Back from Michigan

I'm back after a long weekend in Michigan. It was a good visit and I got to see a number of my friends, a sweet hockey game, and I enjoyed some Hungry Howie's pizza - always a good thing. My buddy Tine gave me his old N64 along with the best video game ever - The New Tetris. My roommates and I used to play this game ALL the time in undergrad. Needless to say it might be a dangerous thing to have around the house now, but so far, so good. If it becomes too much of a problem I now have a study carrel at the library up on the Lake Shore Campus. I assume I'll get some decent use out of that, and it will be nice to have a quiet place to work and to be right there in the library as well.

The Dissertation Group continues to meet. We've basically been a discussion entity up to this point, but in two weeks I'm going to present some of my work and we'll have a proper workshopping session, which should be good. I'm interested to see how it turns out, especially since the chapter I need help on is all over the place right now. A bit of constructive criticism would bode well for this chapter at present. The first one was much more straight forward, while this one is trying to compare and contrast four different cities, which can be a challenge in terms of structure. So we'll see what happens. Hopefully there will be some satisfactory notes to post in the near future.

Completely unrelated, I've been working my way through all of the Dick's Picks albums. I actually own 2-3 of them and downloaded the rest (I know, I'm a horrible person. I'll buy them once I can afford to do so). There are 36 volumes and all but one are multiple CDs. I started the last week of October and just finished this week. You would think one might grow tired of that much Grateful Dead music for that long, but actually it had just the opposite effect. Most Deadheads fall into one of two camps, Jerry or Bobby. Personally, I'm deeply ensconced in the Jerry camp, but the Dick's Pick exercise leaves me with a greater appreciation of some of Bobby's work. I'm still not drinking the Weir kool-aid, but I'm probably less likely to skip past the Bobby tunes now than I used to be. Although, some songs, like Lost Sailor > Saint of Circumstance, will never be listenable to me and always get passed up.

I also went on a book-buying binge about a week or so ago, and have since received all of my purchases. The expensive books were of the academic ilk and should be useful for my dissertation. I also found a number of cheap books on the Grateful Dead that I wanted to read, and one on The Band. I've almost gotten through a book of interviews conducted with various members of the Dead and I find it to be a very enlightening book. It's really amazing how progressive the band was, not just musically, but in terms of musical innovation. Their experience with musical equipment, especially PA systems was more interesting than I thought it would be. I'm looking forward to getting through the other books, especially Phil Lesh's autobiography.