We’ve been super busy lately here. Kels was in New Hampshire for the past two weeks training for her new job with Maine Drilling & Blasting. Today is her first day as the Regional Office Manager for the New York and Vermont office, conveniently located 10 minutes from our house.
We spent yesterday working in the yard, cleaning up all of the debris from winter (leaves, pinecones, twigs, gravel and junk from snowplows, etc). We aren’t quite done, but we got enough done to mow for the first time in the season. There is something very zen about seeing all of the orderly lines from the mower in the back yard. I suppose it makes me a bad environmentalist for taking pleasure in bringing nature under my control, but so be it.
We’ve got photos up of Kelsey’s growing baby bump up to and including yesterday. We take these every Sunday night, so you can see a weekly progression of growth. At the end, if I’m feeling ambitious, I might string these together into an animated graphic that shows the growth. We also posted the most recent ultrasound photos, which were taken at 20 weeks. We’ve got another appointment next week, and if there are ultrasound photos from that one, I’ll post those also.
I’m working on finishing up classes, and I’m going to be taking my comprehensive exams at the end of May. This is a big deal – not only because it involves a huge amount of work, but also because it will allow me to concentrate on my dissertation work starting this summer. I will be spending the fall semester working on my dissertation proposal while staying home with our baby and traveling to campus hopefully one day per week. I will finish up classes in the spring, once our baby is old enough to be put into daycare.
Comprehensive exams involve picking two areas of study out of science, technology, and policy. I am taking the technology and policy exams. I am assigned a reader, who is a faculty member, for each exam. I then come up with a list of 30 books for each exam – 60 books total – which I need to read by the time my exams start (in addition to any other classwork I have). For those of you that subscribe to me on Goodreads, expect to see a lot of updates over the next few weeks! I will start exams on Monday, May 17, and I will be given four questions by each reader, so eight total. I will pick two questions from each reader, four total, and I will have a week to respond to the questions in writing. Answers are about 10 pages in length, for a total of 40 pages of written material. Once I have turned in my written responses, my readers will take a few days to review them and provide comments. I will then have an oral examination, which will involve follow-up on my answers and their feedback, and will test my knowledge of the material on-demand. My exams will be completely finished before Friday, June 4, when we leave for a much needed vacation in the Outer Banks. If website updates and correspondence are sparse over the next two months, you know why!