lazy lazy thursday

Is it called Good Thursday? I remember when I was a child and still a diligent Catholic, that the Thursday of the Easter Weekend was a rather important and holy day. I remember going to church actually on Thursday night and then waiting for the long church service on Good Friday where we had to kiss the feet of Jesus on the cross. I usually remained seated in my church pew, because the thought of kissing a statue just didn't make sense to me. Of course all eyes would be pierced on me (or maybe it was me, L and A, grouped together in our joint repulsion for this ritual) because the whole congregation would get up, row by row and file down the aisle to take their turn at kissing the feet and we would be exposed in our seats. No where to hide in a Catholic church during this ritual.

But aside from being grateful that I no longer have to go to church on a Good Friday and instead can simply think about the pickled fish and hot cross buns I will eat - this Thursday I decided not to go to my research site - they are having a formal staff meeting and I didn't want to go all the way to BLV just to be told I cant sit in on the meeting. So I'm sitting here at almost 12pm, in my gown, organising my electronic fieldwork folders. Flip when will it ever end - its like I have to work on keeping it 'tidy' at least once a week and this doesn't even include the backups I have to keep making. I'm using DROPBOX, a brilliant tool to share and sync files between computers in different location, primarily as a fail safe way to backup my fieldnotes in realtime, but then I also want a copy on my primary PC. And while in principle this seems simple enough - it requires so much management added to my generally paranoia that I might lose my fieldnotes due whatever reason. The amount of 'stuff' I'm collecting - goodness, I certainly don't want to bore any one with the details. I've also started to collect interactional data - of when a lecturer is walking around the class, looking at a student's work-in-progress and doing a mini-consultation. Again lord knows what the hell I'm going to do with all of that! So its files, files, folders and more file...oh and did I mention I also collect hardcopies of things too!

Anyway I'm meant to be sending off my supervision notes, but I've been distracted by downloading data recordings, photographs and student written notes taken in class. Soon I'll be off to my favourite cafe to sit and listen to the interactional data I've recorded and write some more fieldnotes. Oh the life of a PhD student, when she's in the mood to be a PhD student.