Not Ready, Part II

I hate how the arrival of August always seems to indicate "SCHOOL IS COMING, SUMMER'S BASICALLY OVER" when it's just barely August! I mean, around here, schools don't start until September (including my university), so basically August means the last full month of summer. It is still summer, darn it! Stop acting like it's already school season!

I haven't achieved all of my summer goals yet. I just finished my final round of data analysis for my Last Big Tenure Paper (tm), i.e. signature paper #2. I haven't even written it yet. I think my goal was going to be to submit it by Sept. 1, but more realistically it'll be around Sept. 15 or Oct. 1. Not a disaster.

It has been harder to be productive this summer than I'd anticipated because I spent so much of it sick, and struggling to get enough rest. I am less productive when I'm tired (duh). Both kids currently have colds again, but it seems to be mild for them. I am hoping I don't get it this time, because I feel like I can't afford to get sick yet again.

I have been running more often through the summer, and that has been really nice. Sometimes I even run in the mornings before work because work meetings have been few and far between. Then I can just drive to work and make up the time I lost running. Tonight I went running after the kids went to bed, because I badly needed to get out after a frustrating day in which Nora refused her nap, cried for ages, and then was incredibly cranky and difficult for the rest of the night. If it weren't for the darkness issue I'd run at night all the time. For the first time in ages I actually got to the point at which I felt good and like I could keep going forever.

When I got back home at 8:45, both kids were still awake and putting up a fuss. Sigh.

Exercise is necessary to keep me sane but it hasn't helped my body budge from my apparently new weight set point. I have been diligently working on that without much "slipping" for, oh, over a year now. So I think it is time to face the fact that this might just be the new equilibrium, like it or not, barring something extreme. And the only extreme yet healthy thing I can imagine would be some intense training regimen, and that just isn't fitting in with my life right now and the need to get tenure and be a present mom. (I do either walk or run at least 3 miles a day, every day, so it's not like I'm sedentary, but still...pretty lame). One thing that is important to help me accept this and not constantly beat myself up about it is to only buy and wear clothes that actually fit and flatter my body. My current body, not the body I wish I had. So that is what I am doing. I am not the same size that I was in graduate school. This is something to just accept, I guess...

Technology has been helping me gear up for fall. Two free and awesome programs have been making my life easier. One is dropbox, which is like a folder where you can virtually store stuff and synch it to every computer. It appears like a normal folder on your computer and when I save a document there on my work computer, it automatically shows up on my laptop at home and on my iPad as well. This is great for working on the same stuff from work and home without having to constantly email files to myself.

The other is Mendeley, which is a citation index but is also a way to store and organize your PDF journal articles. You can also import cites from the web and from lots of different databases (but not ERIC yet), and most exciting, this program resides on both my laptop and my desktop and again can be synched via the web. Not only that, but you can share citations and papers with others, which is very handy. Unlike Endnote, it's free (up to a point). I was never able to get into Endnote for some reason, but I am loving Mendeley. The way I used to keep track of my citations was embarrassingly old school, so it was time to step it up.

Now I just need to find a good qualitative data analysis program like nVivo that actually works on a Mac, because I just don't want to deal with PCs.

We are going to try potty training this weekend, serious hard core (rolling up the rugs). Oh my! I am not sure how this will work, or if it'll work, but it's worth a try. Added motivation is the fact that poor Nora has a terrible yeast diaper rash -- she desperately needs naked time. Naked time, here we come.