January Review

A month I am very glad indeed to see the back of.  Going from the end of sumbel season (and, admittedly, a very good New Years' party) and travelling back to the north east, trying to get back into the working mindset.  Still just as cold and dark as December, though, with no real sign of days getting longer.  Walking home in the dark gets old, and the snow was lovely but the ice is perilous.

I did have another PhD student look askance at the fact that I could enjoy the prettiness of the snow though. I pointed out that it wasn't going to settle, and it was practically CGI quality snow falling in front of a cathedral lit up for the night - glorious. His response?  "Well, when you get to my age you don't really find it that exciting."  He is twenty-three.  I responded with the hope that once he reached my grand old age of twenty-six he would once again take delight in the world...

So, achievements this month:

Long bits of writing done: 1 (should have been 2, that is now trailing over into February)
Blog posts written: 3
Books read: 0 completely (Theory is, if I start tracking it, it will improve)
Books bought: 3 (not too bad, a little high. On the plus side, did discover a couple of ebook repositories, and am arranging a loan of another text I want to read.)
Significant things:

• Sat down for a morning with some bibliographic software, put together a system that works and organised most of the PDFs from last term.
• Had an excellent supervision and set some targets for next month.
• Found login details for most of my blogs and actually started using them.
• Managed to arrange social things to happen twice.
• Had a really crap month, but have not dropped anything really important, and have made plans to help with next month.

February targets:

• 2 long bits of writing
• 5 blog posts (this one doesn't count)
• Attend 3 large social gatherings
• Read 1 theoretical text and 1 biography