basil vodka, steeped for two days--great with strawberry liqueur and a little ginger ale), and I've been thinking about my own position next year and the year after.

 I've never really thought explicitly about myself as someone who was defined by their job, but really, that's a big reason I'm in grad school.  My father is defined by his job and profoundly unhappy because of it; my mother defines herself (I think) much more as someone who paints, cooks, gardens, and mothers, and is happier for it.  Her job is important to her, but she's managed role shifts and job shifts within her career, and not been shaken by them, and that's always much more how I saw myself.

So I find myself a little adrift this summer trying to self-motivate towards research and writing, with the thought of picking up, moving, and self-motivating elsewhere for a year.  I'll teach in the fall, and I definitely don't see myself primarily as a teacher (although that is an important part of why I wanted to be an academic).  But this whole "you're done with coursework, go write a book!" thing with no road map leaves me feeling a little lost.

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).

Summer Goals

Monday was Memorial Day in the US; it's officially for reals summer here (90F helps prove it), so it's time to solidify summer research plans and other things.  On the slate for summer blogging plans:  Me Made June, the Summer Book Club, and Notorious/Another Damned Medivalist's Summer Writing Group.  I think I'm going to loosely tie the book club and the writing group together: my reading list (and book club related posting) is going to be heavy on sci fi/fantasy with a feminist angle, along with some more generalized posts on race, feminism, and material culture provoked by my more heavily theoretical reading for my writing project, a first draft of a dissertation chapter.  (omg)   A lot of what interests me about my dissertation topic is the systemic creation of the consumer culture we engage with now and the personal creation of identity through clothing; I hope the intersection of theoretical issues with consumerism and identity making might interest you as well.

In non-theoretical news, J and I spent the hottest day of the year (so far) biking and picnicing at Snooty U's arboretum.  By my conservative estimate, we biked around a thousand million miles, but J says it was more like ten.  Except for a broken shifter on my bike when we were almost home, it was basically one of the most perfect summer days you could ask for: homemade beer, at an empty park, eating fancy cheeses and warm strawberries with a nice boy.  More picnics are also on the summer to do list.  

Grading and Moving

The picture is of VERY early iris at the arboretum in Overcast; my iris at the house are up but not even budded (it's still tulip and daffodil season at home).  The arboretum is one of the things which has made me feel grounded in Overcast . . . it has been a place to go to figure out what's native, what's invasive, and what varieties will grow well here, so thinking about moving sometime in the next year, it feels sad to visit it.

This weekend was spent antiquing and plant-buying with my mother, so expect a few catch-up posts on that.  The next few days will be spent in a blur of grading and waiting in anticipation of news.  The deadline on the grant which will tell us the date of our move is this week, but as with all things academic. I'm not holding my breath that this will be done on time.  J is casting a wider geographic net in his job search, which I think makes us both feel better about our prospects for next year.  This week with my mother here has made me want to be back in Snowy State, but also made me realize that a year in Snowy State would mean very little research or writing.  Keep your fingers crossed for us this week . . . a no on the grant will mean a semester of pure research and writing, but a yes on the grant will mean an extra semester of support from my university.  A funny place to be in.

Some flowers and some writing

I thought I was going to get the article I started revising last weekend done much sooner, but due to the amount of revision it needed, I sat at my desk and wrote basically all week.  Which sounds like it should be a good thing, but like my MO on research trips, my MO in writing tends to be to sit down and be consumed by it until it's finished.  This tends to preclude blogging, cooking, interacting with J, and feeding the cat for a few days in a row.  Maybe this gets it over with faster; I don't know, I've never written another way.  Since I figured out how to be good at writing papers sometime around sophomore year of college, I tend to gather gather gather material for a few weeks, and then sit down and finish the writing in one extended burst.

TR has had a discussion up this week on the health hazards of being an academic, so of course I spent most of my week sitting and writing.  Part of why this article took so long to revise was that, although I have mostly gotten my bibliographic house in order with Zotero, my digital house is a mess.  I do most of my work on a little netbook, and I used to work on a desktop computer I brought from college to grad school, and the netbook got a virus and had to undergo a major wipe last year.  I fortunately still have all my files, but they are spread over backups on my desktop, and buried in various levels of a very annoying external hard drive I bought because I thought I was so smart.

I got it when I was still actively using both computers because it came with a preinstalled sync system which would supposedly only update new versions of files, so that the newest version of the file would always be available.  Not as good as cloud computing, but many of my archives and a lot of the places I travel don't have internet, so having a copy of the file to carry around is important.  But the stupid hard drive makes it almost impossible to access the files, so now I need to pull everything off it (and between the wipe and all the shuffling, there are now some very important files which only exist on the external harddrive--dangerous).  So I'm in the process of pulling everything off, wiping the thing of its software, and turning it into a big flash drive, besides uploading everything I have to Google Docs.  And then copies of everything will be going to J's computer as well.  I don't know if this is going to make more headaches for myself later, but it's not workable right now--I spent way too much time looking for my data that I could have spent writing.

Tomorrow will be spent brunching and finally sewing up the RTW jacket, because I get a stack of final papers to grade on Wednesday, and there will be nothing accomplished after that.

A Self-Stitched Easter

Just a quick note about the weekend.  The RTW muslin is in a place I'm happy with, the fashion fabric is partially cut out, and I had a productive research weekend.  You all have seen the outfit I'm wearing above; the shirt J is wearing is a shirt I finished literally Easter morning.  The construction turned out well, and J loves it, but I HATE the fabric.  It's some kind of poly blend (mystery thrift store fabric) that's got a weird silky hand, but J loves it.  And although I didn't do the MPB Negroni shirt sewalong, I definitely learned the value varying stitch lengths for different areas--I don't love this shirt because of the fabric, but I feel good about my work on it.

I didn't get the editing/writing done that I wanted to, because I ended up chasing about 140 years of footnotes, but I found the source of an annoying scholarly myth that's been bugging me for several years.  It's the sort of thing that doesn't even get cited anymore because everyone accepts it as true--everyone in the 19th century cited primary documents, so we'll cite the 19th century writers, and not examine their evidence.  

However, when you chase down the 19th century citations, all these writers are basing their arguments about both the 17th and 18th centuries on a single document written in 1689.  It's used as the sole source for the price of retail goods sold to Native people in French Canada and New York, and A. it was written in Paris by someone who had never been to North America, and B. the prices it quotes are way off base from the account books I've found for both French Canada and New York for the same period.  

It boggles my mind that no one has examined these numbers, because entire books rely on the assumption that this document is accurate.  I'm rolling around in my head how to write about the problem of relying on this document and why it's wrong without it being horribly boring, but I'm excited about the find.  And with the magic of the interwebs, I can find pretty much everyone who has either cited this document or someone who relies on other scholars who do.  

Have you had an exciting breakthrough lately, in work, sewing or something else?  I didn't accomplish my stated goal for the weekend, but I did accomplish something, and that made the weekend feel pretty productive.

Saturday Morning Reading List

I'm taking today (and possibly tomorrow) to rework an article in hopes of submitting it this summer, so here's a roundup of webcomics and cartoons I indulge in.

The Abominable Charles Christopher This is sometimes sad, usually sweet, and beautifully illustrated.

Wondermark Historic illustrations captioned awesomely.  My favorite is "In Which Education is Vital" because sometimes I think it would be better to defend a dissertation that way.

Atomic Robo Robot hero defends the world from vampires and dinosaurs.  Nuff said.

Hark, A Vagrant!  Canadian history comics, Lois Lane, and sass.  Occasionally mermaids.

Dr McNinja  Basically what it says it is.  Too ridiculous not to read.

Girl Genius  Steampunk and romance, but not too much of either.  This one is huge and long running, so there's plenty of archives to read, but don't expect it to resolve any storylines anytime soon.  J and I started reading together when we started dating (3+ years ago) and the main storyline still hasn't been resolved.

Romantically Apocalyptic  Oil painting comics?  Flesh eating monsters?  Ridiculous pop culture references?  Check, check and check.

Saturday Morning Cartoons  Tor.com has a great weekly series in which they link to animated shorts; they're sometimes a little sad, like this week's, but usually fun.

Wish me luck writing today, and I hope you found something fun to procrastinate with.  Revising this article is both nervewracking and exciting; it puts me one step closer to putting my work out there for real and looking at the job market, which is frightening, but it's exciting because it's a piece I wrote a year ago and I finally feel like I'm in a place to answer the questions I left hanging when I put it aside.

A happy and peaceful Easter if you celebrate.

Job Hunting

Another non-sewing post, another cat picture.  Groceries loves putting his face on J's mousepad for some reason; maybe it's warmer?  At any rate, it's not helpful when J is trying to look for jobs.  

We've found ourselves in a position strangely similar to that of AB and her husband J, and AB's blog is a good read if you're dealing with uncertainty (or want to see some awesome cactus hats).  We're waiting to hear about one last fellowship which would keep us in Overcast for fall semester, but otherwise it's mostly official that we'll be chased out of town for part of next year, so J is looking for jobs.  Not with too much anxiety, because we have at least three months and potentially as much as six months until we would have to move, but job hunting makes both of us a little anxious.

J has a degree in Theater, and he's trained as a carpenter and technical designer, so he builds sets and props and makes sure they're safe to union standards.  Hiring positions are surprisingly narrow, so much so that this theater search seems a lot like the academic job search I'll be doing in a few years.  Lots of decoding job ads, massaging the resume to fit, looking nationally for the few jobs in his narrow field.  And apparently, although there's a lot of theater in NYC, a lot of their sets are built out in Yonkers and beyond (probably because large spaces for building large sets is cheaper).  So there's the possibility we may end up in some suburb of NYC, which I know even less about than Brooklyn.

We--mostly I--are also wrestling with the possibility of moving home to Snowy State.  Not moving in with my parents, who live there, but with getting an apartment near where J and I went to college (which is also near my parents).  My parents and I get along great, and they love J, so that's not the problem--the problem is that my parents love hanging out too much.  I also used to volunteer with a group in Snowy State that demands a lot more time than I have to give--it was great in high school and college when I had no job and lots of free weekends, but now I have a dissertation to write.  

Snowy State is otherwise great for what we need--a large university, lots of theater jobs, easy access to flights to the archives I need to go to.  But I'm afraid my parents and my old volunteer group would demand so much time that I would get nothing read and even less written.  Not helping matters is that I'm the only person of my family or social circle who's gone to graduate school--no one seems to understand that, while the school will give me free money to write, that money won't last forever and writing takes as much time as a real job, because it is a real job.  Academia has its own problems with recognizing writing as real work--by demanding it for hiring and promotion, but progressively cutting back resources for faculty and graduate students to have time to write--but my extended family ranges from supportive but confused to outright hostile to the idea that I'm being paid to essentially write a book.  

That ranged a little far from job searches and moving, but the point is this: we're looking for jobs nationally except for the two places I really want to be, Overcast and Snowy State.  And it makes my heart hurt.  The good news is that this move will be for two years at most, so it's not a forever move, but I feel like these moves put life on hold for so long.  Not that that keeps me from reupholstering couches in the mean time.

Late night reupholstery

So last night, in the throes of grading madness, I broke out the staple gun and reupholstered one of the office chairs.  I had been writing or grading in this chair all day, and the scratchy old polyester faux wool was driving. me. crazy.  (See the original here).  It was stained up when we got it, plus the rough texture itched through thin skirts and attracted way too much cat hair (this is the cat's second favorite chair in the house).  Had to go.  

To the archives!

After last night's car drama, J and I bussed to the archive today, and we're back on track for the stress of doing research travel with a spouse.  This involved a brisk walk across a lot of partially plowed imperial plazas and side walks in State Capitol, which was probably the most pleasant part of the day.  

Most of my stress surrounding this trip (pre car drama) was in the planning: I have a lot of flexibility in leaving Overcast City for research travel, because I'm only locked in to teach one day a week.  I'm TAing, so I can miss lecture the rest of the week and it's not too big of a deal.  J, on the other hand, works retail, and has neither regular nor back-to-back days off.  I originally had a four-day research extravaganza planned, because like all good research trips, my last trip to State Archives ended with me stumbling onto an amazing collection of records which no one has worked with before, and which the archivist told me I wouldn't be interested in or find helpful.  They are, in fact, actually what I need for the last chapter of my dissertation, and I found them literally a half hour before leaving the archive last time.

Progress

Of a sort. I finished Dr. Asiago's book, and I feel horrible saying this, but it was so boring. He does military/political/diplomatic history, and I'm much more interested in social/cultural/diplomatic history. We're interested in many of the same historiographic issues, and of course, the same groups and periods, but very different approaches to them. Not that I have issues with them as scholarly work--there are parts that I'll be re-reading because they say complex things very clearly, but the military/political angle puts me right to sleep.

Also got some writing done. J was off work Tuesday and Thursday (his days off are intermittant and a little random, since he's working retail) and he did some huswifery while I shut myself away in the office to write. Tuesday we got a lot done; we're starting to experiment with making liqueurs, so while J was rolling out forgotten Christmas cookie dough, I put some clemantines and cloves in brandy to sit. Hopefully in 2-3 weeks it'll turn out like homemade Cointreau. Also we drank beer while J made cookies and I wrote fellowship apps and my prospectus; a beer with lunch makes fellowship apps much easier to get to.

I feel like I spend the majority of my time applying for money to do research instead of doing research. They've definitely gotten easier to whip out once I get going, and doing the prospectus has given me some good canned answers to "why this topic? what the historiographic significance?" but they're still so time consuming. They all want slightly different things, and there's so much groundwork before the writing even starts. I just need time away from Overcast Town with no teaching to keep pulling me back here so I can get some research trips in. The library at Snooty U is good about ordering material and getting microfilm, but I hardly have time to keep up with the reading for the class I TA, let alone sit in the library basement for days on end and read microfilm. Especially if I keep getting assigned to teach 20th century courses I have no background or training in. Seriously, why assign an early Americanist to TA courses on 20th century music and politics? I know there's a value in teaching outside the comfort zone, but I barely had 20th century feminism in my comp fields for women's history, and there's not the remotest chance that I'll ever have to teach a 20th century survey.

But I've finally finished J's Christmas socks, so I'm starting a hat for me (pictures later). Yesterday we also finally got our pear cider bottled, after it sat in secondary fermentation for several months. We brewed it in October right after my exams, but never had time to bottle with the holidays, so the upside is that as soon as it's done carbonating, it'll be ready to drink immeadiately. It's definitely smoothed out quite a bit since it was racked. Tomorrow before J goes to work we're going to pitch a blueberry mead (honey wine) and put up a blueberry liqueur. We're just using frozen grocery store blueberries, but I'm excited, and it should be a pretty color.

On Writing

Or at least, on writing the prospectus. My program requires a prospectus/dissertation proposal to be submitted within three months of the comprehensive exams, and I submitted it in time for the official deadline, but my advisor wants another draft done with more substance, or lit review, or something. At least he gave me a lot of comments to work on, as per his usual.

My problem is that I lost all my momentum over the holiday. After a series of small but exhausting family crises, I can't get my head back in the right place. I work best when my partner J is at work and I can devote long, uninterrupted blocks of time to writing, and I had that today, but all I've accomplished is rewriting a few pages of my prospectus. My advisor wants me to elaborate on why I want to write what I want to write, which is important to articulate, but so much harder than just writing BS. It's not that I don't want to work on the prospectus, or that I'm tired of my topic, but that I feel like I lost all the words I crammed into my head last semester. I spent the summer and fall semester of 2010 pushing all of these things into my head so that I would be able to cite on command, and I was able to do that at the end of the semester; that's how I passed my comp exams. And now it feels like it's all gone. I wrote the prospectus with authors in mind, but didn't include them because it wasn't required. Now my advisor wants names and detailed historiography, and I feel like I'm back in my first semester of grad school and I have to re-read review articles to remember who wrote what.

The writing is happening, it's just going very slowly. I think the rest of tonight will be spent trying to finish reading my advisor's book; it came out in October, just after I finished my exams, and I didn't feel like I had the brain power to finish it, so I'm only about half way through it. (I'm a bad advisee). It's both a daunting and a boring read. Boring because I can't skim it for major arguments like I usually do, both because I already know his major arguments and because I need to know what he thinks of some details. Daunting because, for good or bad, my research and my advisor's area of research cover the same groups, the same players, many of the same concerns and mostly the same time period, which means that his books feels sort of like a crib sheet for my work. What does he think of this guy? Check chapter one. What does he think this group was doing? Check chapter three. But maybe finishing the book will help me avoid putting my foot in my mouth in the prospectus.

Square One

Well, it's not exactly square one, because I'm ABD and in the third year of my program, but it's basically square one as far as the dissertation goes. I went ABD in October and I've made very little progress since. One archive visit, some secondary source sifting, and no writing.

I'm in an early American history program, and the dissertation will have feminism, archaeology, material culture, critical race theory, chemistry, religion, and maybe a dog and pony show for good measure. My advisor (who we'll call Dr. Asiago, because his real name sounds like a different sort of cheese) refers to the dissertation like it's its own person: "The dissertation should locate itself at the intersection of X and Y fields; the dissertation has to grab attention; the dissertation can't lose energy." He says I should keep a writing journal, but he also has stacks of paper falling over in his office and walls of filing cabinets. I bought my first little two-drawer filing cabinet this summer and I can't bring myself to make more things I'll have to file later. I'm sure he'd hate to know that I'm starting a dissertation blog, but I'm sure he'd also hate to know that I'm planning on sewing a couple of dresses when I finish my next round of fellowship applications, instead of jumping straight into more fellowship applications.

But hopefully the blog will keep me honest. Being ABD, my only responsibilities are TAing a course unrelated to my dissertation this semester, and I'm hoping to get a couple of short research trips in this semester instead of staying home and fretting. I'm trying to keep my responsibilities and commitments down to leave me time for writing, because in college I had periods of over-commitment when I didn't know whether I was coming or going, but I seem to get more done when I have some deadlines to work towards. Maybe the next step will be goal setting, but first I have to figure out a starting point.