Stories from Summer Vacation: A View from the Desk of Katherine Kelly

This story comes our way from the desk of doctoral student Katherine Kelly:

Hello from my desk! This July I'm taking a month away from my job at the Longhorn Network for a fabulous rendezvous with my doctoral dissertation on home organization. The view here is really nice: I see coffee cups, frantic and unintelligible post-it notes, and piles of books that seemed important at one point, but that I have now forgotten why I even checked out of the library, left behind in my writing like so many fallen soldiers. I can't go back for you, secondary sources!! Your chapter has already been written!!The ability to have a month off to work on my project is extremely lucky--by mid-August I will be back at a job that I really enjoy, but that keeps my attention divided (the scales are tipped back again because they pay me; the dissertation, on the other hand, makes me pay and pay again). During this time, I've been able to conduct a number of interviews with professional organizers, who have all been very gracious and whose shared experiences will make my work a lot better. I'm really grateful for their time, and for the uninterrupted time here at my desk, and, incidentally, for the exercise ball chair I just bought to sit on, which has really been an unexpected boon in all this.In my spare time I'm training for an Olympic-distance triathlon I'm doing with another Ph.D. candidate (Anthropology) on Labor Day. There's not much to say about that except it's very sweaty and I will probably finish.