Monday I can’t remember much happening at work although it was definitely busy. I did not manage to find the time to print my piece for writers group until the evening. Writers itself went well with the piece I wrote being given a good hearing. The weeks I enjoy are the ones when I feel at the end of the group session I know how to make the piece better. There is quite a bit of work to do on last weeks, particularly the middle stanza (which I had not really thought of as a separate stanza). I am struggling with the home work this week, I normally just do my own thing but this week I had a poem already drafted which would improve vastly if I could put it in the voice suggested for the homework. The trouble is that I am finding it a difficult voice to sustain in poetry, although it is one I have used in prose. The scene is not long enough for prose and does not lead anywhere yet. So it needs to be tackled in the poem.
Tuesday was busy, busy, first thing was a meeting at the medical school to discuss a bid proposal, then off to the Northern General to give a course in Primary Care on the use of NVivo. They had initially asked whether I could do it in an hour. It is a pretty solid two hours worth of teaching, and I mean talking. It is not my idea for a course, too compact, to heavy on my voice and dense, dense, dense. If I persuade people that there is a tool that could be useful for their research then I am happy, the real learning of the package takes place afterwards. I even miss out major areas which would be useful to any researcher but I don’t have the time. I basically have enough time to take them through the first few stages of a project and no further. I also should have been more careful as a number in the group had pretty bad colds.
Wednesday was again busy day at work and then I came home to prepare for the supervision the next day. Was sitting down to relax and answer emails, when I heard a pop and the lights flickered out. Went to check the fuse box and sure enough one had flicked, plus the bathroom light did not come on. I also spotted that my network did not seem to have come back, checked in the back room and found the router dead. However before I could do anything about it we were into a full scale power cut, with burglar alarms going off and no street lights. However my laptop switched to battery and I managed to find my internet dongle so ordered a new router to come on Friday, thinking I would spend Friday evening getting myself back connected. It also caused the hot water system to fail. This is not a big thing as most of the time I do not use it.
Thursday was supervision day but I awoke with the feeling of a blocked nose developing on top of a burny throat. However as it was supervision it was a go anyway day and the cold was only half heartedly there. The weather was warm, the sun shone and the train journey was smooth. Unfortunately my supervisor had to go and make a video in the middle of the supervision, so it was split into two sessions. The day was so warm that after the supervision I went to the ladies loo in order to remove a thermal t-shirt I had on underneath my jumper. I tend to dress warm for supervisions simply because I seem to catch fewer bugs if I do. I have quite a bit of rewriting to do especially around the theory of space. I will hopefully tackle it this coming week.
Friday I awoke and realised that whereas I had managed to pretend I did not have a cold on Thursday there was no way I was going to manage that on Friday, so I had to decide what to do. In the end I decided that taking Friday off work was probably the best although that meant not getting my router. So I have been surviving on my internet dongle. This has a limit on it that my router system does not. I suspect I am fairly well within it as my normal downloads are text based but I do not feel as able to use my router.
Yesterday I decided to try going down town but felt so rotten while out that decided that the best thing was that I stayed in the rest of the day and today. This was unfortunate as St Andrews was discussing its church profile at church meeting today (admittedly I had forgotten that until after the decision). However I have put the extra time into reading around space and realising that what I need to do is write some notes on sociology of place rather than space. I also need to develop the theorising in my descriptive writing. I am well aware that the two go hand in hand as, as one develops so does the other. The question that I am finding difficult is how much theorising/analysis apart from the broadly descriptive to put in my results sections and how.
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