Ramblings of a person whose marking will never end.

Wow, nearly a month since I last blogged. It's a good thing that I'm not writing for an audience ;) (I love smiley faces. And because of this, I love that commercial that gently makes fun of the office mate who teases in her email, but reassures with a smiley face. But I hate emoticons. I think they are ugly and without class).

So I think it's likely been since around my last post that I last worked on my dissertation. Actually, that's not quite true - I squeezed in a 3-day survey writing fest in the middle of marking (marking which I should still be doing, but I must take a break). I stumbled on the idea of using a different concept in my measure - one that I should have thought of ages ago, but because I'm not really engaged in my field, it never occurred to me. And because I don't have a lot of students around who can help me on this (I even did a brown-bag presentation to a group including my faculty, and all I heard was the sound of crickets in response .... I decided not to take it personally, but it would have been helpful if they had at least a few comments...) And, as I think I've mentioned, while my advisor is amazing, he doesn't do research in this area at all, and I'm left feeling rather lonely. But, that said, I think that it's reasonable to include this new measure. But what I really need to do is sit down and explain my rationale for including these items in my survey, based on my interview data and on the general literature. And for that, I really need 2 weeks. But, in case you haven't looked at your calendar lately, it's now June, which means I'm now officially behind the very outside date I had set for my survey to be mailed out. Really, I don't know why I even bother to set these deadlines.

Something interesting I noticed was that I have a real tendency to want to use constructs as outcome measures when they are usually used as predictors, and vice versa. Does that say something about me?

O.k., I'm going to mark 2 more proposals before I go to bed. 2 more. Ready, set, go.