Well, after spending all of September, and all of October effectively spinning my wheels, personally, professionally, and academically, the beginning of November to now has been a period of intense and purposed self-renewal. It's still in process, and there are areas that are falling behind, but in general I have focused on improving, if not the timing, at least the quantity of my sleep (and quality: I purchased a real bed. It cost more than I would ever want to spend, but I can already tell you it was a good investment); I have tried to spend more time with friends, where appropriate and as it fits around my other obligations; I have actually gotten work done, met my obligations to my company and coworkers; I have focused on spreading out the bulk of work for each homework assignment instead of trying to do them all the night before (although this still needs a lot of improvement); and I am still working on, although have made progress, re-organizing my life and possessions in this new house. Some areas that still need work are integrating time for research, reading, and writing into this framework. I have a bit of time here and there that I could be putting towards it that I'm still wasting, so a large part of this process is identifying those times, without sacrificing the necessary time each person should preserve in a day and a week on personal or interpersonal interests not work or academic.
One other thing I've been sacrificing lately is my art. I can't let that keep up; I'm already itching for a nice day spent walking around with my camera, especially in this new neighborhood I'm living. So, hopefully i can do that before the weather makes it impossible, although adverse weather makes for interesting photographs, so I will not complain either way .
Ultimately, the many plans my team has had to publish a paper have fallen to the wayside in the face of increasing time crunch with homework and other obligations. It's a shame. I'm working hard to slough through the homework dominating my time so that I can add this back in. As a more immediate concern, I have three or four papers to read and write a critical review on (all part of the peer review system of academic paper submission -- if you write, you should also review). I intend to start them this afternoon.
Teaches.it continues to do well -- not a smash hit as any business owner would hope, but progressively improves. We went to the NJEA conference last Thursday and Friday, and sold nearly $450 in direct subscriptions to our service. I expected maybe 5 to 10 sales, and we had over two dozen. That was a huge confidence boost, both in our company and in our product. I can only hope we ride this high into continued success.
Beyond all that, I'm enjoying the new apartment very, very much. It's larger, John (my roommate) and I fit much better, and there are a number of other good things about the place (hard wood floors, plenty of windows, nice neighborhood). So far the worst difficulties have been related to parking, which of course is impossible in an urban environment, more-so in the high-traffic area we are. It's an adventure!