And still busy
As you can probably guess by the frequency of updates to my diary, things haven’t really quietened down yet. Work is still busy, I’ve got huge amounts of work to do study-wise, and the ESOL classes on Tuesday nights aren’t helping, because I have to go straight there from work to get there in time, which means I don’t have time to eat beforehand, which means I’m having dinner at 9.30 or so when I finally get home, which means I’m not getting to sleep until very late, all of which means I’m tired for the rest of the week. And that means in the free time I do have I’m generally feeling too tired to want to sit at the computer writing long diary entries.
Oh well, only two more weeks of ESOL training (eep!), and after that I’ll hopefully be able to arrange my schedule of tutoring to suit me a bit better than the classes have, so that should improve things. In the meantime you’ll just have to put up with these occasional summaries.
MrPloppy and I had dinner at awhina‘s on Monday night so I could use Ken and meerkitten as subjects (sorry, “participants” – “subjects” isn’t PC any more, apparently) for my sociolinguistics field study. I was supposed to survey one male and one female of different generations, both born in NZ, and when I’d suggested this to awhina she volunteered to invite her parents round as well so I had yet another generation to choose from. In the end I couldn’t decide which combination of two people would be most interesting, so I surveyed the entire family, which turned out to be really useful when I took my results along to the tutorial, because not everyone in the tutorial group had done the fieldwork, so my extra data came in handy when we combined all our data.
I got three more catches from the Wellington trip this week: Hot Six by Janet Evanovich was caught by an anonymous finder who’s taking it to Canada, Special Relations by Tim Sebastian has migrated from the book exchange shelf at the YHA to a book exchange shelf in a Nelson holiday cottage, and The World Upside Down by Felix Donnelly was caught by a geocacher (unsurprisingly, seeing as I released it while lytteltonwitch and Wombles were searching for a geocache nearby!) who’s taken it home to Austria!
One sign that I’m too busy at the moment is that my reading rate has dropped off dramatically. I normally average 12-15 books per month, but last month I only read five, and so far in March I’ve only read two books (and one of those was an audiobook!), despite being a third of the way through the month already. I don’t particularly obsess about the number of books I read, but it has been interesting keeping track over the last couple of years, and seeing patterns begin to emerge.
And Mount TBR has grown a bit higher over the last few days, too – on Friday there was a parcel in my letterbox from libertine101, a surprise RABK of The Cat Who Smelled a Rat by Lilian Jackson Braun, and then yesterday a bookring book arrived that I’d completely forgotten about signing up for, Stir-Fry by Emma Donoghue.
I seriously need to start making more time to read!
Currently reading: The Last Girls by Lee Smith, Sociolinguistic Theory by JK Chambers, and The Wise Woman by Philippa Gregory (well, technically I’m still reading it, in that it’s lying beside the bed with a bookmark in it, but in reality I haven’t picked it up in over a month because it was irritating me)