It’s that time of year again – the time between semesters, when there’s no structured time in the day.

It’s a good thing, because I can work whenever I feel motivated to do so – and without fear of interruption.  And it’s a bad thing, because… well… I need that motivation.

Maybe it’s the winter blahs, maybe it’s the lack of structure, or who knows?   My brain finds scattered tasks to do, but not the important ones.  It’s also the time when I feel like there’s  no point in doing the work I do – it won’t matter, it’s not publishable, no one will bother to cite it anyway, someone else will do a better job, etc.

How to get out of a funk like this?

I’ve tried a few procrastination techniques (organizing my office – a task that I need to do but gets boring after while; writing class syllabi – a task I hate more than just about anything besides grading exams), writing blog posts (see!  I can do this!), updating web pages, etc. etc.   But the creative brain still refuses to engage.

Will give it another kick in the butt, another cup of coffee perhaps, and we’ll see what runs from there….

Part of the difficulties of combining research with a teaching heavy position (I have 2 classes this term, one with a lab – and this is my light semester) is that it is difficult to find time to do field work.  I’d love to be in the field for 2-3 weeks consecutive, but with a southern hemisphere field area, this conflicts with classes.

So I’m cutting my field time back to a week – and the week that worked out best with the rest of the team was Thanksgiving break – only missing one class (the other class and labs were cancelled during the holiday week).    But I’m ambivalent about this “give up your holiday to do field work” thing….

The field work is done, but I’m exhausted, and have a 24 hour plane trip home (including layovers and customs and such) – and then right to university to catch up with classes.  And the piles of grading, and the piles of paperwork.

And the piles of rocks – I officially am bringing home more rocks than other stuff, I think.  But there’s enough samples for at least one student to do a project this spring/summer, and one more funded field season left (so I can hit the other sites I’ve missed next year).

Now I need a vacation….

Like many of us out there, there are a lot of demands for my time… and I keep putting off some of the high-tech “upgrades” I want to make at work.

The question is, are they really worth it anyway?

I should have a nice webpage – I should have my cv. online (plus links to publications), and current course syllabi and links to notes and useful webpages.  But is it worth it?  The university pays a significant amount of money to run a Blackboard system – which does more than my webpage would ever do (discussion forums, say) and is secure enough to post grades on.   I could get away with just a formulaic page with contact info and a cv… right?

Should also help update the department webpage with an nifty RSS feed to help promote our public events.

But they seem like more trouble they then are worth – updating my webpage requires logging into the university VPN to access FrontPage (I’m a Mac user – and a PPC user at that, so no Parallels-ing into Windows land for me).  Would love to add an RSS feed, but am I capable of keeping up with updates?  Isn’t it just easier to do things the old-fashioned (non-internet) way?

Yeah.   Might happen someday.  Probably not.  You can see how well I’ve done with blog posts….

(At this point, some roadie is supposed to come out and try to play Stairway to Heaven after tuning the guitars, right?)

I’m trying a first post here, just to see how this works – I’ll put something substantive up later.  Promise.