Winter Rejuvenation

Regan and I were talking last night, and we both decided that it is high time that we get this blog up and running again.  Of course, it won’t be quite the same, now that Regan is back in Los Angeles and I continue to feel less and less like a visitor in Amsterdam.  We’re both doing our best to write our dissertations without losing our sanity, and if I could speak for both of us here, starting the blog back up will provide both of us with some very nice “break” moments (aka procrastination) when it feels like the cycle of researching/writing/editing feels like a little more then either of us can bear. 

The last few months have been a little rough as I struggled to finish a chapter that should not have taken as long to write as it did.  It felt like a terrible weight hanging over my head, and for some reason, I didn’t make any forward progress on it for months and months.  It made me pretty unhappy, and it certainly didn’t please my advisor.  Feeling stuck can be a pretty common feeling among grad students, as I have only recently really acknowledged.  Even as I recognize I’m not the only one this has happened to, I’m not sure what the solution to the problem is.

But then somewhere around November, some switch got flipped and I started to actually want to do my work.  I knew it was really better when I started putting in more miles on my runs and I felt like reading cooking blogs again.  Maybe it was the start of Bokbier season or the fact that pumpkins were available at the market.  I don’t know, and I certainly can’t explain why during the shorter, cold days of winter I feel like working again. I can’t explain it, but I’m happy about it.

So, while I continue to go crazy writing three more chapters and two conference papers, Regan and I will once again amuse ourselves with our blog.