Anna staining some boards that will become mug racks in the Faculty Corner:



Anna came up with a fabulous idea: at the end of every month, one of us will plan and surprise the other with an afternoon excursion/activity. I took the first turn and booked us for a photo safari/tour of the Congressional Cemetery. On Saturday afternoon, we met a photo pro and a cemetery tour guide and followed them around the cemetery for two hours of history lessons and photo instruction. Neither of us took too many photos--I was distracted by the fascinating cemetery stories, and Anna was busy playing with the dogs running around everywhere. (The cemetery grounds double as a dog park.)



More photos available on my Flickr.

After the photo tour, we headed to Politics and Prose to listen to Nancy Polikoff (an AU-WCL professor) talk about her new book, Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage: Valuing All Families Under the Law. (check it out, seriously)

Staying busy...

Today is the first day of the new semester, and for the first time since I started the program I am neither taking any classes nor teaching any. Not to say that I dislike either of these activities, but as they have been extremely time consuming, I look forward to being able to spend time on my dissertation, in addition to studying for my Integration Theory comp exam, working at the Faculty Corner, applying for research funds, and working on two running research projects with two of my professors. In other words, I like staying busy...

Not so busy (1)

Not so busy (2)

Congratulations to my little brother, who is now a college graduate! Look for him and his climbing equipment coming to a forest near you.

Anna came home a week and a half ago, bringing her cold with her and passing it on to me. I took several sick days last week, meaning that between illness and vacation, I was out of my office for nearly 2.5 weeks straight. Needless to say, this week has been a frantic game of catch-up. Nevertheless, I did manage to take lunch breaks outdoors yesterday and today in order to enjoy the 70-degree weather.

Anna's back in student mode at the moment. She's taking a two-week intensive advanced quantitative methods class. The course is six hours per day, with lectures in the morning and labs in the afternoon, and she even has homework in the evenings. She's learning how to deal with categorical and limited dependent variables, which I'm sure she'd be happy to explain in her next post. From where I'm sitting, I can see her computer screen--it's a mess of tables and columns of numbers. Supposedly they're telling her what effect certain variables have on people's feelings about John Ashcroft as measured on a thermometer scale from 1-100...or something like that.

Season 2 of Big Love arrived from Netflix today, so I'm off to watch a bit of that. Cheers to you, and happy new year!