Happy birthday, Megan

[jo_blogs]

Wishing you a happy birthday Saturday and a fun and joy-filled year to come!

Comments

[megan29.livejournal.com]

Thank you very much. It's definitely a lazy Saturday. I got a very late start, and our phones (which were turned off) had a looooong list of missed calls from my family in Romania. :-)

[stmargarets.livejournal.com]

Megan! I didn't realize it was your birthday. LJ didn't inform me.

Happy Birthday!

I hope you had a great day. Are you planning any skiing trips? Skiing hasn't been that great around here, even though we've had a lot of snow, because the weather had been so changeable.

[megan29.livejournal.com]

Thank you! LJ is very unreliable of late - I think they're messing with their code, and they have so many bugs that all sort of updates have become rather random.

We wanted to go skiing, but it was too warm. It's getting colder now, so maybe next week. The weather has been as unpredictable as LJ :-) - wild swings in temperature from one day to the next. So we're keeping an eye on the forecast and trying to find that window of opportunity when it looks like a good few days of skiing.

[megan29.livejournal.com]

How is your thesis going? I haven't heard from you in a while. Are you done with the revisions?

[jo-blogs.livejournal.com]

Yes I've been meaning to do an update, there just feels like so much to say it's hard to start. I'm glad to hear you had a relaxing birthday and sorry I missed your holiday post, I just read it now and the photos of your nieces are so cute!

Things have changed quite a lot with the thesis. I don't know if you remember that I wasn't happy with the draft I produced in 2012. Because of how I'd written it, once I realised it had big problems at a structural level, I became convinced (rightly as it turns out) that very little of it would be salvageable. My supervisor disagreed, so managing that was difficult. At the beginning of last year, I was quite emotionally fragile (and physically spent), and it took time to recover. So, to cut a long story short, a lot of my time last year was spent figuring out a different approach and going over the data again. That felt like progress, and I'm now working more closely with my second supervisor, which is working well so far. I also managed to get a couple of things published - though I wasn't at all happy with how they turned out, at least it's something to show for the past 6 years! I was also dealing with being diagnosed with ADHD, and getting the right support in place so I can work productively and not run into the same problems with the new draft. That's on the way to being sorted now - I'm working with a dyslexia tutor (a lot of the issues for ADHD are similar to dyslexia) and I just started on medication. I'm making headway with the analysis and doing a lot of planning, though as yet I don't have too much actual writing "in the bank" as it were. Hopefully that'll change as things settle down. I do feel very different now that I have an explanation for why I've been struggling. After going through some pretty dark moments and coming out the other side, I'm optimistic that I will be able to finish eventually.


Thanks for asking about the thesis, I appreciate it.

[stmargarets.livejournal.com]

Oh, Jo, what a long journey you've been on. You've learned so much about yourself these past six years (as well as your subject matter for your thesis). Very few people can say that. It's too bad we didn't have some of these resources when we were younger, but better late than never.

I'm sooo glad you have a second supervisor! Keep going, you can do it! *waves pom poms*

[megan29.livejournal.com]

Seconding StMags here!

[jo-blogs.livejournal.com]

Sorry I missed this the other day - thanks to both of you for the pom-poms, I'm so grateful to have you guys cheerleading for me! You're quite right, St. Mags, I have learned a lot that I probably couldn't have learned any other way, and it's certainly been an interesting ride…I do my best not to waste time fretting over how things might have been different and keep moving forward and my eyes on the prize!