Epiphany: Part Two.

I want to be self-employed. And I want to make things.

Commentariat of the mundane: a photo dump!

"Gee, I love going back and forth between the frozen windy weather outside and overly heated indoors during the winter!" -- nobody with extremely sensitive skin and eczema ever

Here, I took a selfie:

Who needs face skin, anyway?

Sometimes, I look in the mirror to check on the whole face situation when I have these extreme dry skin spells and it looks like a patch of my skin has dried donut glaze on it. Which, considering I scarfed down a half dozen glazed donut holes in my car this morning after I parked because I had two minutes before my 8am appointment, is actually entirely possible. 

Anyway, not much terribly exciting news on the front line, or even the back line. I achieved decent office time dissertation progress last week, which is what I am going to assume caused the acute right wrist pain that I am currently suffering from. You know what are daily actions that you totally take for granted until you decide to develop a mystery wrist injury on your dominant hand? Opening doors, turning the steering wheel, and...um...cleaning yourself after a visit to the Little Disgruntled Doctoral Student's Room. Anyway. Dissertating is a dangerous business, especially when trying to do it while working an office job! I'll probably have to start using one of those ergonomic mouse/keyboard wrist cushion things that old people or nerds use.

In any case, lots of mundane things have happened in the last couple of weeks. I took pictures (doy):

Snow Day check-in!

Today's Bro Award goes to our postman, who just delivered our mail in this arctic tundra. I think we could have waited for the one envelope of Costco coupons, but the effort was appreciated nonetheless.

Honorable mention goes to the guy who just BICYCLED past our house on the sidewalk while pulling his little kid behind on a sled. That's Snow Day-ing and adulting right. Ah well, back to my fireside blanket burrito.

Important dissertation progress milestone!

I reached fifty pages!

Those dissertation pages sure fly when you're sitting at an office job all week with absolutely nothing to do.

I (and by "I" I mean "Professor Schmoobles") rewarded myself with chicken wings and a martini after work yesterday. Because what else does one reward oneself with after reaching a dissertation progress milestone?

Precioussss.

That being said, fifty pages is like NOTHING BARELY ANYTHING in Ph.D. dissertation terms. It's still all just introductory exploratory stuff. But whatever. I'll take it. Here's to the next fifty and my next round of celebratory fried food products and martinis!

Back to work.

Both in the office drudgery sense and in the dissertation progress sense.

Ugh.

Is it just me or did last week go by in exactly ten seconds? More sleep please.

Anyway, two important dissertation-related things happened yesterday:

1. I  learned that a sixteenth-century Spanish mystic shares the same name as a current-century *ahem* adult film thespian. Things I will not be clicking on on my work computer for 400, Alex.

2. A 15-16c. Spanish mystic named Juana de la Cruz, who is not to be confused with 17c. Spanish mystic Juana Ines de la Cruz (somebody tell me how to get the hour of my life that I wasted trying to clear up my confusion), dressed as a man to escape her family's attempts to marry her off to a man at the age of fifteen. Years later, she would claim that God had designed her at conception to be male, but that the Virgin Mary intervened in utero and requested she be changed into a female. This was why she was left with an Adam's apple. Scholars have suggested that this androgyny (or maybe transgender...?) allowed Cruz to arbitrate more successfully than most in her time the different levels of power assigned to males and females--she was allowed to publicly preach, which was an extremely rare allowance for a woman. Her writings also blur the distinction between male and female, resulting in the elevation of the female as an authoritative voice. FASCINATING! I mean, for me. Anyone else? Bueller?

Oh, also I was able to finish putting in information about one key figure into my ever-expanding Excel Spreadsheet of Dissertation Doom and even managed to add maybe a page worth of text into my actual dissertation document. Woo hoo!

Speaking of deserving a reward, Bossman said yesterday that he was going to bring in donuts this morning. I literally planned out my entire morning around this. And by "planned out" I mean "planned to eat donuts." But we've both been in the office for ten minutes now and there is zero evidence that he brought in any donuts. Grumble.

IMPORTANT UPDATE 30 minutes later: I think Bossman could feel the heat emanating from my fingertips as I typed that last paragraph because he just got up and said he was going to go take a walk to the fancy donut place near campus and pick up some donuts. SUCCESS!