The merde hits the fan overseas

Meh, nothing very special went on today in my personal sphere, but shit certainly hit the fan in US news. Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy and Merill Lynch was bought out by Bank of America both of which sent the stock markets into a free dive. Also Monday morning (although released during the weekend), the New York Times released a scathing investigative piece on Sarah Palin’s practices as mayor of Wasillia, AK, and governor of Alaska.

Otherwise, on the dissertation front, I finally got some newfound momentum on my proposal revisions. Every time I opened the version of my proposal that I had defended to start making revisions, I would hit the major revisions I had to make to the opening portions of the document, tweak one or two sentences half-heartedly, and give up. Today, instead, I opened a new “To Do” document and just scanned the proposal and created an itemized list of everything I needed to change: turn this paragraph into one sentence, re-word this phrase, add some references here.

To begin with, just skimming through the whole document like this helped me get a better idea of what I was going to change in the first (and more complicated) sections. But more importantly, this allowed me to see all of the changes that I needed to make on one page and break them down into manageable chunks. The plan for tomorrow is to start with some of the easier and smaller tasks. Yay! Productivity.