Winter to Spring...any time now

Time has been flying by, and all of a sudden it's August. While my friends and family on the other side of the equator are enjoying the last month of summer, I'm anxiously waiting for my second winter to come to an end. July is the height of winter in Melbourne; August promises to be better. The days are slowly starting to get longer, and the temperature is not dropping quite so low at night anymore. Today, in fact, it's actually really gorgeous out.

A couple of weeks ago my housemate, Kirsty, and I spent a weekend up in Daylesford to take a mini-break from the various pressures of our lives/winter. Not that Daylesford is warmer than Melbourne - it is significantly colder. But it was a good weekend of retail and massage therapy. I have to say, I'm falling in love with the Victorian countryside. I love living in Melbourne and I love escaping to the country every now and then. Because of the train system (and my concession card) it's both easy and affordable to take a day trip, or even a weekend trip, out to the country without having to use Kirsty as a chauffeur.

On the academic front a looming supervisor meeting had me waking up in the middle of the night in terror. They want me to do my panel presentation in early November and had asked that I come to our next meeting with some reflections on my research questions and on the literature I have been reading. As I started to review the research questions I had come up with earlier in light of what had been piquing my interest in my latest research, I discovered a problem: my research questions had nothing to do with what I was interested in now and they weren't igniting any old interest either.

After a lot of pacing, a couple sleepless nights, and several pages of rewrites, I had a vague idea of some research questions that would bridge the gap.

I went into my meeting and laid it out for my supervisors: I had lost interest in the whole internet part of what I intended to research. Much to my surprise, this was met with a great deal of excitement. Positive excitement. They didn't think it was the end of this internet business for me, but saw that I had reached the proverbial "fork in the road". Apparently the fact that I had reached this cross roads at this particular stage of my PhD is a really good sign that I'm aware of where my thinking is and am in touch with my thought process. Or something. Like I said, I had 2 sleepless nights before the meeting.

After discussing where my interests were heading, what different options there were if I was to drop the internet bit, and what was expected of me as a PhD candidate, we came up with an idea that married my new interest to my old one that I suspect I am quite happy with. My task for my next meeting is to reflect more on what it is I want to research, do some clarifying around that, and go over my notes from when I was focusing my literature review on the internet to see if I can find where my passion for that topic got left off and if I can pick it up again. I'm feeling confident about it all.

So my plan for this weekend was to catch up on sleep and finish up some uni work that's been eatting up all my time. But somehow neither of those things has happened. I'm sleeping alright, but with regards to sleeping in, my body apparently had other plans. So I resorted to spending the mornings with a good book. Hopefully my ability to sleep through the night will continue on through the week, since I can't just lie in bed all morning with a non-uni book on weekdays.

Well, we have a house inspection coming up this week. Kirsty's going to see if they can come tomorrow since she'll be home sick. I'm not on the lease at this point, an issue that will be resolved this month, which means that I don't have to be here for the inspection. Which is great because most of the things that needs fixing I don't particularly care about, but Kirsty does. I'm a strong believer in that if you want something done right, you do it yourself. At any rate, I'm hiding in my room from my share of the housework, which tends to be the smaller share, so I should probably get on that.