So, today the "working at Victor's office" experiment began in earnest, and all I can really say is that this is the awesome-est, best idea ever. I worked a full day, with time out for what will likely be by new gym here in Bellevue. I read a bit of one of my "core" secondary sources, but mainly used RefWorks+ JSTOR to locate references for the two chapters I'm working on. Damn, I have a lot of reading to do!
Today was a productive day... just not so much in terms of my dissertation. Several medical-type appointments (nothing major - a teeth cleaning here, some dental x-rays there, etc.), and loads of errand-running.
The Prius will finally be going to the body shop tomorrow a.m. to have the damage inflicted on it by the car movers repaired. This is awesome, but it means we'll be totally car-less for the remainder of the week (if we are lucky, we'll have the car back on Friday). So: lots of errands. A whole week's worth, in fact.
And now it's bedtime, so all updates (exciting and otherwise) will have to wait 'til tomorrow. G'night!
I ended up spending most of today hanging out with Tom, a friend and former co-worker from the U of M. We walked around downtown and the market in a vaguely touristy way. I remembered a few times that I'd planned to take pictures.
Then I had a longish wait for the bus to get home, and ended up making some really useful progress on figuring how to approach the dissertation, esp. with regard to secondary reading/research that's chapter-specific. How to handle the secondary sources for individual chapters has been a tough problem for me to tackle because of the structure of my dissertation, and it's something I've been putting off all month.
My dissertation is going to be a collection of essays, essentially, which all focus on a central topic. Each chapter looks at a different time period and body of historiography (for instance, the third chapter is about the 1920s and 30s, when the Harvey Company branched out into "Indian Detours" and the secondary sources for that chapter deal with the history of tourism in the Southwest). [For an overview of the Harvey Company, see this wikipedia article; I don't entirely agree with its presentation, but until I write my own overview... it's what I have to link to ;-]
I'd been going around in circles with regard to secondary lit., because my dissertation touches on too many fields for me to do a full lit. review in the introduction as is typical. My solution is simple (and, ok, fairly obvious) - I'll footnote a short lit review for each chapter in each chapter, as appropriate. I'm not entirely clear on why, but I feel much much better about actually starting to review my secondary research now. Whew.
We went out to the OPH for brunch today. Good times, as always. It's especially nice to enjoy one of our Minneapolis favorites here. We had fun, and stayed way past the point where they stopped refilling our water and coffee.
This afternoon, I decided somewhat last-minute to make some kind of stew. I bought two pounds of beef at Bob's yesterday without knowing exactly what I was going to do with it. Given my lack of plan, I ended up falling back on an old favorite of ours - Penzey's Harvest Stew. It's meant to be made with lamb, but I nearly always make it with beef instead. It's not up on their recipe index, so I'll reproduce it here:
Harvest Stew
2 lb stew meat, cubed
vegetable oil
1 tsp sweet curry powder
1 tsp hot curry powder
1 tsp garam masala
1/2 tsp garlic powder
2 Tb water (for mixing with spices)
1 onion, finely minced
2-3 carrots, peeled and cut into thick coins
4-6 large potatoes, peeled and cut into chunks
3/4 C chicken stock
1-2 tsp salt
Preheat over to 325F. Heat oil and brown meat; put it in a large casserole dish with the carrots and potatoes. Mix spices and water to form a paste. Add the onions to the frying pan, reduce heat to medium, and cook until onions are golden. Add spice past, and cook one more minute, stirring to prevent burning.
Pour the onion/spice mixture over the beef. Add the stock to the pan, stir to get up the tasty browned bits, and pour over casserole. Add the salt, and mix everything together very well.
Cover tightly, and bake for at least an hour and a half, covered. Stir occasionally. Then remove the lid and bake for an additional thirty minutes to thicken the sauce.
Servers 4-6 Prep. time: 20 min Cooking time: 2-3 hours
It ended up being quite tasty, and went well with the half-whole-wheat bread I made to go with it. Victor ended up carrying back a 15-pound(!) bag of potatoes from the grocery store, because apparently our ghetto-mart doesn't have any other potatoes at present.
We also had the end of a bottle of wine with dinner, so now I'm a tad tipsy... but still able to post (mostly).
And that's a good thing. Finally, I have my office here in Seattle unpacked, a computer (though not my main one, sadly) hooked up, and am ready to Get Stuff Done.
Stuff like: replacing this horrible keyboard (thank you, Apple, for breaking my hands), getting a working office chair (my hydraulic mechanism broke during the move, apparently, so I'm basically sitting on the floor as I write this), and starting this blog.
The blog: will have dissertation updates (theoretically daily during the week, but who knows?), cooking updates (because recipes are fun!), and some other junk, misc.
If you're not in my friends 'n' family list, you'll probably miss a lot of personal angst and/or whining. This could be a benefit... but maybe you want to know a bit more about what's going on with me, ESPECIALLY the angst. Because maybe you love angst? If so, drop me a line and I'll add you to the list! (Or however it is that Vox manages these things.)
EDIT: It looks like you'll need to have a vox account to be my vox friend. Sorry about that! Also, all non-vox-friend comments are moderated.
