So time for me to catch my breath!
It has been a busy term and to be honest I feel exhausted and really do need to sleep for the next couple of weeks. The PhD being the constant mistress that it is, it is quite hard to say I’m taking a break from it until the New Year. So it’s nice to have that decreed by my supervisors. I definitely feel that a chance to recharge my batteries will get me back to the kind of motivation levels and productivity I need as I have only a few months until the summer when I want to submit the thesis. With rest now I should be well placed to put this thesis to bed in 2012, which is what I really want.
Everybody as a moment at least once during their PhD where they feel despondent and feel like you will never ever finish writing it and if you do it will just sit in the library and no-one will ever read it or care. I had that a couple of weeks ago, I am not ashamed to admit. But, in the past few weeks and months I have taken encouragement from my achievements. That I have been able to present my work to an interested audience in Lisbon and that there are people out there reading my blog and watching my progress through these pages. Of course, the odd conference paper gets rejected and you see another year of students enjoying their graduation day around campus, along the way, but I should be proud of what I have accomplished this term – not least the amount of teaching and the responsibilities of module leading I have undertaken.
So, despite the occasional moments where I feel I haven’t achieved anything because of the PhD ‘Albatross’, I definitely think that I have earned my Christmas break. It won’t be all relaxing as I have marking to do but it should be a nice Christmas break. I left Newcastle last Friday to come home and spend some time at home and see my parents and my friends. I won’t be spending Christmas Day itself at home, so we had our Christmas Day a week early with presents, beer and turkey and all the trimmings.
The reason I won’t be spending Christmas at home is because I am flying to Canada for Christmas and New Year with my girlfriend. It will be nice for us to spend our first Christmas together in her homeland and to meet her family. It will be my first trip across the Atlantic and am very excited by the prospect of seeing, smelling and tasting Canada at Christmas time. Finally, could it be after all these years, a proper snowy Christmas this year?!?! I shall let you know…