June 24, 2007

Back to reality. Here are the highlights of my last two weeks.

My 16-day journey began with a day in Seattle (an unintentional 6-hour layover), the only documentation of which is a picture of a cheesecake stand at the Market. Each is the size of a cupcake.



Next was Anchorage to hang out with my pseudo-nephew and godson Kenton, and my best friend and her hubby. We have known each other now going on 26 years! Kenton was awesome and wanted to follow me everywhere.



On a hike near Girdwood, AK. The rushing water behind us was way more interesting than posing for the camera.


CC hauling herself across the gulch in the hand tram on the Girdwood hike.


Hanging out at Westchester Lagoon in Anchorage with my best friend eating chocolate, drinking coffee, and admiring my new clogs bought without sales tax and a $25 off coupon. The little things in life that keep me going.


The other little thing in life we love:


My first night in Missoula - taken from parent's back deck. For anyone who wonders why it's called Big Sky Country.


Artificial rapids designed for whitewater kayakers to practice on the Clark Fork River in downtown Missoula, MT.


Ye old alma mater. Main Hall with the "M" and Mt. Sentinel in the background. It's always weird to walk around one's old college campus.


My mom on our hike to the Blodgett Canyon overlook. Bitterroot Valley below.


Blodgett Canyon, Bitterroot Mountains, MT.


My future retirement castle? Where I should have written my dissertation from - I'd be done by now.



The HobNob Cafe on Missoula's so-called "Hip Strip."


And finally, the Missoula Osprey (rookie team for the AZ Diamondbacks) on opening night at their new stadium. That's Chance Wheeless, who was in the juvenile delinquency class I TA'd last Fall, playing first base.

May 31, 2007

Welp, I squandered another perfectly good day I had set aside to work on revisions. After lots of pacing, working on other projects, obsessively checking blogs, and a mid-afternoon sojourn to El Sol y La Luna for a dissatisfying huevos rancheros and funny-tasting tortilla chips, I currently have a headache, am hot, stiff, and due at Lovejoy's in an hour to listen to loud music.

In the crossing-things-off-lists department, I finished up my scope of work on a consulting contract I had, and let them know I wouldn't be available for further work. Yayhoo! But, wouldn't you know it, about three weeks ago another consulting opportunity came my way that I couldn't pass up, so I now have two other jobs besides finishing my dissertation. This new job has me working for the firm I worked for in Seattle. They are consultants on a project here in Austin, and brought me in as an independent to help out. It's a really interesting project, funded by the Gates Foundation, to engage the community in high school redesign efforts.

To add to the many self-inflicted barriers to finishing, I leave next week on a 16-day trip. Aagh! Maybe I need a new kitten.

May 24, 2007

I have had this complete and total aversion to writing lately, as illustrated by my heavy use of photos and images in my blog entries. And lengthy quotations from Supreme Court justices. This probably has something to do with the fact that I am deep into the writing phase on my dissertation. After months of labored statistical analysis, or as we like to say, "running models," I finally have to face my 13 tables of regression coefficients and describe what it all means in English.

I finished a first draft of this results chapter, and it was painful technical writing. I felt like something really heavy was sitting on me. Today I met with my adviser to get some help in figuring out where to go from here, and I am feeling a little overwhelmed. I kind of know what I need to do to get it to where I want it, but I always have that niggling fear and self-doubt that I won't be able to do it. Like this time, I have just reached my limit and it's not going to happen. How did I become so fearful and lazy? That is a bad combination - the fear and the lazy. My adviser occasionally asks me, "what else have you been doing, besides this?" That question lays bare the hard reality that I have become a very poor manager of time.

May 23, 2007

R.I.P. Veronica Mars

May 16, 2007

A little guy that M. recently drew, and I call "Milo."

April 29, 2007

From the Jo's Easter Pet Parade and Costume Contest, my favorite contestants:


Hot Dog


Bjork Dog


Denim Jo's Dog

April 20, 2007

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, April 18, 2007:

The Court further pretends that its decision protects women. Women might come to regret their physician-counseled choice of an intact D&E and suffer from “[s]evere depression and loss of esteem,” the Court worries. Notably, the solution the Court approves is not to require doctors to inform women adequately of the different procedures they might choose, and the risks each entails. Instead, the Court shields women by denying them any choice in the matter. This way of protecting women recalls ancient notions about women’s place in society and under the Constitution — ideas that have long since been discredited.

Although today’s opinion does not go so far as to discard Roe or Casey, the Court — differently composed than it was when we last considered a restrictive abortion regulation — is hardly faithful to Casey’s invocations of “the rule of law” and the “principles of stare decisis.”

In candor, the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, and the Court’s defense of it, cannot be understood as anything other than an effort to chip away at a right declared again and again by this Court — and with increasing comprehension of its centrality to women’s lives. A decision of the character the Court makes today should not have staying power.

April 10, 2007

Happy Birthday Okazaki Fragment! On March 31, O.F. turned 12 years old. Thanks for being my familiar, and for keeping my lap warm all these years.

March 23, 2007

Build it and they will come



My mom's friend Sylvia who lives in Canada took this picture outside of Banff. They had to build the elk and deer their own crossing because after the highway was built there were lots of collisions (this was where their original path was before the humans invaded). Sylvia says it didn't take the animals long to learn that this was their "road."

I have often wished our government would spend the money to build these crossings. I heart Canada.

March 11, 2007

21-year-old Lily Allen, speaking to the AV Club, on the effect of how women musicians are portrayed in the media:

AVC: You've talked a lot about way women in rock tend to get patronized as "the female version of this male artist," instead of being written up for themselves. And you took on NME over a comment about how you can rock "even in stilettos." Why do you think there's so much of a problem finding positive ways to talk about female musicians?

LA: I don't know. I'm really saddened by the whole situation. It makes me really, really angry. I think that there's a view of… I think that as long as women are parading around on television, taking their clothes off to sell records, then guys will be able to take the piss out of us. That's what it comes down to. I have a little brother, Alfie, and he has a very poor view of women, and I think the only explanation… He's got three incredibly strong women surrounding him in his home life, yet he's so affected by the stuff he sees in the media and the way women are portrayed. And I think until TV programmers are more responsible about putting these slutty women on TV dancing around, that's the view that kids are going to have. Ultimately, that's my only explanation.

March 1, 2007

A couple of public service announcements:

I finally stopped in at Dominican Joe's, the new coffee shop in that corner strip mall at Riverside and S. Congress, and I highly recommend it! Reluctant Texan and I dropped in while walking back from the Barack Obama rally, and I was pleased to find that it was not a cheesy knock-off corporate coffee chain of some sort, but rather an independent venture that collaborates with a local non-profit to buy the coffee directly from the growers. Plus it has a calm atmosphere and plenty of tables, breakfast tacos if you get there early enough, and toasted bagels and cream cheese. From their website:

Dominican Joe's primary coffee is purchased from Makarios, an Austin-based non-profit organization doing educational development work in the Dominican Republic. Skipping the large corporate middle-man, Makarios works directly with farmers in the region and pays them higher wages and supports their communities in an effort to develop self-sustaining skills for the future.

One thing they fail to mention is that Makarios is a faith-based organization, so there may be some word-o-Jesus-spreadin' going on in the DR. Not sure how I feel about this.

The second promotional item is a cool-sounding SXSW day show taking place on Thursday March 15 at Lovejoy's. It's co-sponsored by Three Imaginary Girls.

February 18, 2007

Today I sadly report the theft of my bicycle. Sometime between 2:30 and 11:00pm on Friday, someone came up to our house, opened the front gate (the entire front yard is fenced), walked up to the porch, and took my bike. Just like that. No, it wasn't locked up, and for almost two years it didn't need to be. The other thing is that with our schedules, there is almost always someone home, and we don't have regular schedules. I am home all but two days a week! The one evening I go out to have some beers after a meeting this happens (Puritanical analysis: I'm being punished for not working hard enough!). Luckily M.'s bike was at work.

I totally blame irritating developer-dude who, for the past several months, has brought scads of construction crews onto the property at all hours of the day most days of the week. I figure this has multiplied the number of people who know our little house even exists, because you can't really see it from the street if you're just driving by. We talked all winter about how we needed to move my bike to the storage garage - of course! And last Fall I just got a full tune-up and a new front fork put on it, with a new headlight too. Needless to say I have been very depressed about this - as I do tend to form unhealthy attachments to inanimate objects. I bought this bike in 1996 from a little shop in Moscow, Idaho. The longer I have something, the harder it is for me to let go of it - it becomes a source of pride a la "I've had this ______ for 17 years!"

The other part that's depressing is the feeling victimized - that someone had the audacity to walk up to our front door and take something that was mine. So now, just in time for SXSW and springtime riding opportunities, I have no bike. Saturday M. took me to Flip Happy Crepes to cheer me up, and then we went to Lowe's and bought a "No Trespassing" sign. I haven't hung it up yet, but I'm looking forward to making our house look like drug dealers live there.

February 11, 2007

Progress! Last week I met with my dissertation chair to go over my latest research results, and I am very close to being done with this portion of the dissertation saga. I need to make one more good two to three week push on the statistical modeling, and then I can return to the writing portion. I have a skeletal manuscript at this point (what I used for my proposal defense), and basically need to add two more chapters: results and discussion. Then beef up the current literature review and methodology chapters, and it's done! Ha ha! Not as easy as it sounds, but definitely doable in a 5-6 month time frame. Probably sooner if I applied myself, but isn't that just the way it always is with everything. I like to apply myself just enough so I get it done but don't lose my mind in the process; plus it's nice to just sit around or do errands in the middle of the week and bask in the last few months of freedom and the simple gift of having so many hours in the week that are mine. I think the only casualty after this is all done will be my social skills - writing a dissertation means I spend an awful lot of time alone (no offense to Okazaki Fragment, Stella Bean, Pepe, and Frankie).

February 6, 2007

The movie about The Gits is coming to the SXSW film festival in a few weeks. This movie has been in the works for a long time, and premiered at the Seattle International Film Festival in 2005. I got an email a year ago about 7 Year Bitch and the remaining members of The Gits wanting to play a show in Austin when the movie was released here, but haven't heard anything since. Seems highly unlikely, a 7 Year Bitch reunion? I think I could die pretty happy after that.

January 30, 2007

It's starting. The thinly and not-so-thinly veiled misogynistic commentary about Hillary Clinton. The culprit I am pointing out at this time is not surprising, yet disappointing - Jon Stewart. Watching The Daily Show is basically like taking a bath in super-charged masculinity every night, but still I watch it. I suppose it's still a breath of fresh air in the current climate, but it rarely fails to alienate me. Last night it was so apparent, the way they covered Clinton vs. the way they covered Obama. Dredging up stereotypes about how women like to "talk" and men don't want to have to listen to women "talk." How Clinton's campaign isn't going to appeal to men because it will somehow remind them of their nagging wives?? Good god.

And another thing, what's the deal with media outlets referring to her as "Mrs." Clinton instead of Senator Clinton? Gets on my nerves.

January 29, 2007

I'm going to Anchorage and Missoula in June for two weeks. Now I have something to look forward to and a self-imposed deadline for getting most of my dissertation stuff done before I leave. Yay!

My neck is killing me today - did I sleep on it funny? I don't really know, but I'm sort of dreading what Pilates is going to do to it today.

January 23, 2007

I really liked this article in the American Prospect called The Mommy Mantra: What female politicians lose when they brand themselves as mothers. Using recent public appearances by Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton as examples, the author explains that the Mommy Mantra is "the idea that what qualifies women for politics isn't their intelligence, their experience, their policy proposals, or even their character, but rather their inherent identities as feminine caretakers."

An excerpt:

"When Clinton and Pelosi claim political capital due to their experience as mothers and homemakers, they are selling their ambitious selves -- and, indeed, all women -- far short. Women don't deserve to be in politics because we're more compassionate or nurturing than men. We deserve to be there because we are human beings, and especially because we are human beings who, regardless of our choices about if and how to become mothers, continue to live under a social and political system that denies us many of the same options men have enjoyed for generations."

January 12, 2007

A new comic from Marshall, starring the one and only Pepe*, making its internet debut here at I'm Just Shy:



* Based on a true story

January 4, 2007

Well, hello there 2007. When I was growing up, I never thought much past the year 2000, so I figure the rest is a bonus. I had a couple of weeks off over the holidays, allowing me to finally tackle that pile of bank statements and various other administrative tasks, organize my office, make Silver Zephyr's mom's butternut ball cookies, cat-sit Reluctant Texan's four cats, finally watch the first few episodes of the first season of Six Feet Under, type up one section of my mom's English translation of her father's family history (which was hand-written in Spanish ten years ago) and generally contemplate life.

New Year's Eve day I spent entirely on the phone catching up with old friends. It's comforting to talk to people who've known you a long time, because they have a certain perspective on who you are - they remind me of who I am when I've forgotten. My godson and pseudo-nephew Kenton turned 1 year old on New Year's Day. I sent him the first ten books of the Beatrix Potter series, the first installment of his personal library that should be complete by the time he's old enough to read.

For 2007, I have a singular goal, which I will approach with a laser-like focus: finish my dissertation research!! Yes, yes, you've all heard it before. And you will hear it many more times until it is done. My secondary goal is the trite "exercise more," which I am already closer to than in years past as I have signed up for six weeks of pilates starting January 22. Hopefully it won't bother my knee too much - I'm told I have patella-femoral syndrome, aka runner's knee. How I have runner's knee 14 years after I stopped running competitively, I have no earthly idea.