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it seems like as long as i've been on lj, essius has been a doctoral student. is that right? anyway, perhaps now I am getting a glimpse of why graduate studies take so long to get anywhere. I feel like I'm constantly wading through snow, and not rapidly either. working on hebrew has no relevance to my study, but if i don't claw my way back to the top of that particular cliff now, i probably never will. so i'm plugging away a little at that. actaully, i spend 1.5hrs in the morning going over languages. been doing some good composition work in greek and latin. i know i should be writing things freestyle, but the structure of composition textbooks gives me short manageable chunks that i can carve off and accomplish each day. gaelic is going forward, though not at a tremendous pace. perhaps i'm spending too much time trying to read background material. i've considered that, and my resolution is to start writing up background/introductory sections for the thesis commencing next week. this will get words on pages, plus help me understand my own ignorances and better address them. on the other hand, it's probably time i started working on some primary analysis. that's what fridays are for: sitting down with the texts and applying my criteria and writing up data. we'll see how that goes. 2 weeks into lecturing a 7 week course on church history. scope of the course? 2000 years of church history. i have to spend a good 4 hrs prepping for 2 hrs of lecture, which I suppose isn't too bad (except I don't get paid for prep hours). It just feels like a hard slog, trying to cover a vast amount of reading, process, synthesise, and then present in an engaging manner. also means i don't get home to 10pm or so of a wednesday night and i'm pretty tired. my other sideline project is translating some untranslated chrysostom for money. woohoo to money! it's not a long text, but it chews up a bit of time. as does getting distracted by reading on not-quite-topical areas (impassibility is the latest one). turned down the job i applied for. too early a start and too definite a finish made me realise that I need to focus on getting this masters done. not ideal though. also need to come up with a phd topic sometime. the gym has been good to me. some days a struggle to go - feel the pressure of time all of the time. but would be much worse off without good exercise. that's me
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we've been here over a week. a tenday in fact. maybe that should be hyphenated, ten-day.
english classes are going okay. one set of classes is easy (more advanced, and the curriculum is clearer), the other more challenging (less english on their side and i always seem to get through their material too quick). we've made a few forays out into the wider world. shopping for mittens for Rachel (semi-successful), a trip with friends to the outskirts of Ulaanbaatar to look at summer houses (lots of snow, very pretty), and the movies (Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief, childish but entertaining), had our camera stolen (sad, particularly for the photos we had on it).
i've tracked down 2 13th century latin accounts of travels from europe to Mongolia and back during the height of the Mongol Empire. Thinking of reading through one in the near future. that will be something different from the usual classics.
meat-eating is boring. and requires flossing more.
the snow is thawing. locals tell us it will be gone in a week. no guarantee that it will get much warmer though.
haven't done much study here. or any exercise. we do spend a lot of time inside and at home, but i haven't found any motivation or routine.
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daytime temperatures in the last few days range from -20 to today's high of -6. (All temps in this post are centigrade. Get with it USA)
You have to realise, that in Australia it just doesn't get that cold. I grew up on the coast, and it never hit zero in my childhood. It's only in the last few years, living in S-W Sydney, that I've experienced a few below zero evenings/mornings. So, coming to Mongolia is hard for Aussies, it's just a cold we've never known.
Anyway, we're coping. We put on all our layers and bundle ourselves up and trudge out into the snow. We've been here 5 days now, and are starting to get used to life here. We don't speak any Mongolian, which makes a few things tricky, but we're managing.
English classes begin in earnest tomorrow. Today was a warm-up for us, assisting another teacher.
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in 19 days. that is less than 3 weeks! i just realised.
tickets: booked visas: check
knowledge of mongolian? minimal. in fact, we know about 2 words, sufficient to say hello.
i have finally found, after some serious internet searching, some materials for learning mongolian. peace corps stuff, manuals and (thankfully) some audio. mongolian is, by all accounts, not the easiest language to learn (for a I-E speaker). It's a long way removed syntactically and phonetically from English. So, next two weeks will see some crash-course mongolian happening.
not sure whether i'm excited or what. i guess not really. i'm a bit blaise about everything in life though. i've taken "take it as it comes" to a whole new (pathological?) level. I am looking forward to it, but in a vague kind of way.
no news on the jobs front. we'll be in mongolia for a month, so it was kind of hard to keep looking while knowing i'd have to say, "btw, can't start until april!". so, have enrolled back into full-time in an effort to finish off my master's thesis. progress is slow but steady. i have a desk in this under-ventilated subterranean bunker, with 7 other post-graduates. it's kinda cool, but we'd all appreciate a little more from the administration. reading my way very slowly through chrysostom's homilies on John. the greek is getting marginally easier. i'm starting to get a feel for chrysostom's stylistic features, which is nice.
been going to the gym a lot. that is good.
now, if i could be a little more organised, a little more disciplined, and study a lot more, i'd be happy with each day's effort.
that's all the news with me. oh, and gaelic punk is sensational. bought an LP by oi polloi, all in gaelic; had to get a friend to digitise it for me. anyway, that brings my gaelic punk collection to about 20 tracks. all good!
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So the week down in Mollymook was what RPG-holidays always are: days spent lazing, watching cricket, and going to the beach, and evenings spent rolling the dice. we have been playing a WFRP game for some time, set in Kislev, and our week-long jaunt took us into the heart of the mountains, half-in-league with a dark elf sorcerer, to kill an evil Nurgle lord and his army. the climax was suitably climactic.
without a car we had to catch a bus back up, which was fine in the end. The next day I headed off for a camp, with 150 christian teens 16-18yo. It was a pretty fine 5 days too, with some early morning runs, many swims, and lots of bible talks and the like.
Monday onwards I interspersed this by driving across Sydney for a Gaelic course. It was meant to be 2 weeks, but the first week I was down the coast. So I picked it up halfway through. It was a follow on course from one I did a year or two ago. Anyway, it was at just the right level for where I'm at, and the teacher is quite a good one (not that there are (sadly) many Gaelic teachers around here). The week really helped solidify definite articles, genitive forms, and a whole bunch of verb stuff.
But with rail trackwork, the commute became a little massive. So, Mon/Tue I was going from camp to class to camp. Wed onwards it was 2+ hrs on the train each way.
Was groomsmen at a friend's wedding today. Good times. Everyone vaguely important had to be barefoot. A lot of fun for the day, but quite long and tiring.
That is all the news.
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we went on a holiday, to victoria: - melbourne has terrible street signage. - victoria is much smaller than new south wales. this is a bonus when driving. - the grampians and the great ocean road are plus-plus. - there is plenty of good vegetarian food to be eaten in melbourne. we also went to leeton in nsw, for earthminor's grandfather's funeral. then we came home. i'm still trying to find a job for next year. we put in some application papers to join a christian organisation and move to mongolia and work. so, plans there are moving forward.
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it's a warm spring saturday. the wife and I have been doing some of that spring cleaning bizzo, trying to clear out some of the junk accumulated over not so many years. pre-emptive to the divesting of materials that will need to take place before picking up our lives and transporting to mongolia.
thinking of getting into some swimming this summer. i need a bit more exercise in my life, and my joints do not appreciate too much running. i think my lungs would appreciate it too.
gaming-wise we have been playing much Warhammer Fantasy role-play. we are at that good point where our characters are starting to turn from hopeless hacks who fail at everything, to veterans who can handle some combat. i am playing a norscan berserker.
study progress is slow. trying to translate my way through Chrysostom's homilies on John, and just don't have a lot of time for it, and the going is hard. i've been going into college (a 2hr walk/train/walk expedition) once a week to just sit in the library and focus. newtown lunches are a bonus.
went down to canberra for a weekend a couple of weeks ago. was part of a weekend school for scottish gaelic. it was a good and productive time for me, not so much for the wife whose gaelic to that point was nil. anyway, picked up a few gaelic cds afterwards. julie fowlis is great.
work situation is up in the air. fairly pessimistic about having a job here next year, seems unlikely there will be enough funding. knocked back for another position, and have applied for a third, but haven't heard much back. there's a possibility this will bring forward our plans for mongolia, but we'll see.
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March 2012 |
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