Retooling

In the past month or so, I've decided that I'm going to have to do some serious retooling of my dissertation topic. I'm bummed about this, because my original idea would be an awesome study, the problem is that to really do it in such a way as to get worthwhile results it would need to be a longitudinal study. I'm not doing a multi-year thesis. I want to be finished. I'd also like to be able to stop paying tuition. If I had to decide right now which one I'm more excited about I'm not sure I would be able to answer.

So, in trying to update some of my references (which were perfectly fine and within the five year cutoff that the school recommends when I first started working on my idea paper, they have sadly trickled off the other end in the two years of coursework and procrastination surrounding trying to work on the idea paper and classwork at the same time), I think I ran across a way that I can retool into a smaller, shorter study that's still unique and still reasonable and, more importantly, still kind of interesting. Not as interesting as my original idea, mind you, but...you can't win 'em all.

Today I was going to sit down and really put my nose to the grindstone and kick out some good revisions to the idea paper. So far today I have actually managed to feed the baby, change the baby, take a shower, try to get the baby to nap, give up on the baby napping, do some bits and bobs for the class I'm teaching online (I started teaching a class online last week, did I mention that? Not sure I did. Anyway.), eat lunch, and take a shower. Now, roughly five hours after first sitting down at my computer and hoping to get started on the dumb thing, I have a baby napping on my chest (I'd try to go put him down, but he'd wake up and complain and then get fussy and I'd seriously get nothing done) and absolutely no motivation to actually try and start.

These are the days of our lives.