Adieu briefly

First, some big news: Today, Ms. Prepared became the first person in my cohort to defend her thesis (and, of course, to pass)! Her defense went really well. So from now on we'll have to call her Dr. Prepared.

Tomorrow I will be leaving town for spring break. Details will be posted after I return.

95% of you can stop reading right now, because the only ones who will find this entry remotely interesting are my college peeps.

In one of those random "I wonder ... let's go look it up on the internet!" moments, I was looking at the Greek Life page at Case. Some things have changed since our day:

Delta Upsilon has enough members to have a South Side house.

Now not only Delta Gamma and Phi Sigma Rho have chapters at Case, but so does Kappa Alpha Theta (installed last fall).

The largest sorority chapter is Phi Mu, with 85 members. KAT is the smallest because it is so new, and Phi Sigma Rho limits its members to engineers, but the third smallest chapter is Sigma Psi, with 59. All in all, there are 446 women in Panhellenic sororities. (Spring 1999, the largest chapter was 59, and there were a total of 218 Greek women.) Sigma Gamma Rho has a campus chapter (rather than a citywide one). Apparently there is also an Asian-American interest sorority called Omega Tau Zeta, not a part of Panhellenic.

Don't worry, though - not everything has changed. For example, Wes Schaub is still the director of Greek Life.

Wild, wild life

Not a goose
Originally uploaded by TheTurducken

Let's start with the admission that, while I take a lot of pictures of the great out of doors, half the time I don't know what it is I'm taking. "That's a tree," I can confidently assert. "And that's an, um, a bird." OK, I'm exaggerating a little: I know an oak when I see it - as long as it still has leaves. I can tell a goose from a robin. But I'm no John Audubon.

Which means I had no idea what the bird shown here is. It was hanging out at the goose pond at Shelby Park. A little internet research suggests it may be a Muscovy duck, which doesn't seem nearly interesting enough. I mean, look at this guy. Can you see him with a bow around his neck, repeated around the border of your kitchen?

Out of my rut

I've been suffering from a case of unmotivationitis lately. The difficulty is distinguishing serious unhappiness from the natural vagaries of graduate student moods - because you need to know the root cause to treat it effectively. (If simply saying, "Hey! Work harder!" was effective, there wouldn't be a problem, after all, and graduate students would be marvelously efficient.) I think I figured out where my slackitude is coming from, so I'm partway to a cure. I also had a chat with my advisor today, and he was helpful, although not in ways that were entirely expected.

The biggest issue is that I'm making the transition from "doing stuff for other people on deadlines" and "having to do stuff on my own for long-term rewards." It's easy enough to get things done for classes or grant deadlines. It's harder to prioritize journal articles and research projects that are due whenever they're done. After all, the rewards (and penalties) for getting classwork done in a timely manner are pretty immediate. The rewards from getting a journal article submitted are more long-term and nebulous ... someday you will be considered for more jobs, tenure, respect, etc. As you can see, though, long-term doesn't mean unimportant! I think I may have come up with a strategy to help me get going again, and I threaten to keep you updated on it.

A few links

Would anyone like to buy me The Bishop when it is finished?

Here is the answer to a question that has plagued many.

Another student in my program has a blog.