Thar she blows

Yeah, I'm a blog slacker. Sorry! Things have been so busy. I finished all of my dissertation data collection and now my research assistants are finishing entering children's responses and I am scoring & analyzing. I am well on track to finishing this semester, and I am so excited to get this puppy done and get outta here. I had already orientation at my new job that starts in the spring semester, and the students sound great, it seems like a supportive place, and I am excited to start there in January.

The other good news of the summer was that I now have my first major paper accepted to a big developmental journal. Wa hoo! Study 1 is my masters study, and Study 2 is one I did over fall 2005-fall 2006 to make it a stronger paper. We have been working on various incarnations of this paper since May 2005 and it is FINALLY accepted! I have a chapter in an edited book published with my advisor, but first-authored papers in good scientific journals are really most important for one's career, so this is a good start. It is crazy though - the publication lag is almost a year between acceptance and out in print. But, I can list it as "in press" on my vita, which is all that matters anyway. :-)

Also, Steve & I moved! Not far - just across the hall diagonally in the same apartment building. :-) It is a 2-bedroom apartment, so we now have an office, and no longer have our desks in the living room. We also have my old double bed in the office, and though it is propped up against the wall most of the time to save space, we can put it down and turn the room into a guest room any time. If any friends reading this want to visit Philadelphia - we now have an official place for you!! :-) Also, with the desks moved out of the living room, we had space to move over the dining table into a corner of the very large living room, and made what should be the dining space into an extended kitchen. We have extra counter space (a table, also the top of our chest freezer) and extra storage, and a hanging pot rack. The actual kitchen is small, so we loooove the extended kitchen. And finally, our bedroom is huge. The long wall is 19 feet!!! We have room for 2 beds if we wanted them. I will post pictures soon!

The title of this post comes from the PAINT COLOR we used to paint our living room before we moved our stuff over. It is a light blue, like a sky blue. Steve & I both picked it out as one of our favorites, and the final thing that won me over was the name. It is hilarious!!! "Thar she blows." I particularly love the use of "thar" instead of "there." I feel like putting on an eye patch and speaking like a pirate when I say it! (I think this might even be better than the "doe skin" color that Nicole & Katherine & I painted my parents' living room years ago.)