Tuesday, January 18, 2011

All Cozied In

Ok, I have gone out and done laundry and gotten groceries and gas and catfood and litter, and cooked up a lot of lovely food, and I should be all stocked up for anything. Anything except going crazy from not leaving the house, I suppose. But it feels good at least for now. I am all ready to settle in for my long winter's nap.

Except I am not supposed to be napping, am I? I've gotta go, go, go! There are hardly any jobs to apply for at the moment, but I should apply for them anyway. I missed a whole nother pile that i had printed out over break. Sigh. It's just hard to stay on top of all that when you have promised yourself it is time to relax and watch trashy tv. And I did get my syllabi and most of my assignments written up, so that should count for something!

I also need to figure out a research plan and schedule. Currently, my to do list includes contemplating a research plan. I'm not even to the making the plan stage yet. But I will continue to make forward progress in baby steps. I will also have to really hold myself back so that I don't just allow teaching prep --- which is a lot of re-tailoring classes I just taught last semester --- to eat all of my available time. I have already done that a little. But my office is 90 % cleaned out and reorganized, and I found stuff I want to use in my next comp session and copied that already, so, tada. One out of three classes prepped again for this week already!

Oh, and one odd thing was that I hung up a calendar in the office and then when putting assignments on it, noticed that all my dates on my syllabi were off. Dammit. Except when I came home and opened the files and checked them against ical, they were all right. Hmm. Next time I'm in there I will check the calendar itself, and possibly have to go out and buy one. Strange.

As for a research plan, I have so far looked up the dates of my conferences and potential conferences (see Love and Disdain's post about doing interdisciplinary --- or Area Studies --- stuff for a good description of my usual difficulties) and put them on the calendar. Except that calendar I printed off the web might, as you can see from my previous paragraph, be completely wrong. I am also looking at my weekly calendar and figuring out times for things in my schedule. Like actually going to yoga this semester, or doing spinning (no classes available). And I suppose if I am scheduling research time I should also schedule job-applying time. Hmm. There is also the difficulty of carting all my teaching stuff in to school ---- depending on what I am working on, I might have a lot of research stuff to schlep around too and I don't know how to fit it in my bags. See? This is why I put a day or two in to contemplate things before I actually plan things.

Also, since it is looking like I will be around here for another year, I need to start contemplating summer and fall. (I like looking ahead like that.) I have contradictory info from the postdocs about whether we can teach in the summer or not, and no one knows how much that would be. I was talking to my officemate today and zie was saying zie may leave for the summer or pack up all the stuff into storage and go live out in LA and write (which is where zie was adjuncting before this.) I don't know yet what I'll be doing, but whether or not there are any other postdocs around will make a difference. (For the first time, all of us were at the same bar at the same time and hung out on Saturday! It was good. We need to do that more regularly.)

I had such a hard time writing in an unstructured situation even when I had perfect weather and could set up lots of stuff with friends back in GradSchoolLand, and that might be even worse here, where I feel trapped by heat and mosquitoes. Then again, it might not. Still contemplating. Of course, I wonder if my advisor needs someone to watch her house this summer again...? Getting out there would be a hassle though. As you can see, there is much more contemplating to be done.

Of course, if you have been reading this blog for any length of time, you know there will be much more dithering about on my research plans, and then whatever plans I make I will fall short of and/or change completely, but that is just the way of things. Planitty plan plan plan. At least I have a plan all set up for snow!

6 comments:

Dr. Koshary said...

Talk about burying the lede! We had to wait until the sixth paragraph to hear this:

Also, since it is looking like I will be around here for another year, I need to start contemplating summer and fall.

That, my friend, is good news! Celebrate accordingly! (After class prep, of course.)

Earnest English said...

Yes, yay! And I love that planning a research plan is on your to-do list. Your to-do list looks like my to-do list. "Think about starting to think about possibly cramming some research into this impossible crammed schedule."

Lucky Jane said...

Totally agree with Dr. K: congratulations on some stability to launch a search for a more permanent perch. Plans for plans sound wise.

As for the calendar thing, I too used iCal to make up the reading schedules on my syllabi. Are you sure it isn't the paper calendar that is wrong? A couple of years ago, students who were using the planners sold by our official "bookstore" were confused that I hadn't planned a lesson for "November 31." I managed to teach them the mnemonic about which months have how many days, and I even kept a straight face.

Sisyphus said...

It's always been a two-year postdoc, people. What I want is to get a job where applying for jobs is not the most time-consuming element of it.

Psycgirl said...

Uhhh this is kind of embarrassing but I had the same problem with a calendar last year... then realized I had bought some odd calendar where the weeks started on Monday, not Sunday like I assumed.

(Beautiful pictures. Annoying calendar).

Anonymous said...

I was doing the schedule of assignments, had everything perfect! The readings all fit. The essays were timed perfectly. Just the right amount of in-class writing and TBA days (since we had seven snow days last year, I worked in a couple of free days just in case things got fubar again or I get sick or something) only to realize that I had left off an entire week. Now, that's only two days, but still, it was a ginormous PITA.

I love the coats, too, btw!! And yay for research plans!