The semester caught up to me for awhile there and I’ve been trying to catch up since. CHI in Florence was great; in addition to another fine conference, we really enjoyed the food, art, and sights. I miss the coffee. There’s too much to say about Florence to try to capture it in a short catch-up blog post, and who knows if I’ll ever actually get around to blogging it at all, but at least there are plenty of photos.
I have to blog about Ravelry.com soon, because it’s just that awesome. By helping me organize my patterns and yarn, I think it’s helping me be a more productive knitter! I’ve been doing a lot of knitting this winter because it helps me relax and focus; since the start of the school year, I’ve made a couple of scarves, a neckwarmer, and a couple of hats and headwarmers. I just finished up a sweet little silk organza ribbon yarn scarf made from special yarn I bought in Florence. I’m also making great progress on a cardigan for Everett, who is enjoying the attention involved in having a custom handmade garment created to fit him better than any other sweater he’s ever had.
The semester is nearly over, but I still have a paper to finish and a practicum to wrap up. The paper is a big theory construction paper that I dread, but at least I have a plan for using a case study theory construction method to inductively form a theory about why some open source software development projects are successful. Fortunately, I can leverage a bit of work on a review paper from my research group and the prior papers I wrote this semester to generate this paper much more efficiently than the last few. All the more fortunately because I had a momentary lapse of reason and volunteered for the faculty search committee; I think it will be a valuable experience on the overall, but the additional work for committee service is immediate and not insignificant.
Life is good, but very busy just now. After the semester ends, I will have a couple of weeks off to try to recover from the school year before diving into summer work. I’m really looking forward to it; I haven’t had two weeks in a row off in years and years. I have all manner of grand plans, and I’m sure I can get at least half of them accomplished.