A confession
I confess. I have spent about $80 at Wal-Mart in the last week. I honestly cannot remember the last time I spent money at Wal-Mart; I'm not even sure when the last time I walked in to a Walmart was. But, I'm in northwest Iowa, and Walmart has run the other stores (Kmart, Shopko, White Drug) out of town. On my first trip, I was accompanying a friend who needed (yes, needed) the audiobook of the new Harry Potter. The local bookstore was sold out of everything Harry Potter, so Walmart was the only local option. I bought sunscreen and deodorant. I should've gone to HyVee instead, but I was lazy. I'm ashamed.
Then, yesterday, I was in Wal-Mart because my brother insisted that we go there to buy a socket set because he knew they'd have it, and we desperately needed to fix the SeaDoo. While waiting in line to buy said socket set, I noticed the Walmart optical center and wandered over; I found they had the contacts I'd just paid through the roof to have overnighted to me from VisionDirect. I returned to the lake house to poll my friends about whether or not I could justify canceling my internet order and buying my contacts at Wal-Mart. Meggie, an alternative medicine student, checked, and sure enough, I was experiencing pretty nasty eye strain. Those of us at the house then decided it was ok for me to return to Wal-Mart and buy my contacts if I offset my indiscretion by donating to a worthy cause.
So, now I'm looking for somewhere to send my $70. That's how much I saved by shopping at Wal-Mart, and since I was shopping there to get my contacts 2 days earlier, we decided I should donate the price difference. So, where should my $70 go? I suggested maybe the Michigan Democratic Party, but Meggie pointed out that charitable organizations are having some trouble this year because so many people are sending their charity dollars to campaign-related pots. The Dems will have to wait until fiscal 2008 to get any of my money, I guess. Where would my $70 be most useful and most likely to offset some of the damage I did by shopping at Wal-Mart? Here are some ideas, and I'm interested in your suggestions:
- First Book - a nonprofit organization with a single mission: to give children from low-income families the opportunity to read and own their first new books
- Food Gatherers - exists to alleviate hunger and address its causes in our community by: reducing food waste through the rescue and distribution of perishable and non perishable food; coordinating with other hunger relief providers; educating the public about hunger; and developing new food resources.
Here's an article from Money magazine that talks about the evil-not evil debate that's in my head.
My not-so-digital life
It turns out the physical world still very much affects me. I don't mean that I still have to walk around or that I still bump into things and bruise myself. I mean that things like DVDs, papers, and Cubs tickets still muck up my plans.
I'm on vacation in Okoboji, Iowa, and I thought I'd packed well. I thought wrong. I forgot to return some DVDs to Blockbuster on my way out of town, and I'm pretty sure I'm now the proud owner of The Long Kiss Goodnight and the not-at-all-proud owner of How to Lose Your Lover. Yes, I could just send them back to the store from here, but that would require effort I'm not sure I have the energy to muster.
I also forgot that my syllabus for "Getting Started: GSIs Teaching Graduate Students," a Center for Research on Learning and Teaching (CRLT) orientation I'm teaching in late August, is due next week. Luckily, my very helpful officemate, Jun Zhang, was kind enough to send me all the papers I've gathered in preparation for writing that syllabus. UPS delivers to this remote area where DHL and FedEx fear to tread, and my papers arrived today. I guess that means I'll write a syllabus in the next few days. It seems strange to call a workshop plan a "syllabus," but that's what the guy at CRLT called it.
Two more things - Cubs tickets and more DVDs. I forgot to turn on my vacation status thing on Half.com, and someone bought my West Wing DVDs. Thanks, Chris, for getting into my apartment and sending those off for me! My eBay reputation stays unblemished this year; we can almost forget about that phone snafu from a while back Thanks to Nicki, I don't have to worry about the Cubs tickets I also forgot in my apartment. She got them off via USPS to my cousin's waiting family. I wouldn't be able to forgive myself had I ruined a 3 year old's chance to see a Cubs game. Unforgivable!
So what have I learned during the last few days?
- My friends are wonderful people (well, not learned, but reminded).
- My need to send and receive postal mail increases as my distance from my apartment increases.
- I do need more than my laptop to get work done.
I think I've sent and received more postal mail in the last 5 days than in the 5 months before that. Well, wait, I was the lucky recipient of a number of fantastic post cards. Maybe I deal with mail more often than I notice. It just seems odd to me that I've had to arrange for the delivery of so many items in the last few days. Of course, I haven't even mentioned Harry Potter. I had the last book sent to my parents' lake house, and it took until very late Saturday afternoon for the darn thing to arrive. 749 pages is too many. My eyes are tired, but my curiosity is sated.
Now that I've managed to blather on about mail for an entire blog post, I invite you to check out my Okoboji vacation pictures. You'll be jealous!
My Dissertation Topic (for real!)
I met with Stephanie today and showed her "my paragraph." I finally managed to get my dissertation topic into less than 300 words, and it feels fantastic! You might've read my other post on Collaboration and Identity, and this topic is something close to that. Obviously there are ambiguities in this paragraph; it's an introduction, and it will take an entire dissertation to explain. I need to tweak the paragraph a bit, but here it is in its rough glory:
I am proposing to conduct a qualitative study that focuses on participants of interdisciplinary collaborations where the collaborations are designed to a) encourage team science and b) marshal practices from multiple disciplines to address problems too large and/or complicated for a single discipline to solve. The emphasis will be on understanding how a research community changes its practices when collaborating with participants from one or more different communities. I employ an understanding of practice from Wenger – practice connotes a repertoire of resources for accomplishing work; it includes experiences, stories, tools, ways of addressing recurring problems (Wenger, 1999). I contend that a community’s practices, the way it thinks of itself, and the way it thinks of other communities influence 1) its adoption of innovations and 2) its collaborations with other communities. It is also important to consider the nature of the work involved, the funding mechanisms supporting the collaboration, and a community’s prior experience in collaborations. Funding agencies and experts have highlighted team science as a high priority, and even called it a scientific necessity ("Who'd want to work in a team? [editorial]", 2003); the push in team science provides interesting opportunities for studying this kind of interdisciplinary, distributed collaboration. My study will provide insight into how a community’s sense of itself, its practices, and its sense of others affect collaboration so that we may be better equipped to encourage successful collaboration. The research will incorporate in-depth interviews with members of two interdisciplinary collaborations (one in biomedical research and one in civil engineering), observations of their work (both independent and collaborative), and analysis of the funding and policy mechanisms supporting these collaborations.
libbyh.com on the move
Libbyh.com is on the move. I've opened a new account for the site with Dreamhost, and over the next week or so I'll be moving everything to their servers. Dot5Hosting sucks. That's all there is to it. They have horrible support, bad service, unacceptable down times, and are just all around irritating. So, I'm leaving Dot5Hosting and moving to Dreamhost. I apologize in advance for any complications the move presents for anyone reading. May I suggest some other blogs to read in the meantime? See the "recommended blogs" sidebar for your procrastinating pleasure.