Monday, August 27, 2007

The kid is back

2 hours writing, 2 hours reading/researching, 1 hour emailing; page count = 109

After a wonderful week's vacation out West, I'm back in New York and ready to go. Please welcome this week's monitor, Josh Miles, also in NYC. I met Josh in high school, and we reconnected a couple of years ago when Cathy and I moved to New York. Josh works for a wine distributor and knows a LOT about wine. He and his girlfriend (and fellow Villager) Kristin Donnelly keep us up to speed on foodie gossip, and we always have a great time with them. Benvenuto Josh!

I had dinner with soon-to-be Villager Christa Roth while in San Francisco, and she had a great suggestion: extend the Bridget Jones's Diary-inspired opening line of my posts that lists writing and reading time to include pounds, or in this case, page count. Thanks Christa!

I'm going to be attending the American Political Science Association conference this week, and then the Latin American Studies Association next week, at which I'll present, so the page count isn't likely to increase much during that time. Rather, I'll be getting feedback from professors and graduate students, editing, and rethinking what I already have. Today I set up or confirmed a number of meetings for the two conferences, and I'm going to be meeting with some great people who will have helpful feedback. To help them provide it, I went back over my conference paper and made changes - that was my writing today. The most important change was to check my measure of level of military government against existing, related measures. I used a dataset, Polity IV, that includes several measures of democracy and authoritarianism. None is quite the same as what I'm looking for, but I was able to create a rough approximation and compare it with my figures. Took a while to figure that out, but it looks like a reasonably close fit. So tomorrow morning I'll send the revised paper out to the folks I'm meeting with to give them an idea of my project.

One food-related note from our trip: we went to Thomas Keller's casual place, Ad Hoc, while in Napa. It's just down the street from Keller's flagship, the French Laundry, long considered one of the top restaurants in the country, if not the world. Ad Hoc is at a much more reasonable price point, but the food is still creative and delicious. The menu changes every night, but it's always four courses, and everyone in the restaurant gets the same menu - no sharing, no substitutions. (Ah, bliss: Pet peeve #46 is obsessive re-engineering of dishes by picky orderers - you'll take what you're served, and you'll like it. No, no Catholic Sunday school in my background, none at all....) So as Cathy's godfather, who lives in nearby Vacaville, advises, the trick is to make two reservations for the same time on the same night: Ad Hoc and Redd, which is literally next door. Then the morning of, you call Ad Hoc, and listen to the message that tells you that night's menu - if you don't like it, cancel the reservation and go to Redd instead. It was Texas-BBQ night at Ad Hoc when we went, so no need to cancel. YUM. Makes me want to go back to Hill Country here at home.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Bravo signore, 2 hrs of writing on your first day back. Not too shabby! Sounds like you'll be getting some very valuable feedback later this week on your paper.

I'm jealous (of course) that you made it to Ad Hoc -- I still have yet to dine in a proper Thomas Keller restaurant (excluding Bouchon).