Week-Long Dissertation Boot Camp

Due to budget cuts, USU employees were required to take a Spring Break furlough. We thought this would be a great time for Kevin to focus on his dissertation again, so April and children headed south for the week leaving him alone to write, write, and write some more. Since it was still a bit too cold to embark on a camping trip, we only went as far as Salt Lake Valley. We thank Grandma and Grandpa for putting us up for the week and letting us add excitement to Grandpa's retirement.


Sunday Evening

As mentioned in the birthday post, we partied at the Gold's house. Tanya and Dallin hit it off really well, and she didn't even mind too much when he spit up all over her shoulder. We heard there are bets among certain cousins predicting when Tanya and Rex will add some offspring to their family.




Monday

We spent time with Grandma Tsukamoto (see b-day post again) and then visited our good friends, the Bucherts, for the afternoon and evening. They invited us to stay for dinner and Family Home Evening. Thanks so much for letting us invade. It was one of the highlights of the week for the children.


















Tuesday

We FINALLY made it to the movie Bolt. The children earned this prize last month for decluttering, but it had left Logan theaters by then. Fortunately it was still showing at the dollar theaters in SLC. Ever since seeing it, Erin has added Bolt to her repertoire of animals she pretends to be. She wore a hole in yet another pair of pants while crawling around Grandma's house barking the "super bark."



Tuesday night, Mom, Megan, and Dallin returned to Logan so Megan could attend her very first Young Women's activity. It was orginally going to be a party welcoming Megan into the organization, but then it turned out to be a stake activity. Megan came home wearing make up from a skin care mini class. We chuckled as she refused to allow us to take a photo and immediately went upstairs to wash her face. The only make up we have in the house is for Halloween, and Megan said she doesn't understand why girls would want to paint their faces each day. If any of our readers feel like Megan needs more cosmetic education you will have to intervene now--her mother is no help in this department.


Wednesday

Megan and Mom returned to SLC and relieved Grandpa from entertainment duties. Ian and Erin had run him ragged, and he was ready for a bit of a break. We did enlist his services again later in the afternoon to help with errands. We did some bargain shopping for pants for the boys in the family. In the evening, the children practiced the piano at Grandma T's house and played more games.




Thursday

April, Dallin, and Grandma T went to visit Aunt Betty who is recovering from surgery and a broken hip. Unfortunately, we forgot the camera and don't have pictures of Dallin playing with "cousin" Sofia, who is 2 months older than him.

Following lunch, April took all 4 children to the Living Planet Aquarium in Sandy. You may ask how good can an aquarium in the middle of Utah be? Well...it doesn't hold a candle to the Sydney Aquarium. But it's o.k. for people living in a desert climate--just don't expect anything spectacular. The displays of Utah freshwater critters and those from the Amazon Rain Forest were very well done. The ocean section just wasn't as impressive as in aquariums located by the ocean. Megan and Ian enjoyed petting the stingrays in the touch pool. Erin acted as aquarium guide by the coral reef window and made sure everyone walking by noticed Nemo (the clownfish). She also liked the variety of frogs.




Friday

The children engaged in a final playtime with Grandpa while Mom packed up and loaded the car for the trip back home. We had to get back in time for Megan's friend birthday party. When we called Grandpa later to say we had arrived safely in Logan, he said his house was much too quiet and he already missed us. Maybe we'll have to return more frequently!

Dissertation Status
by Kevin

April asked me to write about what I did all week. Well, the first thing I did was notice how very quiet our house is with no kids here. It didn't take long for me to notice how easy it was to cook and clean for just one person. Spending the week writing was kind of lonely, kind of overwhelming, and occasionally interesting. I did write each day and am grateful for the progress I made. Long stretches were sometimes spent fussing with data or reworking key paragraphs. I felt like I was trying to resurrect the dead--there are a lot of details that I have forgotten about the work we did, but that makes sense when you consider we collected the data between 1996 and 1998!

I spent some time being angry that I did not finish 10 years ago! I realize how close I was, and that the same problems that plagued me before still have to be dealt with now. On the one hand I am more mature (in some ways) and better able to deal with those problems. On the other hand, with more than a decade since my statistics class it is hard to remember how to do the analyses! Also, I was much more familiar with the literature in 1999 than I am now (I have numerous sentences with notes to myself saying I need to find a reference to back up this statement). I'm mad that I let myself be intimidated by my committee members and that I was so crushed by their comments (I don't know if any of them actually intended to put me down or if that is just how I took it).

I have made a lot of mistakes, which greatly prolonged this painful process. I remember when I was looking into graduate school I considered applying to the lab of Eric Pianka (a famous lizard ecologist). But on his website he had an open letter to prospective graduate students where he said, "In terms of making a decent living, you'd be wiser to become a plumber!" His letter also said, "My advice to a young person is not to become a biologist if he or she can possibly help it, but if he or she can't help it, they'll probably make a good one." I didn't care for his advice, but I understand it better now (and find myself telling prospective graduate students some of the same things!).

One mistake I did not make was in my choice of an advisor. Dr. Brodie has been excellent to work with since the day we first met him. He has certainly let me take my own path and make my own mistakes. Some days I think a little more structure may have been nice, but he has been supportive in spite of my shortcomings and has been an excellent example of a first-rate scientist as well as a generous human being. We have had wonderful, memorable experiences over the years that we worked with horned lizards and I hope I can transfer a bit of that excitement into the manuscripts that represent my dissertation. One of my committee members said I was born 100 years too late to do the kind of work we did (a lot of fun natural history), but I think the field of biology is big enough to accommodate my meager contribution. In many ways I would have been better off doing something more in vogue, but the work we did is an honest expression of who I am and what I am interested in.