The Interview Setup

I had some time between interviews to create a post. Probably not quite as much time as I need, since I wanted to include pictures, but it's possible.

So here's a staged picture of me doing an interview. I am actually too busy during a real interview to do this, but this is pretty realistic in terms of what is going on on my end of the phone line if you're being interviewed by me.

And here is my trusty equipment, including the very awesome Olympus digital voice recorder that I use:

There you see my handy phone card so that I'm not putting the interviews on my office's phone bill. Also pictured, the beloved Oral Consent form. Very important.

Lastly, here's a close-up of why I call people for interviews and how they get from the phone to the voice recorder:

See the little black box? That's what patches the recorder onto the phone line so I get a great recording. It's just one extra detail to set-up that makes a world of difference in recording quality.

So yeah. I just wanted to preserve for posterity what my evenings after work have been looking like, when I switch over to working on my thesis research. Good times!

Emily K.

My Renaissance Festival Costume

Last week was busy in two ways. Let's set baseline behavior at working for 40 hours a week. But I always do that. How can we layer on some more?

I emailed requests to many folks in the Personal Style Blogging community to be interview participants. I created a database of contact info, and a database of my interview schedule, and then I started populating both. Thank you SO MUCH to people who have agreed to sit for an interview! This is great!

If you keep a personal style blog in which you post pictures of what you wear, you're interested in being a particpant, but haven't yet received an invite, leave your email address and I'll be in contact.

The next layer was that I worked on my Renaissance Festival costume! I would have loved to use the one I wore last year, but that wasn't going to work with my pregnant belly. So all last week my girl Natalie Parker and I worked out a design, went fabric shopping, pinned, cut, and sewed, and put it all together. Natalie is an outstanding seamstress and made the completely custom mini bodice, most of the chemise and the gorgeous skirt with the complicated ruffle. The skirt has frenched seams! All that I really contributed was making the bloomers and finishing the chemise. Yesterday we took photos and here's how it turned out:


My make-up is garish and the skirt is hiked up because the character I play at Festival is a whore in Madam Red's brothel. It's going to be particularly ridiculous this year with the pregnancy, but what is fun without some ridiculousness?

This costume was so much fun to work on, I really want to make something awesome for Halloween! Any ideas?

So there you have it: work, school, fun. It was a great week!