... a bad blogger.
Sorry for ditching you all for a few days, but I have been working on a paper that I will present on Saturday. It's a paper on blogging, and I will tell you all about it when I come back. The conference will be attended by other scholar/bloggers, some of whom read this blog. So, don't worry, guys. It's almost done. She says with a frozen smile.
The final survey results trickled in a couple of weeks ago, so we're pulling this together very quickly. Not much time to clean the data or revise hypotheses. It's fine. I actually get off on crunch periods. As long as they don't go on for too long.
Crunch periods are made more interesting when you're working at home and not in a hermetically sealed office. At the risk of seeming less than professional to colleagues, let me tell you about my afternoon.
I was able to work for a time in the morning, while the kids were in school. If I skip the shower and leave the dirty dishes, I can get around 2 hours of writing done in the morning. After I picked up Ian from school, my mom took him to Burger King. She had him playing in their indoor playland for two hours, so that I could write in peace. Kiss for the grandma. At 3:00, Ian returned and Jonah got off the school bus shortly after. Then hell broke lose. I bargained with them. If you leave me alone, you can watch a video and play computer games for as long as you like. (Yeah, nice parenting.) I wrote, negotiated changes with the co-author, and settled disputes over video games. At the same time. A copy of the paper was sent to my husband, so he could proof read it on the bus ride home.
At one point, I was on the phone, debugging a video game, sending a file on the other computer, and at that moment I noticed that two neighborhood boys had walked into our garage filled up an entire bin full of our toys and were marching down the street proudly with their booty. HEY! This isn't Toys R Us! Put those toys back right now! I think I hung up on my co-author at that moment. I forgot to eat until after Steve come home.
So, things are a little crazy around here. I'll be back soon. Maybe tomorrow.