Settling down to producing a good proof

One of the oddities of this summer is that sometimes to mark the end of a day I am having a gin and tonic. Now do not get me wrong, the surprise is not me having a long slow slightly alcoholic drink in summer; it is that it is a gin and tonic. My usual preference is for Whisky and Ginger, but this year that feels just too strong a flavour set, so a Gin and Tonic it is.  Tonight's is to mark the fact that I have finished the last part of my second draft. I have gone back through my conclusion and sent off a second draft to my supervisor. I am pretty sure that this version is fine. The changes were actually quite small just really connecting my conclusion back to the literature I have used in the introduction. I considered for a while putting in something by my suggested examiner but decided that that is probably better off in the relevant chapter.

So this evening I have spent time checking what pieces I had in proof read form. This is not simple as some chapters have been several times in different forms to my proof readers. Indeed at least one chapter got pulled out of second draft and restructured pretty late on. I had to email my proof readers to see if they had done a couple of chapters that I could not find. However next week I start the process of proof reading and compiling the whole document! I will start with the one chapter that still needs a small amount of structural editing. I wrote stuff that needed to go into it in my initial conclusion instead of what needed to be in the conclusion.

Family wise, we are hoping Dad will come out of hospital on Monday or Tuesday. If that is the case my sister is still talking of bringing the kids over on Tuesday for the annual swim and Chinese. Then deal with anything that needs dealing with in the evening. I think I will also go over on Thursday, fetch anything needed from my parents house and then go and see them. So there is plenty to keep me out of trouble.

Apart from that this week I have to pull together all the bits and pieces dealing with that and hopefully next weekend I can get through that and maybe start on the next one as well. 

Now to put the whole thing together

Train coming into University Station

This was a strange supervision in someways. Not least because this month I was half expecting with the struggle that was going on over previous weeks for my thesis to be delayed again. I really had only had the last weekend as solid writing and though I had played with the introduction in the first few weeks and I had done some reading while sitting my Mum. (For those that do not know there is more info in my previous blog post). So I did not feel as if I had got time to work on it. Indeed unlike last month when I spent a couple of partial weekends not drafting my conclusion, I sat down yesterday with the idea that I had to get something down and ended up with a half way decent draft. It needs some more connecting with the literature which will connect it back to the introduction and the rest of the thesis.

That means several things. Firstly I need to put in my notice to submit in the next few days giving my submission date as 31st October. Secondly I have to pull the full thesis together, go through doing all the proof reading, minor editing and creating the bibliography, page numbering, add the appendices etc. It has to be with my supervisor by 16th September. Finally one more supervision in October to have a full review of the thesis. In other words if life does not bowl me another curved ball everything is in order for submitting in the middle of the autumn much to my surprise.

However I am fighting a battle with University of Birmingham administration to get registered for next year. You would think that Universities would be eager to take money and get students enrolled but at present they will not even investigate why I can not enrol. This means that come September they start hassling me to do things when it is them who have been the delay.

Not to have a proper grump, the rennovations at Birmingham New Street are a total pain at present. To get home I had to:

1. Come up from platform 8
2. Go through two ticket barriers to get to WH Smith
3. Go to where the lift to platform 12 was only to find it out of order
4. Walk back through both ticket barriers
5. Go back down to platform 12 and take the steps down

On the way down I saw a disabled person on crutches struggling to get up to street level. To put it mildly I was not impressed.

Anyway despite the ridiculous amount of hassle this month it looks as if everything is still on line for an October submission.

Family Emergence slows progress

Last weekend I was really looking forward to this weekend and at last a chance to sit down and work solidly on my thesis. That hope lasted until Tuesday and on the evening I got a phone call from my sister to say Dad had collapse while out with friends and she was at my parents' home waiting for a taxi to bring my Mum home. It was agreed she would look after Mum who has dementia that night and I would take over the next day. Whereas I am single and therefore with compassionate leave from work, my sister has a two children and a husband working both for a church and as the book keeper for her husband who is self employed.

So for the last five days my role has been a main carer for my mother. This is not made any easier by the fact that Dad is in hospital 43 miles away, and though Google says it is 48 mins I would say it is more than an hour when dealing with the real traffic. Given that my sister travels for half an hour before starting that journey and on the route calculator from my home to the hospital is the furthest of the three this is not easy. There is also a limit to the amount of compassionate leave I can take.

Unfortunately my father has unrealistic expectations of what I can do. He seems to think I can work, do my thesis and look after Mum 24/7 and also get mum to see him every day. If I  walked out mum would immediately be put in a home with no choice indeed her doctor is not really happy with me doing this as interim. My sister on the other hand has been a brick.

I have done some reading and even a bit of writing but it is hard to do much concentrated as I am working into the times when Mum does not need my immediate attention. So progress has slowed right down although I am aware that the reading will mean that I better versed that I would have been in British Congregational studies. However even that is not getting much attention. Oh the photo was taken at Dunahm Massey today when I took Mum out to take her mind off things. Unfortunately travel is a very good way of allowing her to forget. Actually it does the worse thing it can for Mum's memory which is ask her to sit quiet for a while.  Train travel at least allows her to interact with me or whoever is travelling with her. If she is active or interacting it seems to keep her memory working.

Actually if you had asked before this who would do the organising and who the hands on care for my Mum I would have guessed that it would be better the other way around but actually Mum seems to be calmer with me and my sister is a whizz at dealing with people in authority and finding out what we need to know such as exactly which ward in which hospital Dad is in.

Sabbactical

This plant is growing at the top of a wall not too far away from here. The wall is about five feet tall! I am not sure where it is getting its nourishment from but it is there. Writing my thesis was beginning to feel like this plant. This blog has been more scanty of recent week. One reason for this is actually I have not been making the progress as I was before. There was very good reason for this, I was not getting the time.

Now I have cut back drastically on a lot of things in life in order to make time for thesis. I have not been going out to events, I have not seen my parents for months and I have not planned a holiday. It simply was not enough.

There are three big commitments in my life at present and in order of priority for attention these are thesis, work and church. I should explain I work 80% in a job that could easily be 100% and if I am ill the work still needs doing and the only one who can do that work is me. When I started my PhD the job actually did fit into four days a week, however two to three years ago that changed. I am working flat out and not keeping all the balls in the air. On Monday I have to go into work and explain why I have taken a nine month break from a project. Simply no time gov honest!

So with thesis not going as quickly as I liked and work being demanding, I found that the expectation that I would be getting more and more involved in church a difficult situation to negotiate. It would work like this, something quite small would be asked of me but then as I explored the ramifications the job would get bigger and bigger. Some of this was deliberate hiding of implications, some of this was my personality. If I am involved in doing something I like to see it done well. Actually it felt to me at times as if people were either plotting to find ways to get me more involved or were using me as a default person to ask to do things.

With my job I edit my thesis at weekends, I find that I can read during the week but I do not have the concentration to do editing. Editing is not easy and involves holding lots of strands together and not dropping any. If you think writing a PhD is just writing three masters thesis then you have got the wrong end of the stick. Not only do you have the practical work of three theses, you also have to integrate them together and find something new to say that runs through all three.

I suspect there is actually no shortage of new ideas in my thesis but it has felt at times as if I was trying to corral at least semi-wild horses. The result is that at this stage of my thesis I need coherent times. I can not just switch onto thesis for a hour or two in an evening and do worthwhile work. If I attend worship on a Sunday that really means sitting down at around 4pm to my thesis if at all, days like today when I was table elder take me longer to settle after church. Basically a day lost and when I have only 2.5 days anyway a day is heck of a lot to loose and to loose that regularly (one for five out of the last six is adding up and the sixth was taken with work). If you wonder why 2.5 then half a day goes with shopping and doing household chores.

Basically I got to the point where the time I had for my thesis was not allowing me to make progress.  Something had to give and the only thing that I could give that would allow the time was church. I was clearly not managing me involvement with church in a way that would enable me to finish my thesis. Seeming as the trying to keep a low level involvement going failed. I could not keep the commitment level low enough. The only other option is to opt out completely. There were people who helped me manage my commitment well, there were people who did not. Some of my keeping going so long was the loyalty to the people who were good at not pushing boundaries.

This was actually decided almost two weeks ago, but there was a communion service and only two active elders available for it, apart from me. To do communion in the style my congregation likes we need eight. Therefore dropping out at short notice seemed unfair especially as I was Table Elder 1. If you want that So I have basically just had communion to do. Today was communion and now I should not be back at church until after my thesis has been submitted, so in November.

That said I have been working on it. The big problem is that to write the introduction I am having to trace books and many are not available directly from Amazon, nor would they be in the University Library as they are far too specialist for that. So it would either be inter-library loans or me purchasing them from other dealers. That means I am writing in the expectation of having to include other work. This is tricky. So for the moment I am going to concentrate on writing a conclusion instead and hope that I can write it pretty quickly.

Hopefully next weekend I will get the 2.5 days and be able to make some good progress.

Slowly getting my focus back

This will be short but I have spent most of the weekend sorting out what needed to be done next and beginning to do it. I had been slowly loosing the focus over the weeks before as other demands encroached on my time. I am not clear next, this week has an elders and there is a communion next Sunday.

I have also been very tired this weekend, more than I have been recently. This may be good news as I had not been sleeping too well for the last couple of weeks due to the stress I felt under. This may mean that I have started to sense an easing in it. However I need more time on my thesis and I am finding it hard to find it. Every one is very ready for me to take time in theory but in practice the reality is different. I can take study days at work but I have to be able to complete my work and there is no let up in that.

So this weekend I was basically getting my head around the edits that needed doing to my introduction. They are interesting, not on the whole huge things but quite often requiring some reading and thinking about. I must admit I cut out one comment as it was just not worth the effort I would need to do to justify it. I thought when I put it in that it was accepted knowledge. After all most congregations I have ever been in a lot of the lay leadership has been in their sixties and seventies. It is a rare congregation where it is spread more widely although thinking on it Christ Church Parrswood did have quite a few who were younger though church secretary was Bernard and he was in his sixties. The church treasurer was two people in my time, one in his eighties  and one in his forties. I also know I am not alone in this knowledge, Rev Mike Jackson of Park URC Reading also commented on it when I was there. However there is no literature out there that says this is the case.

Anyway I have got the introduction to the introduction written, in the end I took the very straight forward approach of telling my examiners what this thesis was about. I have also done quite a bit on the vision process. Some tidying of the last section. So this week I really need to read enough of a couple more Congregational Studies books to make a complete literature review. I am trying to trace any thesis (masters or doctoral) that has been done within British Reformed or Non-Conformist Churches that is a study of congregation(s) and uses ethnographic method. So far I have found a geographer at Edinburgh University who has done some research on Free Church of Scotland that is Ethnographic (actually I may need to reference that work in a later chapter as well). I also have found a Presbyterian Lecturer in New Zealand who puts his interest as Congregational Studies and knows enough as to list the URC. The major problem is finding a forgotten thesis.

All but the abstract drafted but little actual progress

Alien from post it notes in window
of Computer Science at Birmingham

A bit later than usual, a mix of catching the earlier train home because I am not quite sure where to find a place to write with the building work at New Street and needing to do something when I go in.

The last two weeks on my blog I have failed to write up about thesis work. That was not because I was not doing some, when I got the chance I did. It was that rather the work has been unfocused and I know when I am unfocused that I am usually not producing what I need to produce. Now do not get me wrong, my supervisor actually felt what I wrote was not bad, it just was not what I should have been writing. Indeed he felt that I probably should include the central bit of my draft conclusion in another chapter. It just was not conclusion. He has now told me what to put in a conclusion, not what are my findings but what are the tasks I need to do.

At May’s supervision my challenge for the month was to get the methodology into shape and to get to second draft the introduction and conclusion. I think I did the methodology but the introduction and conclusion were still only in first draft. This has added a month onto my time it will take to finish my thesis.

However there was good reason why I was unfocused, and that was that I was distracted. In April I was so absorbed in my thesis I felt as if I was never without working on it in the back of my brain, May I got by because there were plenty of bank holidays and those allowed me to spend enough time on my thesis for it to absorb me. However June has been a lesson in being over committed. What really happened if I am honest is I did not let go of my last chapter and work out what I had to write for the conclusion.  Therefore because I was not focused on what I needed to write for my conclusion I just continued to writing the last chapter.

I find that I can not just sit down and start writing, I need to spend a while mulling the ideas around, and generally not producing very much. After a while I seem to enter into the writing and then I find that I can actually produce good work pretty quickly. I need to think through what I am writing and if I do not then I do not produce what is required. This last month I tried to do without that time and I FAILED to produce so basically I am back where I was at the start of June with what I need to do.

The good news is that we worked out a submission date for my thesis. I can therefore start to make plans around how things fit together. I may even book holiday for while it is being read by my examiners. Also my supervisor does not expect substantive revisions of my thesis. It really is about getting thing sorted. The one thing that must not be allowed to happen is for me to enter a state where I am endlessly writing up. That will not do me or anyone else any good.

So despite Birmingham being dry and even having time to sit in the sun, it was my toughest supervision to date.

Methodology Finally Redrafted Despite a Wedding

The last glass of champagne at 

the wedding

The last champaign glass left on the table once all the other stuff had been cleared from the after wedding celebration. No it was not mine. It was a church member's daughter. I was not even going to go until a week ago, then I realised that for the sound desk to play background music I probably needed to be there. I then discovered they were bringing a CD.This is problematic, despite the fact my church is old fashioned, we can really only play sound from things with a head phone socket! CDs do not have head phone sockets. We are not too fussed on the sort of socket although it is set for 3.5mm. It also came apparent to me that the church crew were chronically understaffed: one able bodied, one over eighty who is slowing down and another with only one leg. For evacuation in cases of fire you need three door stewards! Actually I cared about the person getting married and the crew to know that I should do something about it. The only problem was that I was supposed to be writing thesis. Indeed I was drawn in four directions as there an Anti-Facist demonstration and also a church plant sale. However those were not serious contenders with thesis. I know where at present my priorities lie but the wedding....

Anyway I did both the rehearsal on Friday evening and the Wedding yesterday which included clearing up afterwards I actually had about four hours in total for study over Friday and Saturday. There was no point in me trying to work immediately on coming in from wedding as I was just overloaded and tired. Even after a couple of hours in bed and some proper food I was still decidedly distracted indeed I felt pretty migrainy. So I decided that I had to say I was not making publicity meeting at church today. Sent the email, only to find it was cancelled. Nice of people to tell me.

So that meant that I would have the full day working on thesis and what was even better my brain was clearing and I was at last able to make some sort of sense of the section on writing as analysis. Having got that sorted, I was able to quite quickly deal with ethics, reflexivity and review. The result is the Methodology at just over 10K words (a drop from 19K) has gone off to my supervisor.