A Happy Birthday

Happy birthday to me! Man, it's kind of insane to think that the last picture I took of myself, baby was only four months along. Was it four months, or maybe less? Well, we're rounding into week 30, 3rd trimester, so this is what the books and websites call the home stretch. Great time to celebrate a birthday!

These are my friends, from left to right: Natalie, pregnant me, Tessa, and Stephanie. The best way to celebrate a birthday is with friends. CK should be in the picture, but he was being chivalrous and taking it for me. What a most excellent man. You know you have true friends when they don't mind eating off of paper plates, and having take-out Chinese food for the celebratory meal. That's the way this party girl rolls.

Here's to 31 years! Hooray!

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!

PSBs and a Baby

I received a sweet comment on my Personal Style Blog Research post from Lorena, offering to take part, but also assuming I was done with my data collection. Though reasonable, it couldn't be further from the truth. I have spent the intervening four months doing tons of background research and not yet interviewing a single participant.

Here's the part that will make you laugh. Right around the time I wrote that post, I was busy getting busy and conceiving my first child. Yup! I'm pregnant! The baby is due 1/11/11.


Now, I could use 1st Trimester trauma as an excuse for why I haven't started interviews yet, but there's an even more practical reason I've lagged. I didn't have my own equipment yet. Equipment! Every good researcher's most important investment! For my pilot project I borrowed equipment to do seven interviews, which translated into a total of about 20 hours of work (seven hours of interviews and two additional hours for each interview to transcribe and sort the data).

For the next phase, I want to more than quadruple the number of interviews. This meant two things. One: I should own my own equipment. Borrowing stuff for 20 hours vs. ~100 hours makes a difference. Two: if I could find a way to speed up transcription, life would be golden. With this past paycheck I invested in the following, currently speeding to my doorstep: the Olympus WS-400S DNS Digital Voice Recorder Kit.

It comes with Dragon Naturally Speaking Software. Speech recognition technology: HUZZAH! If this program saves me even 15 minutes per interview, I will consider it money extremely well spent.

So that's my news. I have a baby bump, and I will be testing new equipment in the very near future. The project is in progress, and I truly need to get my interviews done in August. Naturally, the fun part will be where I get to talk to you!

Finally Leaving Town

OK, that's not really a fair post title. I did get to go on an island vacation in March. But since then it's been all work, all the time. All work.

So tomorrow I'm taking a four day weekend! Heading with my sweetie back to the city where I was born and raised. The good ol' Fresno, California.


I don't think I've seen my parents in... well a year or so if I remember correctly. Definitely more than that. But hey, I bought a house, I finished another year of grad school, and I got a promotion in that amount of time. I even crossed another milestone that I've mentioned in comments on some of these awesome style blogs that I'm always following. Probably yours, if you're reading this.

I do love a good packing post, but I live in a city that's 97 deg F, and I'm visiting a city that's 106 deg F. Seriously I will only be wearing tank tops, shorts, skirts, and tank dresses. That's pretty much it.

Funny thing, my husband is talking to his brother on the phone right now and they just got into a conversation about Norteño music. Now that is very Fresno.

World Cup and Politics

Wondering who to root for now that we're in World Cup stage 2? I posted this on Buzz this morning and here's a re-post:


The Netherlands - Because of legalized prostitution, bike culture, and beautiful ball movement.
Brazil - Because they're world beaters.
Paraguay - Because football is their national sport.
Ghana - Because they're the last African team left.
Germany and Argentina - No sentiment here, if you are a betting man, this is where you put your money.
Spain - Because David Villa is the last secretly great football player.
Uruguay - Because they are the true underdogs, and really no one will be rooting for them.

Pick a reason, and work backwards from there to find your team.

In movie reviews, my sweetie and I watched the Weather Underground last night. It was... disturbing. Good, but I had dreams about it and they were sad. It's a historical/political documentary, so if you don't go in for that sort of thing, maybe don't rent. But if you do, it's good, like I said, just sad.

For somewhat related fun, do you know where you stand on the political ideology spectrum? Political Compass gives a test that is actually pretty interesting. I'm right next to the Dalai Lama, near Gandhi: left libertarian. Posting online about your politics is like posting your weight. Kinda scary actually.

em

EndNote X3

I attended a training this morning on EndNote X3 that was offered on campus, and I've spent most of the rest of my day building up my EndNote Library. Right now I have 45 references stored!


How cool is this software?! I cannot believe how excellent it is to have this citation management tool that is best friends with MS Word. X3 has tons of citation styles built directly into the program. For example, in my papers I cite with Chicago style, so I just set the controls to Chicago 15th B, and when I go to insert a citation into my paper, voila! It appears in perfect format.

Also, importing the references into EndNote has been pretty simple, since most of the academic articles that I have been using have options right on the sites, like JStor or SagePub, which allow you to just click a button and import the citation off the web directly into your software.

If you get a chance, seek it out. There are versions for Mac and PC, and if your school is like mine, you might even be able to get a copy free!

For all you grad students out there, do you use this? I LOVE it!