Oops! (postdated)

I finally reached my “winter break” goal for my current qualitative analysis project... at 3 a.m. Then I went to bed without making an LJ post, hence the “oops.”

It’s interesting stuff, though – my RA interviewed a bunch of women whose husbands had quit smokeless tobacco, and now we’re organizing the transcription according to common themes within basic principles of social support. Want to help someone change their behavior? We’re learning all about it.

Mentorship interview #2

At practically the last minute, we found out that D. would get to interview Tom Evans this week after all. We rushed over there and were welcomed in for a very interesting conversation. Tom had been an archaeologist at Oxford for 25 years, the head of the geomantics program, but when his wife finished her doctorate in a much better paying field, he decided to explore his “path not taken” and become a novelist. He’s published one novel under his own name (Strings on a Shadow Puppet) and is also doing a lot of well-paid ghost writing. His own novel doesn’t fit exactly within the “military science fiction” genre where people want to place it; rather, it’s about espionage and human relationships, and rather than good vs. evil he said that his characters are all good in their own ways and sometimes all disastrously wrong. I’m looking forward to reading it; we suspect it’s too dark for D. yet, though.

Also, I got to talk archaeology with him. He got to discover and excavate an Iron Age chariot burial (the British equivalent of discovering the burial site of a new pharaoh)! And I had never thought about the social implications during the Bronze Age of having bronze’s two constituents, tin and copper, being mined so far apart (like, copper is found in Cyprus and tin in Cornwall, to give two prominent examples). Very cool!