It has been a weirdly productive and unproductive morning. K. was a half an hour late, having forgotten to set her alarm and woken up at the time she should have been leaving the house. AJ was in a stellar mood this morning and we spent the extra time playing Frisbee and riding his tricycle in the yard. I talked to K. about the TV thing and things have gone much better today. K. herself remarked how much more fun AJ was � everybody had a better day today.

So in the unproductive column we have a half an hour less work time. Add onto that an hour of emergency grocery shopping cutting into my school time, and I�m down a little today. On the other hand, we now have food to eat (productive).

Of the remaining time, I spent nearly an hour on the phone with my friend L. (unproductive), although we were mostly discussing things academic (productive). She found an article she thought I might be interested in and listened to me try to talk through the organizational mess that is my first chapter (or rather, at her advice, it is now my first and second chapter). And since I know they read here occasionally, I would like to publicly thank L. and also M., without whom I would have been paralyzed on several occasions. They are always willing to take the time to read stuff and offer advice, despite the fact that they have plenty of their own work to do. I am very grateful and I feel very lucky. They also remind me of how much I miss being surrounded by a community of like-minded scholars who challenge me to rise to my maximum level of competence. In other words, today I�m actually looking forward to the possibility of having a job in academia.

I haven�t been doing much writing this week (unproductive) thanks to my discovery that the final major media source I�m using for my diss is finally online and searchable, so I�ve been reading 30 years worth of articles that I had previously been unable to locate without reading thirty years worth of newspapers from cover to cover (very, very productive). This afternoon, during AJ�s nap, I plan to try to pour some embalming fluid on my current chapter, which I�m really getting rather tired of, in hopes that I can actually lay it to rest. I�m ready to work with some new material.

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