I don’t know where I’ve been for the last 3 months (well, yes, of course I do – Thesis Hell), but I seem to have come out the other side. It might be that some of the pressure is off, or the realisation this is the only holiday I’m going to get until this time next year, or it might be waking up crying with pain from a frozen shoulder earlier in the week, but at I’m having a bit of a break and am staying away from the office until the new year, when I will finish writing up. In the meantime, I keep a hard copy of my thesis on the kitchen table, where I can write notes in the margins every 15 or 20 minutes, or whenever something occurs to me, as well as a big notebook where I can write out ideas at length. This seems to be working surprisingly well. But on my iBook, the Microsoft Word icon sits quietly in the dock, where it can bloody well stay for a week or so.

What I’m doing instead of hunching over Word for 12 hours a day like a prematurely aging scholarly Scrooge:

1. using, instead of critiquing, Garageband – mainly very peaceful, minimalistic stuff
2. cooking beautiful fresh food for myself and those I love
3. reading a couple of those books-I’ll-get-round-to-one-day: The Idiot and Bleak House
4. Christmas shopping
5. reading the paper (although sometimes I wish I hadn’t)

…and so on and so forth. I choose to believe this is all going to make me more intelligent and efficient in the new year. And I hope you all enjoy the break as much as I intend to!