Work never really stops

After 2 months of paternity leave, I finally feel like the pace of life is slowing down. It has been a lot of fixing in and around the new house and travelling to and from friends and relatives. And work kept me busier than I thought.

First of all, I'm still working on the first article, be it with some more distance to the text. On 10 September, Mats, Dieter and me had a meeting. Some comments on the text have come by mail from friends in the Netherlands and a few days ago, Mats and me had a meeting in order to summarise all that should be done before we can send the article to a journal. It feels like there are a lot of smaller things, such as numbers and figures that should be double checked and some diagrams altered. Well, this is gonna take some time during autumn, and then I'll work with it full speed after my return on the workfloor in January.

The editorial work with the reader about images of Bergslagen is showing some nice results. With the help of the editors, my chapter starts to take real shape and the reader should be published within a few months' time. That would mean my first academic publication, and it's even in Swedish!

Other things are the financial side of paternity leave, which is quite difficult to arrange when you have as an administrator earning real wage prior to your PhD studies, and now have an income made up of 86% scholarship and 14% wage. It took a half a year, but even that seems to be okay now, and I will soon be able to pay C. my half of the table that we bought for our house.

Planning for next year, I haev filled in a form with my wishes for lecturing. If all goes as planned, I will be lecturing approximately 200 hours in 2010, on courses in "Population Geography", "Culture, Tourism and Regional Development", "Geographical Area Studies" and other courses.

Last but not least, we are celebrating 2 new Doctors of Philosophy in our discipline; Max and Moa! This means an official defence, followed by a dinner and party on which we created the tradition of singing a song composed by us, accompanied by some Geographers playing the guitar. Often hilarious, not so much beacuase of the text, but rather due to our (mediocre)performance :)

And then of course, to gether with C. I'm still taking care of Lucas and our new house. A journey to the Netherlands is also planned for the end of the month. Purpose: visiting an emigration fair in Bunnik!

Dissertation (part 1)

Monday 26 November 2007 was a day with an unexpected amount of snow. This resulted amongst other things in a beautiful white track and field stadium, white grass and white trees next to the small conference centre Östra Mark on university ground.

This was also the first time we had to produce a text about our dissertation, describing our aim, method, questions, literature and earlier eresearch in the field. The whole steering group was present, as well as some interested PhD students from earlier "generations." We all got helpfull feedback and enough comments for working on our "sketch" the rest of the year.

A month earlier, we had been to Åkerby, close to Nora, to witness two days of networking with external lecturers and commenting on other PhD students' work. This was a good experience, since this laid the ground for our work and we learned how to receive criticism with dignity :)