(OK, I was trying to come up with a good alliterative title for this post, but that’s the best I could come up with.)
Books: My relative blog silence over the last few weeks has been because I’ve been working on my dissertation prospectus- the document that lays out my plans for a dissertation project and which will guide the direction of my life for the forseeable future (or until May 2012, according to the schedule therein). At any rate, said prospectus is in the hands of my committee right now, and we will meet this week to discuss it.
Technically, the prospectus is not a book (it ended up being about 35 pages, double-spaced), so if anyone has a better pithy term for ‘dissertation prospectus’ that starts with ‘b,’ let me know. I’ve certainly been reading quite a few books while working on it, though.
Babies: Combined with this project, we went last weekend to visit my new nephew. Much snuggling of babies was involved. Also, ice cream, sledding, snow, opera, and dinosaurs (not in that order). Baby X is, as yet, too young to appreciate any of these things. Sad, but true.
Not having been around many babies, I did not know that the soft spot on their head can throb. How bizarre is that?
Birds: Last weekend was the Great Backyard Bird Count, a citizen science project that’s a type of ‘bird census’ for the U.S. and Canada. I was able to do some birding near my sister’s house, but baby time interfered with birding time. I can see that I’ll have to introduce Baby X to the wonders of birding as he gets older… At any rate, Spring Break is next week (no, it’s not really spring yet), and we’ll be heading to the San Diego Bird Festival. So there should be plenty of birding then!
Aside from that, Spring Break will include at least one of these things, possibly more: 1) writing the introduction to the dissertation; 2) working on the technical part of the dissertation; 3) responding to review comments to a publication based on my master’s thesis, which has incredibly little to do with my current research but I really want to get it out there; or 4) having fun outdoors in the brief period that Florida actually has nice weather. So we shall see how this goes.