Inefficient?

Sometimes I wonder whether I just have too much work or whether I am inefficient with my time. You won't find me surfing the internet or anything, and I never really feel like I've been unproductive unless I've been in meetings all day. So what gives? Anybody have tips to increase efficiency?
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fear and delight

So, yesterday when I got the mail I saw that there was an envelope from the UW Registrar office to me. It was about 5x7 and said "do not bend" on it. I was a little worried that this was some official notice that they were kicking me out b/c I'd been around for too long. [ thus the fear in the title]

To my delight, it was nothing of the sort. In fact, it was my doctoral candidate certificate. I had no idea I actually got a certificate for being PhC. I had to take some photos to show you all.

it came in this pretty purple envelope

It almost felt like an invitation when I opened it..

The words are raised off the page..I forget what that is called, but it looks very official.

Am I supposed to frame this? I don't have any of my other diploma's framed...maybe I should wait and frame them all at the same time?

deadlines

I've got a big deadline coming up this friday. 2 papers are due for a conference that we had abstracts accepted to. I'm a bit worried b/c I'm still waiting on the results section for one of the papers, and some of my "co-authors" have yet to do very much on the papers. While I certainly expect to do more than others since I am first author, I do expect some work on the part of others who want to have their name on the paper.

Once that deadline is over, I've got another deadline on Feb. 16th for a different project and need to compile and create a bunch of documents and slides showing this organizations successes and failures. Gonna be a long 2 weeks!

Happy Birthday Honey!

Happy Birthday Honey! I hope you really enjoyed our Whistler trip to celebrate your birthday! We got some great skiing in!
Love you lots.

Customs

We are waiting at customs at the US/canada border. We have been idling for about 30 minutes so far. Hopefully we only have another 30 min. Skiing was good-it was really cold though, so we had to take some hot cocoa breaks. It was a little rocky/pebble-y...I need to assess how much damage it did to my skis.
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whistler

We are headed to Whistler to celebrate David's birthday. It is about a 6 hour drive, so we won't get there until about 3-4 tomorrow. I'm really looking forward to it. We will take lots of pictures to post later.

felt like christmas eve

Do you remember back to when you were 5 or 6 and still believed in Santa Claus, and Christmas Morning was magical? Back then I would have such a hard time sleeping through the night. I would wake up often and remind myself that I had to go back to sleep or Christmas would never get there.

Well, last night felt just like christmas eve to me. There was so much anticipation that I couldn't sleep. I fell asleep just fine, but it sure was hard to stay asleep. I kept waking up...I can't even count how many times I woke up. And I didn't just roll over, look at the clock and then go back to sleep. Often I would roll over, look at the clock, and then think about how exciting the next day was. By then, I had woken up enough that my body temperature was increasing and I would get hot and have to throw off the covers. Then I would try to fall back asleep, eventually doing so once I had regulated my body temperature.

Today was exciting. And last night it was clear how exciting I thought it would be...I could hardly sleep!

early to work

Tomorrow I'm going to get up early to go into work early. I don't want to miss any of the inauguration, and people at work have pretty much indicated that we'll all be streaming it live, and maybe huddled around one person's computer.

I'm very excited and looking forward to it.

Liz

inauguration

For all of you who want to celebrate Obama's inauguration, consider making part of your celebration a white knot.

http://www.whiteknot.org/

This is a great website and I whole-heartedly support its message.

mission semi accomplished

Well, I did work on both saturday and sunday and I felt like I was really getting somewhere. I was able to correctly calculate the Index of Dissimilarity for gender segregation, now I just have to work on the Index of Association.

I'm still not ready to give someone this chapter, but hopefully soon I will be. Maybe after this upcoming weekend? The only way I'm going to finish this damn dissertation is to allot time to work on it- so sorry honey- looks like I won't be much fun in the near term future :_(

working weekend

So, I've now passed two deadlines I had for giving my advisor something to look at about my dissertation. So, I have promised myself that I will do some serious work this weekend on it. I have been working on it, but it just isn't at a place where I feel like I can share it. And no, I don't think this is my perfectionist side coming out..I really don't think it is shareable at this point.

So, here's to getting some serious work done!

Congratulations Mom and Peter

Congratulations! I hope you have many long happy years together.

photos from christmas visits

I can never remember which order to upload the pictures in so that they will come out in chronological order! So, Instead of moving all of them like I usually do, I'm just going to tell you about our trips in reverse order.

Here is the Price Tower in Bartlesville. The only skyscraper designed by Frank Lloyd Wright ever to be built.

My honey at Will and Sandy's house. Their yard has a creek that runs through it. Very picturesque.

Will and Sandy and the Tulsa Aquarium. We saw some really interesting fish. Their shark tank is pretty cool.

Sandy took this photo of the 4 of us getting ready to watch a video on Matt's big screen TV.

We got to stay one night of our trip at Matt's new house. It is really nice and he has done a great job. This is Matt and his cat Dyna, getting some X-box stuff ready for David and Matt to play on the big screen.

Now we are in Kansas City. This is the recent addition to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art designed by Steven Holl. It is pretty cool how it glows at night.

We went to see where Suzanne works, at the Kansas City Free Health Clinic. We pulled into the garage and closed it behind us. Only problem was that halfway through the tour the power went out on the whole block and we thought our cars were going to be stuck in the garage. Luckily, Matt helped find the manual opener and we manually opened the door. This is us trying to put the cover back on the emergency opener. It was quite a bit of excitement.

David and I thought this was especially cool. It is the original mission statement of the Kansas City Free Health Clinic.

The next few photos are of either during the gift opening or just after we were done opening gifts.

This is Casper. He's a cutie.

Out and about

David dug the car out yesterday and put the chains on, so we were able to return our videos. He had to go into work today so this morning he dropped me off at my doc appt. Now I am at a coffeeshop waiting for my eye doc appt.
Gotta get this years vision benefits! I've got to get home after this and work on my dissertation. Only about half the buses are running with all this snow on the ground. Hope our plane can get out tomorrow!
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snow photos

Here are a few photos taken during our recent snows.

David, Sam and I went for a walk after the first snow. The sidewalks and roads were pretty clear so we didn't have any problems. This is not the case after the second snow, though.


This is after the second snow. I know this looks pretty wimpy to some of you who are used to much more, but the fact that the snow didn't melt on the concrete and blacktop surfaces really made Seattle grind to a halt.

Another one... Sam loves to roll in the snow!


Pretty white rooftops after the snow.

snow day

Yesterday the weather people promised that we would get a big snowfall. All the seattle public schools closed in anticipation of this snow. And, as of 10:30 last night there was no snow in the city of Seattle. So, all those kids got the day off and no snow.

I guess we are making up for it today. Everything is coated in snow outside and it just keeps coming down. It has been snowing all morning. I'm working from home, as is David. I don't think many people have ventured out. The newscasters are telling people to just stay home. It is so funny how this city shuts down with a couple of inches of snow. I guess we do have some big hills and we also don't normally get snow so we aren't really prepared in terms of snowplows etc. I'm enjoying the snow. It is so pretty.

It isn't a wet snow either---it is very light and fluffy. While that means snowballs aren't exactly easy to make, it would definitely make for some great skiing in the mountains. I think that one of the local ski places is supposed to open tomorrow.

I'm loving the snow!

confession

I have a confession to make.

I recently got a new phone. It is a smart phone. Not just that, it is a Blackberry.

I know, I know! In some ways I can't believe I decided on a blackberry, but I really liked the capabilities, and the way it works, so I went for it. Plus it is pink :-)

David and I decided that we really wanted to be able to look things up on the go, and that since we are almost always together, it would make sense for just one of us to get the phone with internet service. And it will be very helpful for me when I am traveling for work, so we decided to pay for the extra data plan so that my phone has internet.

So, if anyone else is on a Blackberry, apparently we can text message for free through Blackberry Messenger--we just have to set each other up with a profile or something. Let me know if you have a Crackberry too!

moving time!

Mom and Grandma are moving to Peter's this weekend. I know they have already moved some stuff and will continue to move other things too. Moving is hard. I think it gets harder as you get older. Not just because you accumulate more stuff, although almost no one is immune to that problem, but also because you can't do as much of it yourself. ....hey, wait. maybe it gets easier as you get older BECAUSE you can't do as much of it yourself. Hmmmm...hiring movers sure makes things easier. But you still have to pack...and then you are back to the problem of having too much stuff.

thanksgiving pics

Here is David and Matt. We were trying to take pictures with the night setting on the camera, but you have to hold the camera really still/not move it at all to get a good picture. This is the best one we got of David and Matt with the city in the background. For those of you who might remember, this place is where David and I took our wedding photos.

In front of the market. It was pretty busy down there the day after thanksgiving.

This is what Thanksgiving dinner looked like at the Litzler house this year.

And finally, this is the little patch in our backyard that we were working on in late fall. I don't think I ever posted any pictures of it. I think we are going to move some plants around..it isn't quite how we want it yet.

thanksgiving

We had a great thanksgiving here. David's brother came up to visit and we played downtown, went over to Bainbridge Island, and had a lot of great meals. Truthfully, it was REALLY nice not to have to travel for this holiday. Sometimes it just gets to be too much traveling every single holiday.

I'm not really looking forward to work this week...It is just going to be hard after having so many days off in a row to get back into the swing of things. But I've got lots to do so I better starting swinging fast!