Bring on the Jetsons...

Being a housewife is tough but being a housewife whose also a grad student is absolutely exhausting.  I haven't been sticking to my schedule during the day perfectly but given that I just started implementing it I feel that I'm doing fairly well.  Getting up at 6 in the morning really isn't that hard until about 2 in the afternoon when I find myself falling asleep while staring at my computer.  Today I was able to push through just telling myself you only have to make it until 5.  But that's not quite true.  At 5 I take Jewels to the park or for a walk and then I come home and make dinner.  Now all of that wouldn't be so bad except that with making dinner comes the hassle of cleaning up after dinner.  There's unloading the dishwasher and reloading all the new dishes that accumulated throughout the day.  There's putting all of the stuff you drug out to make dinner with back and cleaning everything that can't go in the dishwasher.  And when you finally get a chance to sit down you just stare at the carpet and think man I need to vacuum!  Then there's laundry, cleaning, menu planning, and all of those other horrible weekly chores.  I don't know how you housewives do it!  I know I'm being a little (okay maybe alot) whiny, but I'm TIRED!!  So I say bring on the Jetsons.  I can't wait for the days of robots that do all of these chores for you :-)

Well those dishes aren't going to do themselves!  Mom, I promise I will write something profound tomorrow :-)

Success/Failure

For me today was in many ways successful and in other ways a failure.  Today marked the beginning of my new self imposed schedule.  Essentially I created a schedule that I want to stick to throughout the rest of my time as a grad student.  I will explain the basis of my schedule but first let me explain my need for a schedule.

For those of you who don't know I am a 4th year graduate student studying Biostatistics at UC Davis.  This essentially means that I am passed all of the coursework and now am working independently on my own research.  While you're in courses, school in many ways is much easier than an actual job.  Imagine a job in which your boss tells you exactly what he/she wants you to do and gives you a week in which to get it done.  You take the week to do that job and then the next week you get a new assignment.  I loved being in classes.  No self-motivation needed.  You're given an assignment and in a week you will be graded on that assignment.  You work hard to get it done and when the due date comes you turn it in and you no longer have to worry about it.  Research on the other hand is a job in which your boss says "Hey come up with a project that no one has done before and that will take around 2 years to do and get it done".   Needless to say you need a good amount of self-motivation which I seem to be lacking.  Hence the reason for a schedule.

So in an attempt to get it together and start making some progress I set a daily schedule for myself.  Essentially I get up at 6, work out, then from 9-5 I work on my dissertation research, my gsr research, and any consulting projects that I'm working on.  At 5 I stop all work for the day, make dinner, and then take the rest of the evening off.  So today I managed to follow my schedule to a T until about 3:00 when I took a nap :-(  I'm hoping it takes me about a week to get adjusted to this schedule and make it work.  I was pretty disappointed when I woke up from the nap but I will try again tomorrow.

I know I'm kind of blabbering on but I promised myself I would treat this as a journal.  I'm done for the evening now so I'm going to relax and prepare myself for tomorrow morning :-)  I hope you all had a wonderful day and I hope that you will continue to work on your New Year's Resolutions.  Perhaps one of my New Year's Resolutions should be to keep my New Year's resolutions :-)

To be continued....

New Years Resolutions

So I've been thinking about doing this for some time but apparently needed the push of the new year to get me started.  I got the idea from a friend of mine (that's you Bethany :-) ).  My New Year's Resolutions are

1. To start writing in a journal.
2. To do a better job at keeping up with friends and family.
3. To start and finish my wedding album (I'm ashamed to say it's been over two years since the wedding).
4. To get on a schedule and stick to it!
5. And finally to lose weight.

In order to really stick to my resolutions this year, as I've never done before, I decided to start writing this blog.  I want this blog to serve several purposes.  First of all it will serve as my journal, slightly embarrassing as all of you will be reading it, but I promise to remain honest.  Secondly, I am absolutely terrible at keeping in touch with people.  You would think facebook would help with this, but I mostly just read what everyone else is doing and do very little posting myself.  So this is a way for my friends and family to keep track of me and see what I'm up to.  I promise to keep this blog mostly free of statistics talk!!  :-)  I also see this as a way to share my struggles with keeping a particular schedule (being self motivated to work on my research has become a bit of a problem) and my struggles with eating right and dragging myself out of bed to workout.

At best this will help others through similar struggles and let them know that they aren't alone, and at worst it will simply be a therapeutic way for me to reflect on my life :-)

I guess that is all for now, will write again soon.