I just spent a half hour playing fetch with my cat…

…and it was terribly relaxing. Everyone should have a pet to play with.

Let’s see, what to update since the last time I wrote?

1. I got an assistantship! Yay!

It’s the one I wrote about earlier, working under the editor of Design Research Quarterly. The articles are pretty interesting, so even if the writing is dreadful in the pure form and it takes me five hours and three Aleve to edit one article, it’ll be worth it. The experience I get in the editing/publishing end will come in handy later on if I ever hope to have a position in the publication side of research (and the idea of me being a knowledge gatekeeper of that sort is both hilarious and intriguing). I also think it’ll make me an even stronger writer, also very necessary to surviving grad school.

And yes, because I’m materially minded, a partial tuition waiver. It’s only a 25% position, so they only waive 9 hours. I’m taking 11. I pay 2 hours worth and fees. The fees are what really suck. Still, it gives me about $2500 back out of the $4200 for the semester plus a (tiny) stipend. That’s nothing to sneeze at for something that’s in theory only 10 hours of work a week.

2. I’ve been sort of running stats study groups for our quantitative methods class. It’s more fun than I thought it would be because I find that I actually still remember and understand this stuff from way back in 2004 when I took undergrad stats. Also very helpful when you take into account that Sherkat tends to jump steps like crazy and assume we can keep up. So far I have been but I definitely have to remember to ask him to slow down and explain things when we get to the higher end stats formulas that I haven’t really dealt with or used. Regardless, the groups help me cement my knowledge, figure out alternate ways of explaining what’s going on, and it’s a great sort of ‘intro’ to teaching. Most of the tutoring I’ve done up to this point has been one-on-one, so the group environment is nice.

Is it weird I like statistics? I remember being the girl in high school who cringed through her math courses. I survived them and did well because I studied judiciously not because I was “good” at math.

3. I’ve been cooking a lot more since I moved down here. Some of it is out of necessity. I’m hungrier because I’m running around like crazy. But I also need the leftovers. I can’t eat out as much as I used to be able to; I really miss those nice big paychecks from CMR. Alas.

4. I have some thoughts on bootstrapping in discussions of prejudice that I kind of want to talk about at some point. When I’m not in the middle of sauteeing pierogis.

5. Also have thoughts on the use of the tyrant figure and anti-establishment coding vs. establishment frameworks in video games, also to be talked about later. See reason above.