• A new mattress
• A couple of weekend trips
• Grad school brain, back in full force. With features like mistaking multivitamin pills for candies, and leaving a brand new full-size bottle of conditioner in a Wisconsin hotel room even though I looked right at it.
• A couple of speaking engagements (both disseration-related: one more stuffy, one more student-oriented)
• Dissertation, always (I am at “4″ on the list I made here — advisor is checking on the changes I made to the rest of the chapters…)
• The class I’m teaching, always
• Calorie counting – I’m down 8 lbs with my eye on another 5+ by the time I defend.
• Unforgiving acne – it hasn’t been this bad since I was a teen. And it’s never very good. But this…is bad.
• A bunch of new-to-me furniture, with no home in my home *yet*
• Shoveling, because it’s winter in North Dakota and some snow finally decided to fall. Not that I love snow, but it’s so weird for it to be so warm and wet in February here.

I’ve been taking pictures of a lot of this stuff, and will share it bit-by-bit, as I get time.

Dissertation-deadline-wise? I feel cautious and moderately concerned. With about 7 weeks until the approval deadline and another full revision needed by me (and another very very detailed reading by my advisor), plus committee reading schedules, revision requirements, etc… that 7 weeks will be gone in no time. We shall see.

I made this for a work potluck, and I used…

1 pound of ground mild Italian sausage, browned
1 bag of frozen tater tots
1/2 teaspoon salt, to taste
1/4 teaspoon black pepper, to taste
1 bag (16 ounce size) frozen mixed vegetables
1 bag (16 ounce size) frozen green beans
2 cans cream of mushroom soup
1 tablespoon onion flakes
1/4 cup milk
1 cup shredded cheddar cheese

The steps were:
Brown your meat.

In a large bowl, mix together all of the ingredients except the tots and the cheese.

Lightly grease the inside of your crockpot (or use a liner like I did). Pour half the tots in the crockpot and even them out. Pour half the meat/veggie mixture on top and even that out. Repeat tots, then the rest of the mixture. Cook on high for 3 hours. Sprinkle on the cheese in the last 15 or 20 minutes to melt it.

I didn’t take a picture of it ‘done’ until half of it had already been eaten — whoops!

Our work is such that everyone doesn’t come eat at once; we come when we can, and graze throughout the day. By the end of the day, the pot was empty. I’d say that’s a success.

Note: since it was a lunch potluck, I browned my meat at home the night before, mixed all of the ingredients and put them in the crockpot in the morning, then brought the crockpot to work and let it cook all morning in the conference room. Yummy.

The background on this is: Several weeks ago, I made a baked brie wheel wrapped in pastry (with caramelized onions: HIGHLY recommend). You have to buy pastry sheets for it though, and there are two in the package. Seeing no more brie wheels in my near future (poor me), I decided to think of another way to use up the second pastry sheet before it freezer-burned.

This meal is a mashup of two recipes I had pinned on Pinterest: Sloppy Joe Grilled Cheese (left) and Mini Cheeseburger Bundles (right).

(Image sources: left, right)

You’ll need:
–ingredients to make sloppy joe meat (I make mine using ground beef, sloppy joe seasoning, and spicy BBQ* sauce)
–about half a cup of shredded cheddar cheese
–puff pastry sheet(s): my 1 sheet made four decently-sized pockets.

What you do:
Make sloppy joe meat, divide it among squares you’ve cut from puff pastry sheets, put the cheese in there too, pinch them closed, and bake for 20 minutes at 350.

Details:
The first step is to make your sloppy joe meat. If you don’t know how, click on that ‘Sloppy Joe Grilled Cheese’ recipe above; she has a good one posted there. Personally I just put the ground beef in a saucepan with about a cup of water and the sloppy joe seasoning packet, and let it simmer until the meat’s done and the water’s mostly gone. Then I stir in the BBQ sauce and it’s ready to rock!

While the meat’s simmering, shred your cheese if you need to. Preheat the oven to 350. Lay a piece of parchment paper on a baking sheet. If you don’t have parchment, you can grease the sheet, but trust me: parchment works SO well! (I got that temperature and cooking tips from the ‘Mini Cheeseburger’ recipe linked above, by the way).

When the meat is done, remove it from the burner and let it cool just a little while you prepare the pastry pieces. I cut mine in to four squares and laid them on my parchment paper. Then I scooped a bit of meat on to each, topped them with cheese, and folded them over, pinching the sides closed. (Note: I am NO pastry chef. Neat and tidy pinched corners are not my specialty!)

Brush the tops with a little melted butter if you want to. This will make them more ‘golden’ on top. Stick them in the oven for about 20 minutes and voila.

Sloppy Joe Pockets.

Although I made these as a way of using up my lonely frozen pastry sheet, I believe I will be making them again in the future. We both liked this more than just putting them on buns (however, the downside of that is that this is more work. Still though, it isn’t hard).

*Fun fact: did you know that in the upper midwest, it’s called “barbecue,” not “sloppy joes” by the majority of people? I guess it’s because they put BBQ sauce in it. My mom always made it with tomato paste and spices, but around here BBQ sauce is usually a key ingredient. As a kid (having moved to the midwest from elsewhere), I thought it was very odd. But now I like it (and so does Mr. N, which is also important)!

Before we get going, I want to note that this post is loooooong. That’s because I’m going to pick apart the chapters of a dissertation (at least, one in my program–MINE) so you can get a view of how it all comes together. I hope it’s helpful!

So… shall we first have another grad school update? When we left off, I was starting to crush myself under the stress of looming deadlines, as is my style. Healthy right? And then I received the changes. I then offered up this little gem of a post describing what my weekend days look like during the process of working on the dissertation. I also mentioned that I make a list of the tasks I need to do and tackle a few each day. I worked on them each evening of the week last week. I had a few less productive days (fail) followed by a few SUPER productive days (win!). After putting on the finishing touches and reading the chapter through to catch any weirdness that tends to occur when you chop up 85 pages of writing and re-order it, I sent the chapter to my advisor on Monday morning.

Yay!

So here is what happens now, as I understand it.

1. He will read the chapter and probably catch a few things I didn’t catch, or make some suggestions based on the comments I wrote for him.
2. I will make those changes/take those suggestions in to consideration.
3. I will receive (hopefully) the OK from him to rework the other chapters so they incorporate suggestions the committee offered, and also flow nicely with the ‘new’ chapter.
4. He will check over my changes to those chapters, probably offering suggestions and catching things I didn’t catch, again.
5. I will fix those.
6. He will read the entire thing front to back, possibly making more suggestions, which I will consider/repair/work in.
7. To the committee it goes! (Again, heh.)

I’ve just described the rest of February. Ideally, this will be back to the committee the first week of March. Let’s hope! (That’d be about 6 weeks prior to the preliminary approval deadline) A decent (but still not supergreat) cushion that is much more palatable than the 12 days I gave them in the fall, LOL!)

Now I want to try to describe where I’m at, progress-wise. I wonder if reading the list above, you’re like: “So you just finished working on one chapter. There’s what…. 4 more to go?! And one chapter took a week plus two weekends, plus months of re-organizational work with the advisor?! GOOD LUCK with that deadline!”

Thankfully that isn’t the case. The chapter in question is Chapter 2: Literature Review. My fellow grad students may understand what that means, but for those who don’t, here is a brief summary. The literature review is a very detailed tour of the research and knowledge about the topic area. It must be well-researched, and provide detailed background information, historical stuff, right up to the present/modern interpretation (if that’s your study/program’s angle). It must also tell somewhat of a story that leads the reader in to your logical reasons for doing your study, and it must show that there is a gap in the current research on the topic (this is a gap you intend to fill with your study). The length and detail varies depending on the program (and even the advisor I bet), but in my program this is a very detailed, in depth chapter that must start with information and finish with justification, with a logical flow of how you got from A to B. Does that make sense? Here is a real-life example from my own work.

My study is about the technology beliefs and fluencies of college students who are studying to become teachers. So chapter 2 needs to explain to the committee (and whomever else reads it) why this is an important study. So my chapter starts by describing the history of technology in the united states, moving in to how it is used today in business and personal lives, and also how technology used to be, is now, and should be used in schools. It moves in to the research that has already been done on these topics. It discusses those for a while, through the use of examples (we call these “empirical studies”: it’s research where someone actually studied and reported something–didn’t just tell us about it) and sourcing experts’ published articles and books on the subjects. New terms are introduced, and then used throughout (they are not used prior to their introduction and discussion of what they are and why they matter). Eventually, the chapter rolls in to a summary type of thing, several pages long, where the aforementioned terms, studies, topics and concerns are synthesized in to a reason why my study is important, and finally, what my study is.

THAT is chapter 2. Mine is (I just checked) 89 pages long, and that’s with no figures or pictures. There are a lot of headings and subheadings (4 levels deep). They take up 6 pages of the table of contents for the dissertation! The references/bibliography section (which is probably 95% made up of sources used in this chapter) is 26 pages long, with an average of two lines being taken up for each source. The 6 pages and the 26 pages are not part of the 89 pages, by the way. If chapter two were to stand on its own, it would thusly be 115 actual pages long. 121, if you included a table of contents!

Now imagine if you will, you have written a paper like this through the course of many sleepless nights and hermit-like weekends…and you are asked to revise and re-organize it so it will flow differently. (The goal being: you are changing your logical reasons for doing the study; the preceding info must reflect that.) You need to do a lot of outlining, cutting, pasting, and re-writing. The re-writing comes in to play not only for the transitioning from section to section (since section A did not previously belong above section B, so they are disconnected!), but also for the emphasis. Some things you want to emphasize, aren’t emphasized enough, so you have to rework and supplement your other sections to emphasize the right things. The goal is that the reader will read it and think “oh, this is an important issue, and these other issues support that idea.” And additionally, remember how I mentioned that you have to define and build on your terminology throughout the paper–not using terms until you have introduced and familiarized the reader with them? Yeah… think about doing that, with 90 pages, and the having to essentially ‘turn the paper upside down.’ Suddenly none of the terms you used in a section that used to be at the end, can be used since you’ve moved that section to the beginning. FUN FOR YOU!

That is what I’ve been doing over the last week-plus-two-weekends.

I have a total of 5 chapters, yes. But chapter 2 drives all of the others as so.

• Chapter 1 is the introduction. A summary of the rest of the chapters, introducing the problem and foreshadowing what is to come in Ch. 2 and beyond. Mine is currently 8 pages long, and will probably remain close to that length when I rewrite it.
• Chapter 2, we just talked about. 89 pages, give or take a few by the time it’s final. The end of chapter 2 also has the research questions — these are questions I decided were important to explore, after doing all that research for the chapter.
• Chapter 3 is methodology, so it talks in great detail about how the study will be done (quantitatively–with stats) or qualitatively (with interviews/people’s thoughts). Mine does both. It also justifies “why” you’re doing the study using the methods you chose–how do these methods answer those research questions? Mine is 16 pages.
• At this point I just want to note that in many PhD programs, the above three chapters must be complete before the dissertation proposal is even accepted by your committee. I only needed summaries of mine; my proposal was about 40 pages long total, I believe. I later used it as a starting point to build my dissertation.
• Chapter 4 is the results. It is not what I think of the results, it’s the results, and an objective indication of how this result answers the research question. (Did I reject the null hypothesis based on this finding?) Lots of charts in this chapter makes it longish, page-wise. Mine is 40 pages.
• Chapter 5 is discussion. THIS is what I think of the results (in my “educated” opinion). I tie the results back what was researched in Chapter 2 and my research questions. Did this study help find anything new in terms of the research? What are the implications? I also talk about stuff like limitations in my study and what others could do in the future to improve this research. Mine is 42 pages. The END.
• Well, not really the end. There are still appendices and references, those take up 50 more pages after the end of the last chapter. There are also about 25 pages before the first chapter starts, by the way. These include table of contents, the abstract, the signature pages, dedications, and all that biz.

Stack it all together and it’s… 270 pages. *whistle*

Hopefully with that list, you can see why Ch 2 takes so long. It’s over twice as long as the next longest chapter! And it’s very research intensive. The rest should be easy and breezy (in relation to chapter 2). I’ll be chipping away at that very soon!

You saw last week that Cleo’s responsibilities include pen-and-highlighter quality control and the testing of book comfort.

Rusty, being older, takes on more responsibility: he is my editor.

He mostly just observes…

But when he sees something he doesn’t like, he deletes it of course.

(I totally got up on top of MonsterFridge.)

So, this is done, and I love it. It’s a subtle change–especially in the photos. But you wouldn’t believe how much *cleaner* the kitchen looks. More intentional somehow. Plus, there is none of this gross nonsense.

Sorta hard to photograph, but this was a pretty dingy kitchen. I assure you, it took me much longer to clean, patch, sand, and tape this room than it did to do all of the painting.

Let’s compare some befores and afters.

Before:

After:

Before:

After:

Before:
(Electrical, water-using/high power appliances plugged in to ungrounded outlet)

After:
(Surge protector plugged in to a grounded outlet and discretely mounted behind the microwave)

Before:
(I liked to call our disposal ‘Herb,’ and this is why.)

After:
(Was nice to know you, Herb!)

Before:

After:

Before:
(I made those curtains when we moved in, from clearance fabric; lovely mismatched wooden knobs, too.)

After:

Here’s what I bought:

• Knobs — eBay, 99 cents each for 28 total + free shipping
• Roman shades — overstock.com, $25 each + $3 shipping
• Paint — Lowes, $60 (after $10 rebate; only needed one can, but bought a fugly color the first time)
• Outlet covers — Lowes, ~99 cents each for 7

Already owned spackle, sand paper, and all other painting supplies.

Total cost of this update: about $145.

The paint color I ultimately went with–after picking the wrong color the first time–was Valspar Cincinnatian Hotel Hannaford. Looks really crisp and clean. I’m tempted to paint other rooms that color, but guess what! This kitchen was the very last room on my list of rooms to paint. What now? Start over again and repaint them one by one? Maybe not!!

All that work…so tiring. Time for a break:

Next week if I get around to it, I’ll show you how Rusty helps.

Here’s what happens on a weekend when I do have it in my “court.”

First off, I really don’t take any pics. Sorry about that.

I also tend to wake up early (there is so much to do!). This morning (Saturday) I woke up at 1 am (having gone to bed around 10:15). I didn’t get out of bed, but I didn’t go back to sleep either. Mr. N woke up shortly before 6 and we were up before 7, retreating to our separate offices, clad in sweatpants and with our caffeine sources in hand.

I putz around on the internet for a bit because there is no sense trying to do anything before I get my first cup of coffee in me.

Then, I open up all the documents I need and go, go, go.

The documents are:

• My Google Doc “to do list,” on which I have a list of all of the dissertation changes I need to make (more on that in a bit).
• The dissertation.
• An outline of the revised dissertation, which is what my advisor and I have been working on for several weeks.
• Email from my advisor, which has additional comments/advice/direction.

I usually sit and look at them for a few minutes and then end up back on the Internet, volleying between Facebook and Pinterest and Twitter until I realize what I’m doing and refocus.

I try to do at least one thing, if not several, from my Google doc prior to lunch. Today, I managed two of the four things on my list for today.

Around 11 or 11:30 AM, I get up and look for a snack. Sometimes I’ll make Mr. N a hot dog or something. Sometimes we both live on handfuls of candy and chips. Today, as the temperature was fairly decent (20s), we ventured out to Hardees, where we drove through. Curly fries offer the best kind of fuel.

Food gone, husband back in the basement and me in my office, away I go, again.

Change this, comment on this for later reference, edit that, delete this (but paste it in to a new document just in case I didn’t need to delete it).

Sometimes in the mid afternoon I decide I need to exercise. Today I rode my stationary bike for about a half hour while reading a couple of articles I had found earlier. My Eee is great for that. (Did I tell you guys that I guest-posted about reading on my Eee, versus my Kindle? I totally did, right here.)

A quick shower, and a glance at the to-do list. By now it’s 5:00 and I decide I’m sorta hungry. Today, I used my panini maker (a.k.a. Best Gift Ever) to make us some ham and swiss sandwiches. While the sandwiches were cooking I sat on the counter and sipped tequila (what? I like it.) and ate some extra swiss slices that I “accidentally” cut from the block. I delivered one sandwich to my husband downstairs, then brought mine back to my own desk and forged on.

On a night like tonight, I won’t work late. This is because even though I have a lot of changes to make as quickly as possible, I have no immediate deadline. Instead of forcing myself in to multiple all-nighters (see for reference: Worst Week Ever), I have used my aforementioned Google Doc to make a list of each change, broken down in a manageable way. It’s a long list, but it’s much more productive/useful than if I simply had one bullet point that said “work on dissertation.” It’s also psychological: it feels good to cross stuff off the list!! I generally make this type of list by reading through each of my advisor’s feedback comments and my own notes, and then turning that in to a list of accomplish-able tasks. Then, I distribute it in to what I think are do-able workloads for each day to come. A lot for today, a lot for tomorrow, and as much as I think I can fit in to each of the evenings next week, with a goal of returning the changed draft to my advisor before to next weekend.

I finished my list for today and one of tomorrow’s things (it’s good to be conservative with one’s list, as one never knows exactly how long each item will take!), so here I am, writing this post. I may write another post or two and schedule them for later dates, and then I’ll probably do something else from Sunday’s list.

On a dissertation weekend, I tend not to do much else. Laundry, maybe. Exercise, sometimes. But the dissertation takes precedence over everything…I figure I can do the laundry when I’m a PhD. (Or next weekend, when my advisor has the document back in *his* court.)

The same thing is happening to me now as in the fall. Time is passing, I am fretting. Except now instead of fretting with the fleeting hope that *just maybe* I can pull of a specific graduation date, my frets are more grounded. Quieter and less urgent, but more solidly rooted. Like a voice that whispers “You didn’t make it in the fall. you won’t make it this semester, either.” (And if I’m feeling particularly urgent about it, “And the summer is nearly impossible. So you’re really looking at next December.”)

I’m also a tad bit worried about what I’m going to do when I reenter full-speed-ahead dissertation [re]writing mode, and still have my class to take care of. But I’ll figure it out. I’m more worried about my sanity than my ability to actually get everything done. Those people are counting on me to facilitate their learning; they deserve a high priority in my life and they will get it. (It’s just that, everything in my life seems to be high priority at the moment. The low priority things have dropped right off the map.)

I’ve been kicking this around in my mind for a while: my advisor is a lot like me (or I am a lot like him). I get the feeling that he takes on a bit too much and then tries to prioritize everything highly. It’s so hard to sustain a life like that…but he does…and so do I. But a casualty of this lifestyle is that time just slips through my fingers. I feel like I blink and a month has gone by. Things slide down the list and it’s not because I don’t prioritize them. It’s because everything on my list is high priority, and everything takes time. I sometimes need to look at a calendar and remind myself what’s coming up, when, and how long I have until I really have to deal with it. Knowing that my advisor seems to be like me in this way, I develop additional anxiety when the ball (dissertation) is in his court for a long while. I know it’s a priority to him but I also know he has about 20 high priority items and all of them are ‘number 1′ on his list. And I know (well I believe) the same thing happens to him with the calendar. It’s been 3 weeks since I sent back my draft to him, for example.

Once he gets it back to ME, I need to tackle the bulk of the changes. Then it will need to be really read by him, and then more by me, then re-read by him again at least once more before it goes back to committee. Given that the new preliminary approval deadline is April 12 (and I don’t want to push it like we did in the fall), the goal is to have that final draft in the committee’s hands by beginning of March. It’s going to be February next week…and the rewrite is still in the ‘outline’ stage. Wonder why I have a headache.

I used up all of my vacation time (literally every last hour of the year) working on my dissertation in the fall, so I’ll have to complete this rewrite on evenings and weekends, along with my class work (I have to do all their readings, since I have not read them either, provide guidance and feedback, grade, and develop class activities for each week). This could easily be a great deal more difficult than things were in the fall. I’m also giving two talks about my dissertation research in the coming month….that’s minor in comparison to everything else though.

I talked to my advisor on Wednesday. He said he will have it to me before this weekend. So I hope to receive it today. And that’s where I’m at.

*Update* – I have the changes from him as of about noon today. Let the carpel tunnel resume after work!!

So on my weekend, I just meandered around and did stuff. Like, I tried the baking soda/orange juice mask that has been all over Pinterest. (It was OK. Nothing spectacular happened.)

I also made more frozen burritos. Mr. N eats these for lunch.

My recipe for the burritos is: shredded chicken (from the crockpot–I make a pile and freeze it), enchilada sauce, refried beans, cheese, and salsa. Mash all that together, put it in tortillas, wrap the tortillas in saran wrap and aluminum foil, and you’re done. I got the idea from Pinterest; this is the third or fourth time I’ve made a batch. Mr. N likes the burritos at the gas station across from his work, and these are similar to those (but I hope a bit healthier).

While waiting for the burrito goop to warm up, I put up the new magnetic picture frames I bought from Adorama for the side of our fridge. Difficult to tell, but their finish is oil rubbed bronze (which matches our kitchen knobs, etc…I know I owe you guys the kitchen post too).

It seems that the stock photo stylist for these frames has a penchant for women’s hips. Three photos of that. Ok. (I will put my own photos in them soon, really, and they won’t be of thighs.)

I also went outside and did some shoveling. We received some snow on Thursday, but I had not yet shoveled it because it was so damn cold (well below zero). On Saturday it was above zero, so out I went. I wanted to get it shoveled because I knew we were expecting more snow with warmer temps. When snow falls at cold temps, it is light and fluffy and easy to shovel. When it gets warmer and snows more, all the snow gets heavy and hard. So, out I went!

“Hi.”

And there was plenty of the three Rs: Reading, Research, and Riding.

I also enjoyed nutritious meals, which mostly looked similar to this.

(Tip: adding Reeses Pieces to those low fat jello puddings really boosts the flavor.)

And, I organized our bathroom closet. We have one of those narrow, deep little closets (you can see it here). It’s well over 2′ deep, but is only 14″ wide…so naturally, it becomes a black hole of expired or given-up-on products. (You’re also only seeing 2 of the three shelves (and there is another 3 feet of open space below these shelves.)

My favorite is how I tacked my glasses case to the wall under the shelf. It is so nice to have this little ‘shelf’ for my glasses! I use them every day: why should I reach waaay back in to the back of the closet for them? This keeps them close and out of the way.

(Before, left; After, right.)

I was inspired by a blog post about throwing away 50 things. Sadly, I cannot find the link, but essentially this gal just picked one little spot in her house–a junk drawer–and went through it. Most of the stuff was crap; she was left with useful, organized things. In my case, I probably threw away closer to 100 things. I also relocated stuff we don’t use often (like all of the bottles that are in the back of the lower shelf), and put things we use more toward the front (so we will quit knocking the stuff in the front over with our sleeves as we try to contort our bodies enough to reach in to the depths of the closet).

If you looked at the link to the bathroom above this picture, you would see that we have no counter-tops, drawers, or medicine cabinet in our bathroom. (Pedestal sinks look quaint but they are NOT practical for your master bath!!) This and an above-toilet cabinet I bought at walmart years ago are it. As a result, I store my products in caboodle-type pencil cases from the Back To School section. The green one is hair supplies, the pink one is nail polish, the blue one is makeup. Then my earrings are in a large fishing-tackle box I bought at Home of Economy. They’re like ‘portable drawers’ for my stuff. hah.

I also want to point out that my husband does not like the lazy susan in the closet. I think it’s wonderful for such a silly deep closet, but when he turns it the bottles tip over. After he requested several times, I finally moved the things (like the toothbrush and toothpaste) off of it. So keep that in mind if you’re enamored by this and you have a man in your home (or if you just like to spin things with a lot of force, hehe).

I painted my nails too. And since that relaxation-guilt is too strong, I spent the nail-drying time doing research and making inter-library loan requests.

Did the laundry too.

Please tell me I’m not the only person with a laundry room that will *definitely* not be popping up on Pinterest? The fact that this picture is so dark makes the room look a lot nicer than reality. Hah.

Made some sandwiches. Yum.

I had to re-order our 2010-2011 photo album (which I will write about soon in more detail) because I stupidly ordered it without showing it to Mr. N first. As soon as he opened it, he found a damn typo on the first page.

After trying to color it out with black marker, I decided it bothered me too much and re-ordered it. I had to pay $65 for my error, but that’s a deep discount over what I paid for the first book. (I contacted Shutterfly to see if I had any options, since it was my own error, and the option they gave me was a sizable percentage off – I’ll take it!) Since I was re-ordering it anyway, I went through the whole book again and made a few minor changes to some other things that bugged me a bit.

And since it snowed some more, I shoveled some more.

And that was my weekend, pretty much. How was yours?