The Sarlacc Pit

If you've been following this blog you've probably forgotten about it. Not posting in almost a year will do that to a tiny, smidgen corner of the internet. But I'm OK with that.

To say the least, this has been a wild year. After making it through my first semester as a doctoral student, my second semester was a breeze. The first semester had its ups and downs. I felt like the semester started without me and spent the rest of the time feeling like I was playing catch up. I had a project that took a lot out of me confidence-wise, and that was compounded by a constant desire to just go home. It's odd to be in the middle of a lot of life changes; moving out of my home for the first time was difficult, so I decided to do that, move out of state AND start a doctoral program. No pressure. There were successes, though, and I clung to those. I went to my first conference (NASSS in San Diego) and banged out a couple of papers worth turning into something more than semester-end babblings. Then I went home, recuperated, and came back ready to kick ass.

My second semester went much better than the first. I was ahead of my work and got a lot done with my assistantship. Apparently I'm really good at making codebooks; who knew? I didn't do a lot "extra" in terms of writing immediately publishable or presentable papers, but all my semester papers are getting tweaked for conferences in the coming months. I got through my classes easily and actually started to enjoy State College more. Homesickness waned considerably and I really started to feel like I was in the right place.

After taking a six-week course at the beginning of summer I returned home to a bit of craziness. Not only did our home sell, but we also moved into a new place. There was a two-week lull between closings, and a whole lot of madness outside of that. After packing up a 4-bedroom home in two weeks (it's amazing how much shit closets hold) I got to semi-relax for a couple of weeks. I spent that time catching up on assistantship work and hid in my friend Joe's kitchen as a way to de-stress. Then the townhouse closed and, with the help of my dearest friends, we painted a three-bedroom, two-story townhouse in two weeks. And got the floors changed out. And got all new electrical stuff. And cleaned up the messes left by past tenants. And started actually moving in. All in all, I had my first all-nighter (the day we moved out of the old place) and Joe and I had two nights working 9-5 (that is, 9 p.m. to 5 a.m.) packing and unpacking a huge storage unit.

My blog, like Lando, gets saved from
ten thousand years of digestion.

And somehow I managed to gain 10 pounds. *shakes fist at weight gods... then remembers that week spent cooking*

So that's how my last year of blogging nearly fell into the Sarlacc Pit. With everything going on, the last thing I thought about was dedicating 30 minutes to an hour per week talking about the monotony of my daily routine. Only it wasn't really monotonous. It was kind of hectic monotony with a bouts of insanity and a whole lot of Cooking Channel.

All that said, I'm hoping to be a bit more diligent with this blog. I'm also planning to launch my hockey communications blog, which was started and stopped but will have a place in my CV when all is said and done. I have two book chapters I'm wrapping up, an independent study to bang out, and three planned conference submissions this semester. I'm starting new assistantships (two; research and teaching) and hope to continue my involvement with various on- and off-campus groups (CGF and the AEJMC Sports Interest group). The ball is rolling faster down that doctoral hill.

Adieu, mes amis! It's good to be back!

- Mel(li) :)