1. aardvarchaeology
  2. On My Mind

On My Mind

By aardvarchaeology on April 23, 2013.

I've got a lot on my mind.

  • Bronze Age deposition book: visiting some sites on Friday, data collection almost done, have started doing stat analysis and writing interpretations, need to write gazetteer entries while I remember details of how I've managed to pinpoint find spots.
  • Also time to decide what my next project will be! I had hoped that a new place of employment would guide me in this decision. But no. Strategically, I should probably write something about the High Middle Ages or the Early Iron Age now to continue broadening my scope. Can't do Mesolithic, would have to learn to knap stone first.
  • Fornvännen: summer issue is with our graphic designer and I've begun copy editing the papers for the autumn issue. Looking forward to staff conference trip.
  • Teaching: end-of-course seminar on the Heritage Site Communication next week, need to book a time slot for a teleconferenced end-of-course seminar on the Tourist Site Production for May.
  • Västergötland barrow finds: will soon spend two months at 50% classifying and interpreting the finds from the first major Iron Age barrow excavated in that province for a long time. It's a rare treat when somebody asks you to do that one thing very few other people can!
  • Academic job search: I've got an interview on Monday but so has up to seven other people. Not sweating it though: funding deities have smiled upon me.
  • Family: very worried about ailing kid. Need to help mom put her boat into the sea now that the ice is gone. Looking forward to Lincon gaming convention with Junior.
  • Swedish Skeptics: looking forward to dropping some admin load on the Stockholm chapter once they get a board elected. I'm good with admin but I don't like it. Like me and small talk, actually.
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"Very worried about ailing kid. "

Darn. Hard to focus on anything else when a family member is sick. I followed my mom to a doctor today, fortunately her problem turned out to be something that could be solved with an adjustment of medicine dosage.

By Birger Johansson (not verified) on 23 Apr 2013 #permalink

Academic job search: I’ve got an interview on Monday but so has up to seven other people.

That sounds like a lot to me, but I'm in a field where short list candidates are typically brought in (by air, if needed) for in person interviews. Some other fields, particularly in humanities, do job interviews at their annual society meeting/convention, so all of the candidates are in one city anyway. Sweden is a smaller country than the US, so most candidates could probably do a day trip by car/bus/train (especially to a central location like Stockholm/Uppsala), but there are parts of the country (e.g., Kiruna) from which they'd have to be flown in.

So is this interview coincident with the annual meeting of the relevant learned society, or is it a campus visit?

By Eric Lund (not verified) on 24 Apr 2013 #permalink

It's a campus visit, but as you say it's a day trip for most applicants and some even live in that city to begin with. Also, rumour has it that at least two of the eight have gotten other jobs that they prefer and so may not show up at all.

" dropping some admin load"
Admin work = As soul-killing as your average Elder God.
"have started doing stat analysis"
Are there off-the-shelf stat programs available? During the Neolithic (aka my youth) those with the skills got to program pocket calculators for every task, and a decade earlier, slide rulers ruled supreme...

By Birger Johansson (not verified) on 25 Apr 2013 #permalink

In this case I mean studies of only two or three variables and I do them in Excel. I have done quite a lot of multivariate work as well though, using a cheap package called BASP, the Bonn Archaeological Statistics Package.

I might be slow, but grats on getting the order of posts fixed so numbers mean something :). And good luck with the interview, and gute besserung to your kid.