The plumber has been here working on our hot water for the past 7 hours.  No wonder it’s going to be super expensive.  I cannot emphasize the extent to which I look forward to a nice hot shower.  I’m wondering if I will feel start to feel better after getting cleaned up.  Sometimes being dirty AND sick makes you feel sicker than if you were just sick all by itself.

H has stayed home with me today while our plumbing is getting fixed.  He’s been GREAT….entertaining himself while I grade papers and enter grades.  He plays with his trains mostly, and talks to himself, constructing complicated dialogues and relationships between the various trains.

I have some of our clothes packed for our early Saturday morning departure to WV.  The rest of the laundry will have to wait until the plumber is gone.  I have 2 classes to teach tomorrow, one from 2:00-3:15 and another from 3:30-4:45, which is quite possibly the worst time slot for a class right before spring break. A lot of students have already told me that they won’t be coming and I’m sure many more simply won’t show.  I wonder how much effort I should put into tomorrow’s classes.  Maybe I’ll come with some sort of fun group-based game that the students can play…maybe I’ll break out my neuropsychological testing bag of tricks and simply have them screen each other for dementia.  That’s always fun.

Earlier this morning, I had the pleasure of seeing a former colleague.  She is a full clinical psychology professor at my former institution.  Last year, we worked briefly with each other on a translational research project, and she even let me test some of the kids at the local elementary school.  She has 2 elementary-aged kids herself, and she came over this morning to pass down her son’s old clothes, along with age-appropriate games, books, and puzzles.  We had a nice discussion, and she asked me how my current job was going.  I told her that I like it–I like my colleagues, I like (but don’t love) the teaching, but that I am really looking for something more quantitative (and research-based).  I told her that I’m leaving my current position at the end of the year, and I told her about my usability plans.  She then told me that she’s working on a very large grant (which if funded, wouldn’t be ready for another few years).  She asked if I’d like to have a role in the research.  I told her that I’m keeping all options open, and that I would certainly consider it.  Why close any doors?

As far as the usability stuff goes—I’m coming along.  I’ve started a usability blog.  I will share the link here once there’s more to see.  I plan to use it as a springboard for reflecting on things that I read in the field.  It’ll help me get up to speed on some of the issues, techniques, and theories within the field.  I’ve almost finished reading The Handbook of Usability Testing, which is a GREAT book.  The parts about research design and test moderation are familiar to me—the parts about recruiting participants are not.  So, I have a few things to learn in that arena.  I’m starting to get more of a sense of what my contributions could be, and what sorts of things I’d be capable of doing.  I’m learning where the holes in my knowledge are.  That’s pretty important I think—knowing what you don’t know.

OK, time to check on the progress of the plumber.  A hot shower is the perfect capstone experience to this sunny, 18 degree day.

We are only a few days away from our departure to sunny West Virginia for my spring break. Rob has never been to my parent’s house, and I haven’t been there for quite some time….over 2 years. In fact, this is what Holden looked like during my last visit to my parent’s house:

Yes, that is a 3-month old Holden, getting a bath in a utility sink.  So, a visit to see my parents is indeed overdue.  Speaking of utility sinks and bathing, we have been without hot water for nearly a week.  We haven’t had hot water in the bath tub for longer than that—close to a month at this point.  H has been bathed at the neighbors, at our friends, etc.  It’s a long story, but basically the plumbing/heating company we hired SUCKS, and this will be their 4th trip to our house.  A few thousand dollars later, and hopefully we will have hot water once again.  I can’t wait until Thursday—that’s hot water day for us!

On top of this hot water ordeal, H was sick with a sinus infection and I have been sick for the past week with something that feels uncomfortably similar to an ear infection.  My midterm grades are due in, and I have mounds of grading, advising, and lecture prep to wade through before the week is over.  Any one of these things would be OK on its own–annoying, but I could deal.  Cumulatively, however, they make me want to gouge my eyes out.

So yeah, I’m complaining again.  I want winter to be over, I want to feel the sun on my back, I want to be able to breathe through my nose, drive with my windows down, run around in my bare feet.  I want to garden with H, go to the pool, camp, and cook dinner on the grill.  I want to drink wine on the deck and slap at those blasted mosquitoes as they alight on my exposed skin.  I want to smell campfire on the air, sleep between sheets not made of flannel, watch our neighborhood turn to green.

Come on spring—I NEED you right now.

H talks and talks and talks to himself.  His self-chatter is a constant stream of:

“I’m going to the restaurant,” said James.

or

Look at my pistons go!

or

“I’m off to the destination,” said Thomas.

James and Thomas are, of course, trains from the famous Thomas The Tank Engine series that H has been obsessed with since he was about 20 months old.  H’s soliloquies sound like books—you can practically hear the quotation marks around each individual train’s speaking turn.

On this snowy February Sunday, we’ve been listening to a lot of H’s solo chatter.  Today was our catch-up day for all of the chores that get put off during the week, which means we don’t have a lot of down time to spend entertaining our little guy.  Luckily, he’s been in a good mood, and has been entertaining himself pretty well, telling stories about his trains and all of their exciting adventures (many of which involve going to restaurants to drink chocolate milk).

I spent 2 hours yesterday grading exams, and I have already spent at least 1.5-2 hours on class prep today, with a couple more hours ahead of me after H goes to bed.  Quitting this job is absolutely the best thing I could do for our family.  I will feel so much better once I have some more balance in my life, and the alleged “free” time I have on my weekend is not consumed with work that really should get done during the week.

Next weekend we’re going to Waterville Valley, New Hampshire, for our annual President’s Day family weekend getaway.  Holden will get to see his cousins and grandparents, and our good friends A & S will be joining the family for the first time.  It’s going to be FUN, and I plan on doing no work during the entire weekend (it helps that there’s no class on the following Monday!)

Let’s see—what else have we been up to?  Well, we had to purchase a roof rake for the first time ever.  Yes, a rake that pulls snow off your roof.  We have so much snow right now that folks are being warned about the risk of roof collapse.  At least 4 barns have collapsed in VT this winter (sadly, a couple of cows perished in one of these accidents).  Houses are at risk for this too, but the risk is not as bad.  We really do have quite a bit of snow:

There’s really nowhere else to put the snow at this point.  I think I shoveled 10 hours last week.  Really.  Rob also spent hours shoveling.  We took turns, so neither of us would get too terribly sore.

The good part about all this snow is that we’ve had really amazing sledding conditions.  H has finally gone down part of the mountain SOLO!  Here he is, capsizing a couple of times, but having great fun nonetheless:

H and I also are indulging in a fun yoga class that meets once each week on Saturdays. He really loves seeing the other kids. We’ll be taking the class through mid-March, and then before you know it, my job will be wrapped up, and it will be warm, and we’ll be able to walk to the park, have picnics, and plant our garden. Speaking of gardening, when I asked H the other day what he would want to plant in the garden he replied, “Carrots! It will make Buca very happy!” Buca is our 9-year old rabbit. So carrots we will plant.

I’m feeling pretty positive about my career change, although I haven’t had much time to devote to preparing for it. I’ve been in the process of printing off a couple of e-books on usability, plus finding out about professional organizations in the field. I now have a contact in the field (thank you, Deborah!), so that definitely helps me feel like I can navigate through everything without getting totally lost. I’m looking forward to having more time to really dig in.

Other than that…..house projects and more house projects. We’re replacing our windows in June. I found a local guy who will do it for a slightly more reasonable price than some of the larger companies. I’d rather have a local person getting the work, anyway. Our windows are single pane and (in H’s room, especially), the windows are covered with mold because they are leaking water. The windows are original to the house, so they really do need to be replaced. We’ve also been having issues with the hot water in the tub….as in, it’s not that hot. The problem has been progressing over the past couple of months, and now there is NO hot water in the tub. We’ve been bathing H at neighbor’s and friend’s houses. We had a plumber come out last week, and the problem is our boiler. I got the whole sales pitch about how we really need an efficient gas furnace, etc., but the $8300 price tag is too much to swallow the same year that we do the windows. So, I pressed the nice plumbing/heating guy further, until we finally settled on the option to repair the coil in our boiler. Hopefully that will happen soon, so that we can cease our tour of all of our friend’s bathtubs. I’ve also been trying to finish the neverending painting project. I started painting our living room and hallway in August, and I am *still* in the midst of that particular project. I do a little here and there, in between deadlines and grading frenzies. I’ll get it all done eventually, right?

Rob is currently reading to Holden about poop, and we are winding down for the night. I am tired, and I have to lay down with H to get him to go to sleep. This will make me sleepier. Then I will have to get up to work. I cannot wait until my job is over.

During this morning’s drive to “school”, while H. and I are having our usual light-hearted chat, I hear him chime in and say:

“I’m very important.”

Yes, bud. Yes you are.

Monday is my “13-hours-away-from-home” day.  I leave in the morning, see the chiropractor (have I mentioned how amazing he is at adjusting my sinuses?), arrive at work, attempt to do work, get interrupted 25 times, get stood up by a student and end up missing my only opportunity for lunch, teach from 5:30-8:15PM, come home, cuddle with H, veg.  The only advantage to my crazy Monday schedule is that Rob gets some special time with Holden where they bake chocolate chip cookies and watch Thomas the Train videos until I come home.  It’s very sweet, really.

I got too busy today and didn’t have a chance to tell my boss that I am withdrawing my application for the position.  I will do it tomorrow.  I don’t look forward to it, because she’ll be disappointed, and I don’t want to disappoint her.  I also don’t want her to think that I don’t appreciate the tremendous opportunity that it’s been.  But I also don’t think that satisfying other people’s wishes is the best reason for me to stay there.  Having an awesome boss and co-workers is fantastic, but it’s not everything.

I do have ideas about the next step.  It’s going to be a long, risky process, but if I can pull it off, I will be impressed.  I am going to start my own business. It’s such a weird thing to write, say, or think, because it seems so antithetical to my academic persona.  Based around my research and analytical skills, and what I know about cognition, I am going to start a business where I conduct research on usability—essentially, I will examine factors that allow for the most efficient design of web sites.  The most closely related field to this is human factors psychology, which has as its foundation, much of the same training that I already have.  The difference is some of the research techniques (eyetracking, surveys, etc.) are ones that I would have to acquire.  But having gone through 4 years of graduate school, 4 years of a postdoctoral fellowship, and teaching countless coursework that is all way outside of my area of expertise, I am convinced that this is just another thing I can teach myself.  I have no desire to go back to school, and I know that this is something I can do without further formal credentialing or licensure.  Right now I am reading everything I can about usability—what I am finding is that the holes in my knowledge are primarily in the areas of graphic design and programming for the web.  If I can get myself at least a rudimentary understanding of these areas, I can fill in the gaps by consulting with those around me who know better (ahem, Rob).  I have some leads on community-based organizations that provide mentoring and training for future business owners, and assist with all aspects of business planning.  It seems daunting to take an idea and essentially turn nothing into something….but because I’ve seen some people do it (and quite successfully), I feel more confident that I can do it too.

I am starting the research for this transition now, but it will be slow-going because my overwhelming academic job will get in the way.  Classes are done at the end of April, so I really don’t have that long to go, until I am free to be a researcher again.  The irony is that I never would have stumbled upon the idea to do this, if I hadn’t taught Cognitive Psychology.  Boy, teaching that class has given me a lot of ideas about how I can leave teaching:)

I will be a researcher, in Vermont, and I don’t care if anyone thinks this is a fucking crazy idea.  It *is* a fucking crazy idea.  And I am doing it anyway.