Snip-snip

4 hours writing, 1.5 hours researching, 0.5 hours emailing/administrivia

This week's blog monitor is Jay Seawright, in the suburbs of Chicago. Jay teaches quantitative methods and comparative political behavior courses at Northwestern University. Meanwhile, he continually reminisces about the good old days when he and I were trapped, with a select few others, in a room for six or more hours in a row trying to make a survey project work. Welcome, Jay!

Well, after taking another look at my draft of the LASA paper on the police, I realized it needed a lot more work than I had anticipated. So I took out the pruning shears and went to work on that. At the end of the day, I can see the overall shape of the topiary animal (to extend the metaphor), but I can't tell yet the exact species. Tomorrow.

I'm a little ambivalent about the value of this particular exercise, namely, taking significant parts of two chapters, adding in smaller pieces from a couple of others, and turning the whole thing into a self-contained paper. I guess it's helpful to see how it all fits together at this point, but I can't help but feel like it's lateral motion. Having said that, I'm looking forward to getting feedback, and that'll definitely be useful.

Cathy and I celebrated our seventh anniversary yesterday. Hooray! We rented a car and drove up into the Hudson Valley. We visited a couple of the historic estates, Boscobel and the Vanderbilt Mansion, and went to the Dia: Beacon museum, where there's a really cool set of Sol LeWitt pieces. I never appreciated his stuff before, but this was whimsical, charming, and lovely. For dinner, we ate at Blue Hill at Stone Barns, a temple of the eat-local movement. Since the restaurant is on a high-end farm, they literally grow most of if not all their own food. Now, I'm generally a fan of this trend, but the customs in the temple can be a little rococo: I had tea - excuse me, a tisane - with dessert, and the server literally clipped leaves off a plant before steeping them in the water. Uh, OK. It tasted like tea. Having said that, the rest of the meal was fabulous, and I think I have a new favorite cocktail: the Wild Ramp Martini, which instead of using a cocktail onion, uses a pickled ramp, which is a springtime form of green onion that's very trendy. It was delicious, like a dirty martini but without the brackish tang of olive water, much more subtle and in tune with the botanicals in the gin. Worth a trip to Tarrytown! That's next to Sleepy Hollow, and Cathy was convinced on the extremely foggy drive back last night that the Headless Horseman was coming for us around the bend. I may have hit the gas pedal just a little harder....