Over the summer period, I helped develop a one-day course for teaching people WordPress. Today I ran the first course I’ve done by myself (having had far superior teachers to hide behind in my previous sessions).
They’ve all been graciously hosted by Newcastle’s Polytechnic, and I’ll be posting up links to their excellent websites as soon as possible… or they could leave them in the comments! Hint hint!
So; remember this?
Turns out I almost broke my knee over the summer. I was a few degrees off snapping the bone, but I managed to bounce at the right point and ended up with a very long recuperation period. I’ve got a bunch of physio exercises that I need to do every day, which take somewhere around an hour.
The unexpected part of it – for me – was that I kept thinking I was going to be completely recovered the next day/week/month, and it’s only been recently that I’ve had to accept that I’m going to be having a weird-feeling knee for the conceivable future. And what’s brought that on is the cold season, because it turns out my recuperated knee is a ‘weathervane’ (as one of my friends put it) in that it reacts pretty dang well to a change in the temperature.
So; remember this?
At this point (five days in?), some strange radiating hatred for the written word fills my body and I no longer wish to type, or be part of civilisation. Let’s descend into stygian depths and hit things with bone cudgels made from the thighs of our ancestors rather than pretend that todays academia is based on a modern-day version of Confuscian ideals.
Well, I got my funding from the AHRC and that meant that I could go back to university. I’m studying the Digital Media Mres at Newcastle Universities Culture Lab. This is a huge change for me, and it means I’ve got a really burstingly busy year.
So far, my own assesment of my integration with academia would be ‘not great’. Having been as self-reliant as possible for the past few years, the fact that there is now a big organisation in town I can tap for help is something I have yet to adjust to. Moreover, as my first deadline looms, I’ve yet to adjust to the idea of no longer being a free agent and actually having to, y’know, do stuff.
(Some of this attitude I blame on my previous alma mater, which was not very testing in an academic sense, but it’s also got to be said that this is the first course where I don’t just grok the material straight off. Which is interesting, but actually having to do work is something I’m not accustomed to.)
And so, between the studying and the exercising, I find myself slowly becoming a busy person, where parts of my day are filled up. I can no longer sit and ponder the day away as I used to, but instead I have to plug away at projects which require a static, final end product, and I’m adjusting. Slowly.
Next time I get the chance to write an entry, I’ll tell you how those adjustments are working out in a practical sense. Or, if you are interested, you can jump over to my new, professional, website, at http://unnamedlaboratory.org/
