Summer Hobbying

As fun as this summer was, there was also a frustrating side to it. Jobs fell through, which left me lots of time to work on my dissertation, and then my dissertation was frustratingly slow in getting started (not for lack of effort on my part). It was nice to have a lot of free time, but sometimes I just didn't know what to do with myself, and every time I hit a wall with my dissertation (about every other day) I just felt like an unproductive member of society.

My solution was to try to find ways to fill up my time. Usefully. I have had slow summers before, and they have resulted in such pastimes as learning the Cyrillic alphabet and basic Russian, riding my bike, swimming laps, watching classic movies, and writing poetry. This summer, I became crafty. Just a little. I picked up crochet hooks for the first time in years and am well on my way to completing a winter scarf. I used a free booklet on paint effects from Home Depot to paint a shelf for my room using leftover wall paint and a whisk broom. And I sewed couch pillows with my little sister to replace the ratty ones that Ashley instructed me to throw away after she moved out. I don't really consider myself a crafty person, but I've got it in me. Not cutesy-crafty, but crafty.

I also had lots of time to read this summer, and I loved that. But now that I'm back from vacation and the school year is approaching and my dissertation is finally moving forward, my life has suddenly become kind of...busy. This is a strange feeling. A good kind of strange. But at the moment it is also leaving my scarf half-finished and my pillows with an open seam and my to-read shelf overflowing and my DVR filling up and my movie queue from the Ann Arbor library untouched. That's okay. Doing any of these things is sometimes more fun when it's a treat and not the norm. But I'll still miss doing them as frequently as I've been able.

In the meantime, I managed to finish two book reviews of the books I did finish before my summer ended. So there are two new (very different) reviews on my book blog: Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier, and the Mistborn trilogy by Brandon Sanderson. And then tomorrow I will attend a faculty meeting and work on my syllabus and transcribe audio files and email my contacts and work at the temple, and maybe on my lunch break I'll take a breather and just read for fun.