Learning Becomes Her

I really love Mendeley, y'all. I haven't needed to create an annotated* bibliography in many years, so it took a bit of research to learn if Mendeley would do this for me. Turns out, it will. Some sources I found within the Mendeley community indicated that citation styles could be modified to include an annotation and then applied to the references in a document. Luckily for me, annotated bibliographies in APA style must be common enough that this is already a style available within Mendeley. To generate my bibliography in Word, I inserted each source as an in-text citation, set the style, and selected "Insert Bibliography;" I then deleted the in-text citations (as they were unnecessary in this case) and reviewed my references for style inconsistencies. As I mentioned in my previous Mendeley post, however the information is stored in your reference manager is how it will appear in a bibliography. Because I knew these sources would be cited in APA style, I was ...

Let me begin by saying I used to be a commuter bicyclist. For an academic year, I commuted by bicycle from my apartment to campus (and sometimes across campus to the rec center). I get it; drivers can be insensitive to bicyclists on the road, especially if they aren't used to them. That said, get your bike off the sidewalk. The campus police really need to start doing more of this. Unless it is designated as a bike path (and there are some of these around campus) or the road experiences heavy traffic and is without a bike lane, bicycles don't belong on sidewalks. A bicycle is a vehicle and being on sidewalks endangers pedestrians. I've been nearly run over a few times by inconsiderate bicyclists riding on the sidewalk where I was walking and yelling at me  to get out of the way. What I feel like doing every time I see it happen. I cannot begin to describe the rage that swells up in me whenever I see a bicyclist riding on the sidewalk and there's no reaso...

Before even starting my PhD program, my advisor-to-be encouraged me to adopt a reference manager. Her reference manager of choice was Zotero , a free desktop manager with browser extensions available. She recommended this over EndNotes or RefWorks because it wasn't university dependent and I would be able to start building a repository that could continue with me throughout my career. I had started using it, but, for many reasons, I found it more of a hindrance than a help and I used it sparingly. Then a colleague sent me an email (also before starting my program) to a series of blog posts by PhD2Published entitled "My Love Affair with Mendeley or How Mendeley is Basically My Brain" Parts 1 , 2 , and 3 . It sounded interesting and more convenient to use than Zotero, so I downloaded the desktop manager. Luckily, it syncs with Zotero, so I didn't lose any of the references I had already collected. Even though I downloaded it shortly after reading the blog po...

For the past two weeks (with the exception of Father's Day weekend), I was fully responsible for my future step-daughter, Lily. I refer to this as mommy practice because it was the first time she was spending an extended amount of time with me, where it was just the two of us all day, every day. I've spent winter breaks with her before, watching her during the day while her dad and grandparents work because it's cheaper than paying for all day daycare for those few weeks. But this was different: I was paying for groceries and cooking dinner and there weren't going to be grandparents or daddy at night to take up her attention. This was me for the few months leading up to Mommy Practice, because I was super nervous about it. We spent all day together during the week, though not always on the same activities. When we were on campus (usually late morning until late afternoon/early evening), I read about a statistical software I will use for some data analysis this su...

I won't pretend to know what happened because I don't. All I know is that you asked me to stand beside you at your wedding last spring, and this spring, I don't get an invitation. It hurt and it sucked, especially when you couldn't be assed to respond to any form of communication. Unfortunately, I can't say I was that surprised. This past year has been marred by numerous cancelled lunches that you always promised to reschedule and never did. You would cancel and I wouldn't hear from you again until I reached out to you. After the third cancellation, I started to wonder if I should even be in your wedding because I obviously didn't mean much to you; and that was glaringly obvious when we scheduled a birthday lunch (for your  birthday) on a day when you said you had nothing else planned, and you cancelled an hour before we were supposed to meet. And the only reason I found out you were cancelling is because I contacted you to find out where we were meeting. ...