Status, so to speak

It's spring break for the college students this week, so I've been unmotivated on the rowing/erging front. Sigh. Step one was getting myself back to getting up sufficiently early, which was accomplished this morning. Step two will be doing more than just flying exercises. This is difficult for me when I've spent most of the week in my own head, trying to stay focused and motivated on projects.

It has been a busy week, work-wise. On Sunday, I met up with my PhD advisor to go over stuff for a couple of projects. We've got a paper that's close to ready for resubmission (Manuscript of Doom II: The Sequel), but it hasn't been at the top of the queue just yet. I've been reading the book How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing, by Paul Silvia, which contains a number of useful tools. The largest one is scheduling in consistent writing time, so this week I've rolled up my sleeves to start doing just that. One section of the book discusses priorities for writing, where writing with deadlines is higher-priority than writing without deadlines. Well - I've had two manuscript reviews to write, and one came due on Tuesday. It was a complicated beast, so I wound up staying up late Tuesday night, and continued to work on it yesterday before finally getting it turned in. While there are major flaws to the experiment, the underlying premise is interesting and I hope it gets rewritten and published. Yesterday, I started in on the second review. I should be able to finish it today, and then I can get back to the MoD II. The good news is that some of the review-work will inform my efforts on MoD II.

Once MoD II has been wrestled into submission (double meaning there, ha!), other things will be popping up quickly. Our collaborator from Nebraska will be visiting next week, along with one of my committee members from Arizona, and we have a LOT to accomplish over a short timeframe.

Meanwhile, things are quiet on the homefront. What with finishing How to Write a Lot, it has been time to turn to other books. sandokai mentioned she's been reading books on economic status and education, which sounded like appealing subject matter, so last night I started in on a famous (infamous?) book called A Framework for Understanding Poverty, by Ruby Payne. A major reason for reading it is to then read some follow-up stuff by Gorski that debunks it.

On some level, AFUP is making my hair stand on end. For one thing, if you want to understand what Texan rhetoric sounds like, well, here you go, in book form. I personally have a hard time listening to it, because it assumes an authoritarian tone without necessarily engaging trust by way of presenting reasoned arguments. If only it were a simple matter of dismissing the book, though. The trouble is that there are some potentially good/thought-provoking ideas embedded in this giant matrix of wrongful crap (to put it bluntly, from my perspective). So, this is a book that will take a strong stomach to finish, but I'll try to take a good crack at it. It's mercifully short, at least. I'm more looking forward to the next stuff, which I hope will help disentangle the wrongful stereotyping from the worthwhile points, and hopefully do so without using the Texan rhetorical style.

Got to spend good time with scrottie over the weekend. Work locker for him this week as well (more severe in his case, really). So good to see him, but hard to then throw myself back into solitary again.

Lastly, my family had a difficult medical situation with one of my relatives last week, which my mom reported on the book of face (but also in an e-mail). Of course, the book of face never showed the original update to me (assuming I didn't miss it over the weekend). The ratio of garbage to insight there is irritating me, and I can't decide if the insight is worth tolerating the garbage (both in terms of advertising and in terms of not showing me things I'd like to see). That all means I might see about composing my thoughts differently so most of them are contributed here instead of there.