Fall is Here!

Sometimes I'm a broken record. Get over it.

Old desktop background:



New, Fall-o-rific desktop background:



(P.S. All of my backgrounds are pictures I've taken. So the ones above? I shot.)

I long to go take photos of leaves changing colors, wear sweaters and drink apple cider (which I do once and then realize it's only good for the first half of the first cup), and drive around in the country, (sans miles and miles of corn).

I'm really jonesing for the last one but I can't scratch the itch. There's no close country to drive around in. No gravel (that I can find). There aren't fields and intersections that have had corn growing at them all summer. The smell's different. The crispness of fall hasn't settled in. I'm anxious. I just want to revel in it, but it's not here yet.

Bits of it are here, but not enough. The temps have broken. Instead of 90 something, this week's supposed to be 70 something. I got cold this evening! Cold! Who knew!?! And tomorrow I'm breaking out a sweater for the first time since what feels like forever.

Tomorrow I'll be wearing this outfit:


Be jealous.

And send the rest of fall soon, I can't wait.

(P.P.S. Here's Linny and Cisco yesterday! We were parking-lot-watching.)

Happy Saturday

Today involved:
the couch
me laying
a trip to Target and then Kroger
a trip to the dog park
much football
encouragement for Alabama and then Arkansas and then sadness when Alabama won
zero homework
listening to the Huskers via internet radio
and some internet browsing

I'm gearing myself up for a big day of homework tomorrow and have been "preparing" by doing nothing. It's been nice but I can't help but feel guilty for not working. And I'm fighting a cold. And I want to whine but am trying to keep it to myself. Oh, and what's the deal with the Huskers? Why are they playing so poorly??

In other news, I saw this and this while browsing online and it made me giggle. Check em out!! :D Happy weekend y'all!

It's HOT

It's hot down here. It's the middle of September and I'm boycotting this 90 degree weather; I wore jeans and a longer sleeved shirt to school today. I spend most of the day in the same building so the only time I feel unbearable heat is on the ride home from school, and as soon as I get home, I often change. I dream of sweaters and hoodies, chilly noses and my breath in the air, fallen leaves and gray mornings. But until then, I'll just continue fighting the heat with hoodies in the evening and jeans at school.

Here's what I've spent the last hour and a half working on. (Disclaimer, the highs for each day don't reflect the coolest times of the day, BUT STILL, we don't generally say "It was 99 degrees out today, though it was only 73 when I woke up." We only remember the 99. Oh, and humidity isn't factored into this at all.)

These are the monthly averages for June-September this year. I'm comparing Athens, where I live now, to Kearney, where I lived from 2003-2009.




This shows the number of days each month with temperatures under 90 degrees. This one is the reason I did all this. It's been HELLA HOT for as long as I can remember. Hell, it was MAY the last time the high for the day was under 84.

Look at this. In July in Athens, there were 26 days where the temp was at least 90 degrees! (September shows the same but here there have only been 16 days with temps over 90. Only 16.)



This gets at the point above, about how it's been FOREVER since it's been cool.




And finally, something more traditional, though this doesn't really show the range or average temp.


Chase: What? Are you a meteorologist now?
Me: No, I'm a statistician.

Day Trip to Atlanta

After spending half the morning at school with articles and stupid printing malfunctions, Chase and I headed over to Ashley and Billy's to road trip with them to Atlanta for part of the day. They've got a Boston Terrier with digestive issues and feed her only food without preservatives and can only get that in Atlanta. So we stopped there for Maggie's food and some treats (and got a pig ear, hoof, and antler) for Linny. I didn't get any pictures of that part of the trip, mostly because we've all seen hooves and antlers. After that we had (tasty) barbeque at a nearby restaurant and headed over to the Dekalb Famer's Market. It's an international market and was really stinky and new. Pictures from the day:

Ashley's got new flowers popping up at her house, she lives in a magical place!



Chase's lunch (mine was a pulled chicken sandwich with potato salad):


New things at the Farmer's Market (The first one's a water chestnut, I don't know what the other two are):





On the ride home I took a shot of the foliage as of today. I'll take more as time goes on (maybe weekly!) and let you know how Fall develops.


When I got home I took Linny to a dog park and she was a total wimp the whole time. She tucked her tail and wouldn't let the other dogs sniff her and when one (bigger, older) dog wanted to play with her, she rolled over and started whining like she was hurt, but the dog wasn't even doing anything! She got extremely dirty and we had to bathe her as soon as we got home. Talk about a cold shower!

This is how she spent most of the park-trip.


And this is me updating regularly. Please, feel free to leave comments!

All the Rest

Other than school I've spent the last month and a half with Chase and friends. We've gone to sporting events, hiked, grilled, drank.


Holding the baby of a fellow grad student.


After a soccer game (Georgia vs. Utah)




Hiking in north Georgia at Panther Creek


Us, minus Courtney.


I got a new bookcase (on the left) and some new frames for above my desk.


The next weekend we went hiking at Tallulah Falls Gorge. This place is AWESOME. In addition to getting a kick ass workout, the views are beautiful and the swimming at the turn-around is fun (it even has a natural slide!).



(This is Ashley. She's smarter than me, works harder, and gets more done and despite all of this, likes me. Hopefully some of her better qualities will rub off on me.)


This weekend we hit up the Georgia vs. Arkansas football game. It was pushing 90 degrees and BRIGHT so we left at halftime. The game was closer than it should have been and pretty exciting to watch, but we had to get home to watch the Huskers play. :)




This is the view from where we sat, the panoramic shot I got right before we headed home.

We've still got some more adventures planned for the fall. Next weekend a chili cook-off in Atlanta (at Stone Mountain) is calling our names and then we want to fit Amicalola Falls in sometime. Ashley wants to go to a corn maze, a haunted hayride, and probably carve pumpkins so we'll definitely be festive come Halloween. I'll keep you updated. For now though, I'll be spending the rest of the day with Chase and my articles, reading and highlighting.

What Else

I meant to write this last night but by the time I got done with school, I was spent. I was at school from 8am until 6pm working on class and homework and reorganizing my references. I spent the last two hours organizing and deleting PDFs from my computer after I'd added them into my Endnote library and when I was done, my head hurt from staring at the computer for so long. I bussed home, had supper and watched some of a couple of movies before almost falling sleep on the couch. After that I spent some time online, watched the season finale of The Bachelor Pad (I know, embarrassing) and then went to bed to "read" a bit. 5 minutes later, at 10:15, I was setting my alarm... and now it's tomorrow!

What else I've been doing (part one)
I recently decided to use Twitter for good, rather than just for pleasure. I spent one "productive" Friday morning searching online for tweeters who often tweeted or retweeted topics that I care about. Among those added to my list, a few have widened my horizon enough to be noteworthy. Those would be:

Danah Boyd (zephoria)
Gender Across Borders (GABblog)
Jessica Sherwood (socwomen)
Chad Gesser (profgesser)
SocProf (SocProf)
and
Nathan Palmer (sociologysource)

I hope to add more in the future, but I've got to ease myself in to this. Adding a lot of people at once on twitter seems to backfire for me: I can't see the trees because I'm too busy staring at the size of the forest.

In addition to finding some great people, I've found some great (in my eyes) websites.
I'm going to update the blogs I follow on the left in a bit, but for now, these are the gems I've uncovered recently:

A great eye opener: Sociological Images
Two great teaching resources: Sociology Source and The Sociological Cinema
Something fun: Extraordinary Observations
Someone with intruiging ideas and a wealth of resources I still need to tap into (just look at all of the links on the side!): The Global Sociology Blog
Interesting...: The Grumpy Sociologist
Who doesn't love charts, graphs, and figures???: Graphic Sociology
A critical look at America's construction: The Infrastructurist
Who doesn't love tips?: Lifehacker
(I need to make a point of coming here more often): Modeled Behavior
And one last site: The Daily Dish

"Tomorrow" I'll tell you what I've been up to when school isn't on my mind. Oh, and let me know if you want a post of interesting articles I've come across lately. I have a plethora of those!

What I've Been Up To

I spent my vacation in Nebraska eager to get back to Georgia and just GET TO WORK. I've got a thesis to write, books that need reading, articles to skim, thoughts to develop. And since getting back, I'm doing them.

August 16th and 17th were spent at ASA (the yearly Big Meeting for Sociologists) listening to presentations and wandering around the book exhibit, looking for new books. I brought home about 17 books and recently finished Guyland. I also finished up Nurture Shock (a book I started in the spring but never finished) and have a chapter left to read in Law, Crime, and Sexuality (we read this for class last fall but I never read the last 45 pages of it) and half of Why Marriages Succeed or Fail left. Oh, and for class I read Freaks of Nature and will be starting Evolution in Four Dimensions and The Spirit Level sometime towards the end of this week.

I've decided that I want to read a book a month outside of class. August's was Guyland and this month I'm finishing up the books I started but never finished. I'm trying to figure out if the book for October should be Code of the Street or Shared Beginnings, Divergent Lives.

Thoughts?

Tomorrow I'll share what else I've been doing.

September 13, 2010

I'm going to try to blog more. I never really feel like I have much to say but I feel like I'm transforming into a professional adult and though I know it's not happening overnight, it's hard to see where and how I'm changing if I don't document any of it.

I take lots of photos. Definitely more these days. More of Linny, more of friends, more of Chase and I. More now that I'm feeling more comfortable in Georgia. But still not as many as I used to take in Nebraska. And I have more people that I routinely see and talk to. People who inquire about my day, who talk to me without having a reason to talk to me, more friends. And yet I'm farther away from people who I've never been away from. I don't have my family around, I don't have Sundays to catch up on gossip, the bar to run into old classmates or work friends, I rarely talk to some of my oldest friends.

(Though I've had two dreams that my (deceased) Grandpa made guest appearances in... those were nice.)

I guess what I'm saying is that I'm changing, and I want you to see it. So, stick around.