What’s good for working *and* a guaranteed mood-booster? Why the Pixies, of course!

But then we have a day like today and how can I not blag about it? Thanks to falling back he was up at 6:15am even though there was no school today. (I was up before 6am because that’s how my insomnia rolls lately.) I started in getting ready for work and a bit later he ran into the bedroom to excitedly tell me: “Mom! I just added a wiki page!”

He’s fairly obsessed with a new Kirby videogame that’s just come out for the Wii, and has watched countless YouTube videos and played it at a pal’s house last weekend. Apparently there’s a Kirby wiki out there — who knew? Which Gus found, discovered he could edit, and then wrote an entry about a boss called Water Galbaros. All before 7am. I couldn’t be more proud! He’s been working on that page and others on and off all day, and the page now has images too that other folks have added throughout the day.

Then I went to work, only to come home to the news that Jonathan and Gus had bought a small frying pan (with an egg on the handle, like this!), and that Gus could fry his very own egg. Which he proceeded to do, right before my very eyes. He even sprinkled salt on it from the salt cellar like a proper chef. (And then he ate the egg, also right before my eyes.)

I’m trying not to get all mushy and sentimental but lately I’ve been, well, all mushy and sentimental. He’s just such a great kid, and it’s all going so fast I can’t stand it.

I’ve got lots of balls in the air right now, and one of the things I’m doing is looking to see where my scholarship has been cited. It’s just the best kind of nerd high to see that one of my articles has been cited once, another 3 (!) times. And the one that’s been cited 3 times has been viewed over 1,400 times, according to the journal’s website!

I’m jonesing to see how often the article that was published last week has been viewed, but that journal doesn’t make those #s visible in the author interface. Plus it’s probably too soon for anything real. Although, when I tweeted about it (see, told you it’d be braggy), someone who has 1900+ followers retweeted me, so that’s something.

I’ve got other stuff to finish tonight, but tomorrow night I’ll be looking to find my top commented-on posts at the library blog I contribute to.

And I leave you with this: go, open access publishing, GO!

So that’s why I can say for sure that I don’t feel guilty about a short post tonight, because the paper I’m working on with my research partner has grown to 4470 words after my efforts this afternoon. Hard to know exactly how many new words I added, probably only a couple hundred. But revising is hard, too, so I’m calling it a job well done and knocking off for tonight.

Seriously though, I can still feel my back. Sometimes it aches a bit when I’ve done the standing desk thing all day, which I haven’t this week because I had a weird one-day cold + fever over the weekend and I’m trying to make sure that I’m really recovered by being lazy and sitting all day.

I am insanely busy. The confluence of work stuff plus family stuff (including middle school tours, aiieee!) that’s all sitting on my plate right now is unbelievable, even to me. I’m so busy that I haven’t been doing any of the things I try to do to keep sane + healthy, like get enough sleep, walk to work, and … write. Every day. Just a little bit, maybe 201 words or so? (Maybe 205.)

So here I am, giving it a go again this year. We’ll see how far I can make it. 200 words/day has always been my goal, how hard can that be?

I’m working on an article about using games in my library instruction sessions so I decided to use some of those gamey tricks on myself to help keep me motivated. I’m recording my word count in a spreadsheet — watch my score rise! — and printed out a calendar sheet so I can add checkmarks to the days I get a chunk of writing done. So far it’s helping, though maybe not as spectacularly as I’d like. I find myself resisting the urge to categorize my writing: bloggy, academic, research-related, work-related, etc. I think that’s ultimately dangerous though — I have a tendency to hold research-related writing up as the most valuable thing I could be doing at any point, and I’m not certain that’s a good thing.

One thing this writing hasn’t done yet is make it any easier to write the literature review for this article. Oh literature reviews, how I hate to write you, with your endless struggles of synthesis. Sometimes I wish I could just present a list of everything I read: here’s some good research on the effectiveness of games-based learning, here are examples of games used in library and information literacy instruction, etc. I keep trying to remember how valuable a good literature review can be, but that’s cold comfort when I’m deep in the trenches of paraphrasing and summarizing, sigh.

You probably noticed that I haven’t stuck to my “what’s my current earworm?” writing prompt. For about the past week and a half it’s been “Bright Yellow Gun” by Throwing Muses. Over vacation I finally read “Rat Girl,” Kristin Hersh’s memoir of the year Throwing Muses got signed to 4AD, she was diagnosed as bipolar and also got pregnant with her first kid. As expected it was fun to read about the early history of the band, but the descriptions of her bipolar experiences were fascinating. As someone who wishes I needed less sleep it was interesting to read about how it feels to not need much sleep at all.

This earworm is much less mysterious than the last: there were lyrics sprinkled throughout, so that’s why the song’s been stuck in my head.

I was going to do a cathartic post to try and get my frustration with this year’s schoolbus situation out of my system. Short version: because they’ve added another school to the route, the morning ride is 1 hr 15 min to get to his school that’s 2 miles from our house. Which doesn’t seem to bug Gus much, thankfully, but I still find it maddening (while acknowledging how lucky we are to have a schoolbus at all).

Then I thought maybe I should blag about how we spent last night thinking about whether to buy a small house + land in Vermont (not that we were looking — the link swam through my twitterstream). But that’s really not all that interesting, either. In the end it was about a 4 hour “hmm, maybe…” run of thinking about the house. It’s just too far and I can’t see how we would go there very often. Though it is, funnily enough, only about 40 miles from my dad’s house.

And now I’ve just spent 15 minutes looking at the Catskills version of Craigslist, looking for land that we could build a tiny house on (not that we have the time or $ for this anyway). I’m not looking to leave the BK, but we do have such a nice time whenever we get to travel to green foresty mountainy lakey places, and I miss the occasional nature, esp. in the fall, which is such a lovely time for nature.

But now it is time for Mad Men — we’re almost done w/season 3. And we are *not* moving to Ossining.

This has been a grumpy summer for me, scholarly work-wise. Mostly the problem is that I can’t help comparing it to the past two summers. Two years ago I spent the summer analyzing a small data set and writing it up into an article with a colleague. Last summer I wrote an article all by my lonesome, which I’m happy to report was just published. And even last semester, which was totally busy, another colleague and I wrote an article that we submitted to a journal earlier this summer.

This summer my main work has been writing up a preliminary report on the research project I’m working on with a colleague. I finished a first draft of the data from my site this week, and at 20 pages (single-spaced!) it’s definitely something real and tangible, the product of my summer. Absolutely I’m proud of it, and the project, too, which I love and believe has real value. But at the same time I can’t help feeling like it’s somehow less than my work in previous summers.

I’m heading into my 3rd year in my job so there’s still another 4 long years until I come up for tenure. I try not to freak out about it too much; it’s still a while out, and I think I’m in pretty good shape. But it’s sometimes it’s hard not to worry. The research and publication bar is inching ever higher, and it’s not always clear what’s sufficient. What is clear, of course, is the gold standard: the peer-reviewed journal article, the monograph published by a scholarly press. A preliminary report on research, even a 20-page one, isn’t one of those.

I don’t regret the summer’s work. It needed to happen. Our project continues and expands this coming academic year, and it’s important to get a sense what went well and what didn’t before we dive into data collection again. We’ve identified lots of themes that we’re interested in exploring further in our interviews with faculty and students at our four additional research sites. And this report will serve as a starting point for articles, presentations, etc. we write in the future (and, eventually, a book).

So why am I still so grumpy? A wise friend suggested that it’s a combination of settling into my job (both the librarian and researcher parts of it) and tackling such a big research project. She’s probably gotten it spot on. I love this project, but it is enormous and I am constantly fighting guilt that I’m not paying as much attention to it as I should be. There’s big things, like coding transcripts from all 82 interviews we did this past year and entering the data into our qualitative analysis software. There’s little things, like writing the reports for the IRB that approved and grant that funded last year’s work. At any given moment there is something I could be working on related to this project.

Which I guess is my task for this year: making progress on the project in a sustainable way. With an article in our sights, even if it’s not right now.

- Caught up on Google Reader, Twitter and Facebook
- Skimmed the Times
- Scooped the catbox
- Laundry
- Mended a shirt
- Fixed my sneakers w/Shoe Goo
- Unloaded the dishwasher
- Loaded the dishwasher
- Checked the liner notes on the OMD record with the song from which this post is titled
- Considered taking apart the pipes under the bathroom sink which lately is draining slow

The Same, Yesterday:

- More mending (Gus’s pants and camp towel)
- More laundry (caught up on vacation backlog)
- Moped
- Wrote some mopey journally stuff in a text file that I will probably delete
- Packed up the shoes we ordered for Gus that are too small and have to be sent back
- Surfed around to see about new sneakers for Gus (why do they suddenly outgrow all of their shoes all at once [and so urgently]?)
- Caught up on my New Yorker backlog
- Finished a book