• Happy Thanksgiving! 
  • Jon is working this year, so I didn’t cook.  It was strange.  I made cheesecakes anyway, just so I wouldn’t feel too left out.  I should have some later.
  • The best productivity tip I have for today is that, for goodness sake, STAY HOME TOMORROW.  Seriously, the amount of time you spend in lines with grumpy people will never balance out the money you save.  Stay home and shop on Amazon.
  • I got to fill out an Arbitron Radio Ratings thing for this past week.  Turns out I mostly listen to my clock radio in the morning (specifically hard/alternative rock), books on tape in the car and internet classical radio while I work.  However the adhesive to close the thing for sending back tastes VILE.
  • I’ve taken 21 hours of research methods classes.  That almost makes me more of a statistician than an education policy geek. 
  • I really need to break up the rest of this weekend and determine how much time I will spend on each of my key projects.  I have all day friday (8 hrs), all day saturday (8 hrs), half a day on sunday (4 hrs) and all day monday (8 hrs) .  24 hours total, or so.  The projects are as follows:
    • Final paper for curriculum class – est 8 hrs
    • History of Ed Conference proposal(s) – rewrite – est 2 hrs
    • Reading for next thursday’s curriculum class – est 2 hrs
    • Begin work on paper for accepted conference proposal – est 4 hrs
    • Review of philosophy of school choice paper – est 2 hrs
    • Look for online adjunct teaching jobs and apply – est 1 hrs per day
    • Read other materials – whatever is left (which doesn’t look like any)
    • Take transcription test for competitive intelligence job. – est 2 hrs.
  • That last one is interesting – I have a line on a job working from home doing technology competitive intelligence, which (in case you didn’t know) is an awful lot like qualitative research.  Your job is to call companies and get them to tell you the non-confidential information that they would tell a prospective client.  You are basically doing interviews and writing them up.  The potentially evil part of this is that you pretend to be a legit pre-sales contact for them when you aren’t, using an established/approved cover story.  However part of me is fascinated by the idea of practicing my qualitative skills while making money off my old career, from home. 
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