Tag Archives: grad school

monday morning.

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It has been gently raining for the last several hours — maybe even all through the night, and I am sitting here with my first coffee cup of the day, listening to the different sounds of the drips on the driveway, the water hitting the branches of the pear tree by the window, the fat drops falling from the gutters in a different kind of rhythm, and I’m wishing that I didn’t have to go anywhere today.

We had a really nice weekend — a bit crazy busy in that both of our academic schedules had events and dinners and guests well into the weekend, but lovely in that we found time to hike in misty forests, pick our first bag of greens at the farm I joined, and discover a chili-cook off in the grocery store of a nearby town.

I failed to document these events with more than my mind’s eye, and I’ve been too busy to knit this week, so here are some snapshots of Monday morning.

sleepy-boh

egg-cartons

reading

greens-close-uo

process.

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Wednesday is the day I get to stay home. I have no obligations calling me to campus, but I tend to have the most important book of the week to read — often for a meeting Thursday morning one-on-one with my advisor. These are the books that tend to speak to me, and these meetings, while often incredibly challenging, leave me with a feeling of affirmation that this is what I want to be doing. That part feels good.

The actual process of reading a book for a Thursday meeting? Time consuming, because it needs to be read carefully  (and should be, given that it is more relevant to my fields than most of what I read in my other classes). It is so easy to read 20 pages, only to realize that your mind was wandering, and you didn’t really catch what so-and-so was getting at in chapter 3. That does not quite cut it during Thursday meeting, so I’ve taken to using Wednesday to get other things done during the reading process in order to make sure I’m paying attention. All this to say that, despite the fact that I have no actual pictures of the reading process, I  can show you lots of the things I got done yesterday, in between chapters:

Hung out with the dog:

dog1

dog2

Baked oatmeal-cranberry-walnut cookies, based on Deb’s recipe from earlier this week:

oatmeal-cranberry1

Worked more of the foot of the sock, in 5 or 6 row increments throughout the day:

toeup2progress

After a particularly long chapter, I took this guy to the dog park:

dog3

What a ham. I also managed to do laundry, bake a loaf of bread, and have an ichat knitting date with a dear friend. I realize that this post makes grad school look like a piece of cake, but I stand by this particular approach to Wednesday: solid, focused reading, a chapter at a time, interspersed with productive tasks (laundry, errands, food prep) and fun (knitting, playing with dog) helps things to stick better, and means I don’t waste as much time losing focus/drifting off/etc. Note to self — do this more!

Apologies if the blog is getting a bit repetitive! These days I feel like my schedule looks a lot like this:

Read (a lot). Knit (a little). Repeat.

Time to pour another cup of coffee, read the epilogue, and make some thoughtful notes for my meeting.

another jellyfish.

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My third pinwheel is growing…which is a good thing, as it needs to be finished for a wedding I am attending in a few weeks. The rest of my knitting doesn’t look much different from my last posts, so I’ll spare you from trying to figure out if I knit 5 st or 25 st on my other WIPs. I do have some productivity from my kitchen to share:

You’re looking at a soothing, spicy soup that did exactly what I needed it to on Tuesday: address my drippy nose, and transport me to somewhere else. I will certainly be making this again. (If you haven’t checked out Heidi’s recipe blog over at 101 cookbooks, what are you waiting for? That lemony stirfry on the front page is on my list this week.)

Also, a loaf of banana bread. I tend to poke my bananas every day or so to see if they are ready to be turned into bread, specifically, Mark Bittman’s version of banana bread. I like the addition of a little bit of coconut — adds texture and depth without being overly sweet. Yum!

This guy is ready for his close up. He wants you all to know that he is trying very hard to be good, but that sometimes life gest really hard. Exhibit A:

I took this picture out one of our windows, without using the zoom. It is almost too much for Boh to bear. Yesterday he may have attempted to jump through the [closed] window — he bumped his nose on the glass and flopped onto the bed, ready to make another go of it.

This week has had more of a rhythm to it, and now that I have a pile of books to read and think about, I have less time to worry about transitioning into an academic life. Looking forward to the week ahead — we’re finally past introductions and syllabi, which means it is time for “real” grad school to start.

Happy weekend!

FO: star crossed slouchy beret

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Ta-da! This was super quick and quite fun to knit. The cables increase the squish factor of the Malabrigo, and while the variegation is a bit busy, I am quite excited to send this westward to its rightful owner. Here’s another shot of the Star Crossed Slouchy Beret, in which the dog demonstrates his usefulness as a table/backdrop:

Using the eyeballing method, this hat took about half a skein of Malabrigo. I may make one for myself out of my sassymetrical leftovers. This is where a scale would come in handy…I’ll keep you posted. In other news, here are some pictures of yesterday’s victories:

Delicious collards from my local farmers’ market, cooked with garlic, ginger and chile.

My very own yarn! (Dog for scale.) I’m not sure if you can get a sense for the thickness of this yarn, but most of this feels like a light worsted or even a heavy dk. I need to get better at spinning the spindle levelly, and at joining new pieces of fiber without getting an ugly blip in my yarn, but I am feeling really good about this. Dividing my roving into more vertical pieces, and doing more pre-drafting to both lengthen the roving strips and separate the fibers from each other made all the difference. I had a lot of fun with this, and am looking forward to practicing a bit more.

I also have a recent yarn acquisition to share, purchased at my new LYS. This is absolutely gorgeous, local, undyed alpaca. I bought two 8 oz 660 yd skeins, and I’m wondering if I could turn this into a drapey Gathered Pullover. What do you think? Other ideas include a luxurious shawl or lacey shrug.

Thanks also for all of your kind words about graduate school and the transition. It feels truly indulgent to be able to set most of my own schedule and focus on reading and writing and thinking. I’m sure my anxiety will begin decreasing once my seminars get past their introductory meetings and I am able to work through the transitional cobwebs by participating.

Alright — off to do a bit more reading, and then some baking, spinning and frolicking with the dog. Happy weekend!

it has begun.

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I am officially a graduate student. I attended my program’s orientation session yesterday, and classes start tomorrow. I don’t exactly know how to describe my feelings at this moment. Several years of work in a range of positions have helped to affirm that I want to become a scholar and a professor, and I am thrilled at the particulars of the opportunity in front of me. That said, I am also incredibly anxious, perhaps beginning to feel the self-doubt that will likely rear its head many times during the next several years as I work to explore the kind of work I wish to do, and the kind of scholar and teacher I will become.

I think quite a bit of this is reasonable at this point: I’ve been out of school, and thus out of situations that require my brain to operate in a critical, academic way, for four years. Many of the people in my program are younger, and thus, while the “life” aspects of graduate school may be newer to them, their brains are likely a bit sharper when it comes to seminar discussions and critical thinking and writing. How do you reclaim that chunk of brain power and work on expanding and refining these abilities? The only answer I can come up with is to just jump in, with an eye towards maintaining a balance in my life that includes cooking, running and knitting (while READING, and this week, attempting to reacquire enough language skills from college-land to pass a placement test…)

So, pie = balance. The pie above, by the way, is fresh peach and strawberry, with a dusting of a crumb topping. Yum!

Also, while the BSJ patiently waits for buttons (and seaming), I’ve cast on for something new:

It’s the Star Crossed Slouchy Beret, and it is moving quickly. I’m using Malabrigo in Verdes, and while I worried that the variegation would be too busy for the cabled pattern, I’m liking it so far. This is heading back West, to a dear friend who requested a green hat. I am excited to get this in the mail, as I’m sure the mornings are already turning cold in the mountains.

I’ve also begun making some lists for holiday knitting — more on that soon.