Ploofle

Training of trainers and orientation days are finished, and I’m back in the capital for the first full weekend “off” I’ve had here. Course, I’m working on other things – friends of mongolia newsletter, thesis, IT stuff, banana bread? – but at least it’s a change. It’s pretty quiet here due to world cup, but the most important development is that there is a korea-based donut chain with a branch in Mongolia. I haven’t been there yet, but it’s a major goal for next weekend.

The other thing is that there’s a place that makes pho here – Kenny Rogers Roasters(? which is similar-ish to Boston Market). It’s not tooo bad, but could be improved.

Randomly, the other person in the coffeeshop here is a lama who I assume is Tibetan as I can’t understand what he’s saying on skype. He also produced from somewhere in his robes an iPad and a 13″ macbook.

In other other news, no one has called me since I got here – I know I’m hard to  get to, but huh.

Tags: mongolia, work

aaaah work aah. Today’s the first day off in a bit and I’m working on other work. Baah.

On the other hand, walking around checking housing for the trainees was fun – and made me miss my host family. The training site soum we were at was so peaceful and the drive there was beautiful. Sigh.

Today is Children’s Day here, which means way too much sugar, theater shows, movies, parents spending time with their kids, and in all likelihood tantrums.

The trash trucks still sound like ice cream trucks.

Tags: mongolia, work

Long radio silence, but since our last episode:

• Trip to Thailand – note that spiders = personal kryptonite and people are very very nice

• Work in Khovd – some cool stuff working with adolescents – want to keep on doing this kind of work later, as they all are on break in a week and thus work will disappear
• Close of service conference, BoarBQ, TOT, virtual moving to UB – seems to be happening too fast – as I was told really today I’m moving most-ish to UB except for like a week in July.  Otherwise exciting – there will be an Iron Chef at COS conference, and BoarBQ just sounds fun…
• Thesis – whimper ugh
• Lust – I have an unaccountable desire for a nerd merit badge laptop sash.

More eventually, but for now I should pack, as I fly out Friday til end of June and it discombobulates me greatly.

Also my official COS date is 21 August, which means I in theory leave Mongolia that day.  For those with large quantities of appendages, count up the days or something

Rarrrgh!

Tags: mongolia, stress

In case you may be interested in this, it’s sort of a mess as I feel like I read a good line of research/methods, dash off in that direction, just to find a then-better line of research methods, running at a slightly divergent angle from the current point. Looking over my shoulder at the original idea, I feel orthogonal. Blame the word on all the article-reading.

At first I was highlighting then copying relevant passages into a word document, but it rapidly became hard to organize and find cites. So now I’ve stepped back and am utilizing the note feature of Zotero with tagging. Now I can do full-text searches on notes and pdfs, or browse by thematic tags for different things, like “mongolia analogous” or “organizational culture”.

The only problem is that this is a multi-step, tedious process – I read the PDF, highlight relevant bits, go back, copy and paste the relevant bits into a text editor, run a regex pattern I set up to remove extra hard returns and hyphenation due to papers’ two-column justified layouts, copy to individual notes, then tag. Being a tad perfectionist, I guess – or just liking to gratuitously use regular expressions. It sure would be nice if I could directly edit those PDFs with Zotero and grab notes automatically, leaving only tagging to do by hand.

I suspect it wouldn’t be so bad if I didn’t know all the tools and regex bits, but it’s definitely helping out. I think I’m going to do this for scholarly stuff I’m reading in general as it’s a super useful writing aid. At least Zotero grabs the citation information first off (for most items) so I don’t have to do that, and its citation plugin for Openoffice means I don’t really have to pause mid-thought to write out all those little references.

Still, my current count for papers read and annotated in this manner is…63. And I have about 15 new things I found today to read. Ugh. I assume at some point I can stop reading and finally settle into doing.

If this is dissertation practice, I can’t imagine ever being up for it.

Tags: mongolia, regex wallowing, thesis, zotero

Happy festivities to all and welcome to the year of my return!!!! bwahahahaha

With that, there are various (additional) random photos in my picasa thingy that illustrate the deep emotions and incredible personal expansion I’ve been having over the, oh, past two weeks.  These events include cooking, standing on a frozen lake on and off for about 6 hours, and small children.  It’ll change your life too!

I did win half of my snow sumo matches on the lake, though.  And I didn’t completely freeze my hands and feet.

One of my sitemates did have a firework explode in her hand, but only bruised herself.  Yay poor-quality fireworks! Boo inability to read the chinese instructions!

New year’s day cooking extravaganza included, among other things, baklava, horse meat fajitas, pineapple-upside-down cake, pancakes, kahlua (making, not really drinking), and the final day of corning beef.  Subsequent days were of eating glorious, glorious corned beef hash and some semi-ghetto reubens.

The new year’s old man (similar in appearance to Santa Claus if he were a Mongolian man wearing a cotton beard and blue tinsel-edged robe-deel) terrified a few of my coworkers children and handed out candy, then took off his beard, which helped matters.  Around New Year’s in three days I ate cake approximately 5 times and drank champagne or harder stuff perhaps 4 times.  I still have some cake in my fridge I need to throw out.  Oh, and loads of candy from the Governor and the Health Department.  Pleasant.

Internal apartment temperature is approximately 47F in the mornings, which is unacceptable.  Unfortunately, out of my four electrical plugs, only one will not trip/smoke/melt with a heater plugged into it and it’s the one that I use for cooking.  So I am often faced with the choice of heating up to a more tolerable 52F (tolerable in that I can type without my hands being stiff and I’m wearing two shirts and pairs of pants and my deel and sometimes a hat) or having a fridge.  Fridge tends to lose.  Perhaps I overexaggerate, though.  Well, actually, I’m not, but it sounds worse than it is, really. Though I wish I could heat up the room I sleep in rather than the kitchen, but once I’m in bed it’s not bad.

We’re in the coldest part of the winter, so my personal goal is to just get through January and it’ll be ok.  My choice of waiting until March to vacation is seeming increasingly silly…

Thesis notes are finally sorted and categorized, so I hope to push out a general proposal/overview tomorrow.  By god, I will.  Ugh.  Otherwise things are calm outside of watering office plants and various lurking work tasks.  I’ve noticed when I have something big, like this thesis thing, hanging over my head I suddenly come up with all sorts of other more interesting projects and thoughts.  I suppose I should write them down for later, but typically I’d do them.  But I’m trying to not procrastinate any further, so I just ignore them and hope they’ll go away.

My officemates have discovered YouTube, and it has destroyed any semblance of me having an internet connection at work.  Perhaps I will sneakily go onto the computer, edit the hosts file, and make it redirect to localhost…hmm…

Tags: cold, food, mongolia, stupid internet