ready for a trip to cancun!

chapter 7 finished. now i just need to write the final chapter and revise everything and byebye, i'm off to mexico. ... or something.

got $250 from the engl dept for tesol. should get a couple of $$ from grad school too.

i wonder if ikea has a website and if they allow wishlists. i need to keep myself motivated with something, right now...

oh yeah, i forgot to say that a big university in florida called me for a campus visit even without a phone interview (i sent my stuff to them by email after tesol) and without letters of recommendation. one day too late. but anyway, who would want to live in a city whose name no one knows how to spell?

tired

haven't been able to sleep much lately. things are completely crazy here.

the good thing is that chapter 7 is not as hard to write as i thought it would be. i'm almost done with it. i sent chapters 2, 4, 5, and 6 to margie. and now i'm worried about the final chapter. i realized that i have tons of results but no good overall view of the thing, no big picture, no idea how i could write an abstract, for example.

i'm very scared, these days. not about the dissertation. probably explains the lack of sleep...

CCCC

went to chicago for CCCC. presented with tony and a few other people, all went well. i like chicago very much. can't even get lost in that city even without maps. had a fun thai lunch with friends. went home and slept 3 hours straight. i'm glad the next conference i'm going to is in june, i'm tired of these things! i would like to go to IAWE in the fall, but it's in japan and i doubt i'll be able to miss a week of work...

i need to write a short article asap, deadline for submission is march 30, haha!

my fortune cookie said, the two hardest things to handle in life are failure and success.

blah

i hate chapter 7 and i am tired and overwhelmed and mad and scared and sad and broke.

all i need is love...

got a summer research grant, yeah!! this means i don't have to teach this summer. very nice.

done with chapter 6. ok, chapter 7 is going to be a little trickier but i should be done with it in a week or two. two. i'm meeting with margie today to give her the chapters i recently completed and to discuss ... err.... an important decision that i need to make very soon.

i was worried that some of my new (southern) canadian readers had abandonned me but i'm glad to see you back this morning :)

moving along...

done with chapter 5! how is this possible??? i've had to divide my chapter 4 into four chapters because I had about 130 pages and that was too much for one chapter. so i divided it by research questions. question 1 is chapter 4, question 2 is chapter 5, question 3 is chapter 6, and questions 4 and 5 are in chapter 7. chapter 8 will be the conclusion of the whole dissertation. instead of just presenting the results, i'm now discussing them in each chapter so my chapter 8 will be smaller (it was going to be another monster).

so now chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 are done. chapters 6 is on almost done (i need to discuss about the results a bit more), and chapter 7 is on its way, but veronica is helping me with it so i'll have to wait for her input to write some more. i've realized that if i want to defend on the 13th of june, i need to be done with the whole thing by early may. this leaves me with one month (and a half, if i stretch it) to finish the whole damn thing!!

i could change the defense date... but then i rejected a job offer from a school in quebec and the person i was corresponding with in that school told me that he still wanted to do research with me because he's very interested in what i'm doing! nice! so he wants to meet at AAAL in Montreal, which starts on the 17th of june... so if I defend my dissertation on the 13th i would be free to go to montreal afterwards, and maybe to other places in canada too...

i can do it i can do it i can do it i can do it i can do it i can do it i can do it i can do it i can do it i can do it i can do it i can do it i can do it!

oh, and i also sent a file to a big university in florida today. i met the director of their TESOL program last week and he told me they urgently needed someone... not that i want to go to florida, but who knows...

back to work!

oh, i also wrote to two members of the tesol board of directors and asked them to please mention my name when the editorial board of the new tesol journal is established...

heilige kuh!

tesol

thank goodness, tesol is over!

my presentations were ok, caucus is doing well, feet are killing me, i've been up at 5 every morning this week, have talked to several interesting people about work and stuff, the job interview went very well, have seen old friends and teachers, met new friends too, am glad i'm no longer the caucus chair, thought about working for the awards committee now, must write an article for the new tesol journal, will try to get involved with the editorial board of the new tesol journal somehow, will make a reservation for a hotel in seattle for tesol next year asap, am flying home tomorrow, was happy my sister was able to come.

i was very touched that margie came to the last few minutes of my last presentation today to enquire about the job interview yesterday. that was very kind and thoughtful. she's always been wonderful, but something has changed in the last couple of weeks. it feels less like "you can do it, i have faith in you" and more like "i am so proud of you!"

defense

june 13th, 2pm. you're all invited. i'll try to be there, too.

dreams...

i think the nobel prize of cooking should be invented just for me. when i graduate, i'll close this blog (after i write an article on "how i survived graduate school") and open a cooking blog! when i'll retire, i'll marry a rich man who will open a restaurant for me in "le vieux." it'll be called keskon riz and we'll serve tons of vegetarian dishes (and others too), and all the dishes will contain rice in one form or another! haha, feels good to dream ;)

entirely finished writing about my research questions 1, 2, and 3. done. finished. byebye! i'll meet with margie tomorrow to discuss the last two questions, the job search, the defense, graduation, etc. i miss her, i'm sad that she is on sabbatical during my last semester... but i guess it forces me to be more independent, which is good. i still miss saying hi from time to time and speaking french and german and dutch with her... it's thanks to her that i didn't give up and that i'm graduating after only 4 years.

other than that, i got a phone call this afternoon inviting me to a campus visit... during tesol. i said i'm awfully sorry can we do this another time and they said ok, the following week. i checked the plane tickets (the place is about as remote as pocatello, idaho!): nothing below twelve hundred dollars, so even if i'm reimbursed later, i don't see how i could pay that much up front! talking about reimbursements, i finally got new york's and that will allow me to rent a car in tampa (because i'm staying with my sister's in-laws who live 45 minutes away from downtown).

it feels really good to be "wanted." getting the tirf grant really validated the importance of my research and showed me that what i know and what i am doing is important and valuable. this job search is doing the same thing. oh, and one kid in the esl phd program asked me today when i'd be done with my article about dealing with multiple IRBs because he needed it urgently. huhuh. i never thought ANYONE would ever get interested in that! (haha, i checked on google.ca what IRB stands for, in case my canadian visitors wonder what i'm writing about. ironically, it stands for canadian immigration and refugee board. i'm writing about the institutional review board, more commonly called the committee on the use of human research subjects). i guess i'll finish this article sometime during the summer... maybe...

i wished the tornado sirens would stop! we've had them practically all day today and right now we have a monster storm... i need to get out of the midwest soon, before i fly away with the roof!

tesol

when people ask me what i'm doing for spring break i tell them that i'm going to florida... and everyone's jealous... huhuh... but really, i don't think it's going to be much fun, except that i love to see old friends. on thursday evening, i have exactly three meetings at the same time! on thursday and friday mornings, i am starting one presentation and before the end of that presentation i have to run to another one (in another hotel of course) to present there too, before the end! that's the kind of fun i'm going to have all week. great spring break :)

the great thing about it is that after this conference, things should get a little easier. easier with tesol, that is, because then the dissertation's waiting for me impatiently and my cat's having surgery... yeah...

i've asked for a summer research grant so i don't have to work this summer and can finish my dissertation on time, and i'm also asking for two travel grants for tesol. hopefully i'll get a couple of dollars.

i wrote to the intensive program administrators whose students participated in my study and asked them how much i owed them for the thousands of photocopies they made for me. good thing i'm getting some tax money back and the second half of my tirf grant soon, because that a looooooot of photocopies! i also asked them if they were going to tesol so i could meet them in person and thank them for their help with my project. some of them are. i've really enjoyed meeting some of them at other conferences already.

got a phone call from quebec tonight. things are so complicated in my life right now, it's incredible! the good thing about it is that i write a lot and i cook a lot. oh, and i learned that it's too late to "register" for the graduation ceremony in may... my parents will be happy, they'll be able to come to the august ceremony if my sis doesn't have her baby right that day, hehe!

ok, back to research question 3, statement 18...

done!!

chapter 3 is 99.99% done! and in chapter 4, i got research questions 1, 2, and 3 done. got all the info i needed, printed the whole thing, and wrote tables and figures until the cows came home yesterday and the day before!! 106 pages so far... now i need to write a bit more in-between some of the graphs and tables, but overall, i only need to start working on questions 4 and 5 now, which are the easiest ones! yep, i'm good ;)

tesol's in a week and i am definitely NOT ready for it yet! i think i'm going to forget the dissertation this weekend and concentrate on my five presentations plus the business meeting that i had forgotten... fun fun!

ps. got the japanese and korean questionnaires translated. those are the largest language groups, that's a good start! turkish is done too, thanks to my dear officemate john. i'll give the arabic ones to one of my students who's from jordan, and then there's only thai and chinese to translate, and those are quite small. excellent!

the truth about cats and dogs

ok so all the results of the analyzes for research question 3 had to be thrown in the trash! yep, t-tests and frequencies and ANOVAs and univariates... all in the trash! why? because we were sooo happy to finally be able to use the data set with SAS that we used the wrong one, the one that hadn't been double-checked against the set entered by veronica. haha! anyway, i tried to redo everything by myself today and wasn't quite as successful as I had hoped i'd be... but i still managed to get some results and i'll go back and work on it tomorrow.

other than that, i can see that my chapter 4 is really going to be easy to write. i already have more than 100 pages of graphs and tables and figures and now i need to write a few things in-between... i think i should manage with 150 pages only for chapter 4. it's very repetitive and super boring... but not hard, at least, ONCE I HAVE THE RESULTS!!

other than that i'm a bit discouraged today because of several things... but it'll get better soon i'm sure :)