analysis in my sights

I'm sitting at my desk at the OU and the sun (yes sun) is streaming into the room from the top window so that it is beaming down on me. It's amazing what the slightest bit of sunshine does for my disposition - it's hard to be negative with the sun shining in an otherwise grey, damp and cold country. I slept really poorly last night, fuelled by the slight panic I felt upon realising that I have so many things to do - academic and personal before leaving the UK in the next 10 or so days. A thought crossed my mind - would I cope to stay here at the OU all through Xmas simply to work? It has some sort of twisted romantic (if you're inlove with your studies that is) illusion about committment to ones work, that maybe, I secretly covert but would never be able to pull off (I think I'm probably too well adjusted for that kind of obsession). Work, work, work a constant love-hate relationship. All this moving around is so destablising - of course I say it's ok and that I can adjust when I arrive in the 'new' but 'temporary' surroundings - well the moving buys me the stuff I can't have, but desperately want, when sitting all alone in my bedroom in MK. So I have to convince myself that I can pull it off and I guess if my track record is anything to go by, I do pull it off about 85-90% of the time.

But I'm starting to get my teeth into my analysis and as it probably always does, it's turning all my preconceived notions about what 'my analysis' will look like on its head. In a good and productive way...I think, mostly! I'm at that point where I want to dig deeper and I want to think differently, explore other options, look at the data from different angles - all very exciting stuff, but also stuff that needs to be contained somehow. I've just completed the analysis of one practice in one of my cases - in the initial data description I wrote, the discussion of this practice accounted for maybe 3 pages - now in the first analytical iteration it's already a whopping 10 pages and I can see how I can still add depth to this rendition. I can't really see an endpoint just yet, only the possibilities of how it might fit in with an analytic frame that I can see slowly coming into being. Let's see if I can maintain this optomism as I work through all the other practice examples in my study and once I start to put my interpretations 'out there' for all to praise or trash.