This week=business. Monday I had a job interview with mosquito control, and if I'm lucky, I'll begin work in April. Given the wedding, honeymoon, and two of us in Ph.D. next year, I'm really hoping that I begin work ASAP. Yesterday Meghan had her thesis defense and passed with exceptional glory, despite her terror that she wouldn't make it through ( Read more... )

I'm reading it again, the paper that took over my life for a year. That paper, which taught me words I had never known, and why I should care about quantum theory, and why the heck it's important to keep every single source that you will ever run across. The master's thesis. I haven't touched it in three years, and I thought it relegated to ( Read more... )

Something that I learned in Japan that will always live with me is how yearly events repeat. There are seasons, festivals, and crop harvests. Now, with NaNoWriMo, I'm remembering where I was writing certain things. This is my 4th year on NaNo, and now that I look back on some of my accomplishments, I never made it as far as I have already. And I'm ( Read more... )

I find myself writing entries for graduate school again. Goals. Ideas. Specific research accomplishments. I can't help but wonder if there is going to be a graduate school 2.0 revolution, like with the web. If anything, it's more important to have documented writing and research abilities, because the digitization of archives and whatnot are ( Read more... )

Shortly after I complain of having no jobs, I find myself having regular paid freelance gig and finding my way through the back alleys of other freelance publications. Within the week or so I'm going to put something on my official blog about what I've learned during my freelancing job search. This could easily be the way that I pay my way through ( Read more... )

Job-hunting has been a task and a half. I'm currently holding a part-time job at Bodies, the Exhibit, but it doesn't pay enough to cover my half of the rent. Counting freelance opportunities, I've applied to probably 15 places. To date, I've heard back from only 3. Surprisingly, the best companies at responding to my applications are banks. The ( Read more... )

I just did a little bit of writing on this quiet Sunday evening. One of my students died last Thursday, and given that I live in a town with 7,000 people, it was kind of a big deal. I definitely knew the student, but because I cannot read the Kanji provided in the newspaper article, I won't actually be able to put a name to the face until I get to ( Read more... )

So it seems like it's the season to come back to LiveJournal. Myself, I've recently been cranking out a few real, publishable things at my website, www.jettisoned.net. It took me a long time to realize the difference between a journal and a blog. For the longest time I thought I would acquire readers just by throwing words at the screen and hoping ( Read more... )

I bragged about Wall-E over on that other great website that everybody's talking about, namely www.jettisoned.net, but I just wanted to fill up my weekly update here with at least one sentence on it. Yes ( Read more... )

Hot Damn, I must be busy!

But yes, really, I am busy, or at least that's what they call it in the teaching world. Gluing, pointing at pictures of Johnny Depp, gluing pictures of Johnny Depp together so kids can point at them. Yeah, it's a rough life, but somebody's gotta do it.

Really, I think most of my friends have ended their livejournal careers ( Read more... )