On Travelling During Spring Break

To travel or not to travel? There are many rules about graduate school that students generally don't know when they start out. I have learned most of these rules and observe them strictly. Below are a few of them:
1) never tell your advisor when you are going out of town
2) never tell your advisor that you are going on vacation
3) don't go on vacation
4) if you go on vacation, don't tell anyone
5) make sure it's sunny out on campus if you do go on vacation, so that no one figures it out if you suddenly show up in the office with a tan

With that being said, I told Indiana that I was going out of town for part of spring break. D'oh! I told him this as an update of my progress on Geraldine. My trip to the Library of Doom didn't provide me with everything I needed for my database and my friends at another midwestern university have been inviting me to visit for a while. As many of my interlibrary loan books have come from their university's library, I figured it couldn't hurt. So I told Indiana: "Geraldine has this many languages in her database. I expect to have a complete database by the end of spring break. I have exhausted my sources at the following libraries: X Y and Z. I will be in town L for the last weekend of spring break and expect to find the remainding Papuan, Australian, African and North American language sources there..."

And Indiana's response? A lecture. I am spreading myself too thin. I need to focus. Do I want to work and make an insignificant income to buy beer or do I want to graduate and get a tenure track job? Getting trashed on Friday night is acceptable, but traveling is not. Ugh.

Well Indiana, if you're reading this, I am happy to report that I have a (nearly) complete database after this trip. I spent three days in the library here and another day working from a friend's house. I elicited data from a native speaker of Pular and made contacts for more data from another African language. Numerically speaking, I still need 3 African languages to reach the magic number to calculate statistics. Preferably two more Nilo-Saharan and another Khoisan language. I can do this some other time.

My database is more or less complete and I can change my focus to work on my prospectus. Yay!

Here is a picture of me in the library. It is typical of one of my walks into the stacks. 


Below is a picture of Saturday's stack of books. This is typical of a library day when I have physical books compared to electronic readings.