wedding, thesis, and e-books

I admit to having been a bit distracted by wedding excitement lately. I printed and cut our invitations at home, hand-wrote the addresses, and licked every envelope that is now in the mail. (Stamps were self-adhesive!) This past weekend, we spent the better part of two days making our wedding bands. The process was tedious and physically taxing, and the results were fantastic. We spent another day trying them on and looking at them over and over again, but they are now hidden away until the wedding.

That being said, the thesis hasn't totally gone off course. I had a productive meeting with one of my committee members two weeks ago, and one week ago I had my annual "progress meeting" with my committee. That's when they fill out a form and tell the university whether or not they should permit me to stay in  the program. They were more than pleased with my progress, and are encouraging me to just keep at it and get it done. And I'm doing a fairly decent job at that I think. I'm doing a bunch of reading these days, filling in some gaps in my chapters 1-3. I need to get those tightened up by the end of the week so I can move back to the really challenging work of data analysis. I've been working on chs. 1-3 for a while now, but it's all good. It's teaching me to value the revision process, which I have feared and struggled with in the past. I've also been reading Bird by Bird, by Anne Lamott. It's a book about writing--not a formal guide book, but a guide book nonetheless. Lots of good advice in there about dealing with perfectionism, building confidence, working from inspiration, and blocking out rationalism. It's not a book about writing a thesis--it's more about creative writing--and that's been especially helpful. It's good for me to get inspiration about writing as a creative process rather than writing as an academic exercise.

I have been using Adobe Digital Editions to read the book. (I bought it as an e-book.) And I really like it. I don't have an e-reader, so I read it on my computer screen, but the font and the color of the pages is such that it's definitely better than reading a book as a pdf. (The format of the book is EPUB.) Using Digital Editions is great so far. You can highlight text, create bookmarks, and insert notes throughout. So for someone like me, who hates to put a mark on my paper books, this is a really great option. I will never stop buying paper books, but the e-book will be a great option for the academic books that I will want to really mark up. Eventually, I think I will purchase an e-reader, but I'm going to put that on hold for now. The iPad is really appealing to me, but I will at least wait for the second generation.

I think I should probably stop here and get back to my reading... Thanks for following!