The arctic conditions have had the benefit of ensuring that I have not been tempted to go out much recently. Consequently I am romping along and making quite a bit of progress with the thesis. The Christmas holidays, despite my best intentions to do a little work, mostly passed by in a blur of eating, drinking, socialising and sledging. Actually, I'm quite glad they did, because I have returned to work with renewed enthusiasm, having devoted time to family and fun. The German Reading Skills course doesn't start again for a couple of weeks, so that's one distraction less for a while. A turning point came with the arrival in the post of Vygotsky's Thought and Language, which I devoured and then precis'd over a couple of days when the house was relatively empty. This book forms an interesting forerunner to Wallace Chafe's Discourse, Consciousness and Time, which I am using to supply insights into discourse prominence, linking it to focal consciousness. Reading Vygotsky re-enthused me to press on gathering material from Chafe and now it's all moving along nicely.
Another task that fell by the wayside over the past couple of weeks is the parsing of the Pauline epistles that I had planned to do, but I've set aside a portion of the day to make steady, plodding progress. An incremental approach always pays dividends and I have now completed all of 1Corinthians, including picking out verbal textual variants using the NA27 apparatus criticus, and am working my way through 2Corinthians. I contacted my supervisor and asked if I could postpone my supervisory meeting so that I could get back on track and fortunately he didn't have a problem with that. Now I have an extra two and a half weeks to revise my chapter, and I am determined not to squander the time. The bad weather that holds all the UK in thrall will see to that!

Off down to the university tomorrow - virtually 3 hours to get there on the disgustingly smelly CrossCountry train, and another 3 hours to get back! When I first started down there I thought that I'd never, ever get used to the travelling: but one does. Now that I'm embarking on full-time as opposed to part-time study, I'm expecting to ramp up the attendance somewhat. I'll see what my supervisor says. I don't think supervisory meetings would benefit from being any more regular than once a month, with concentrated periods of reading/writing in between. I just hope that my nearest and dearest recognise that, as a full-time, fully-funded student, it'll be the same as me having a 40hr-a-week, full-time job, and that I just won't be up for casual visits, prolonged lunches or trips into town. I always found it to be a considerable problem when we ran our own business and I worked from home. People didn't consider that I was doing real work, and that because I was at home, I was available at the drop of a hat for this or that. I might have to do some straight talking, never mind drop veiled hints! Got to pick up a new ID card, go to the library and check out a new Starbucks on campus, which is in the same block as the new Special Collections facility.
Wallace Chafe's book is very interesting - I'm going to read it and make more notes on the train. He approaches language from a cognitive point of view as a manifestation of consciousness that reflects the individual's capacity to focus on certain events whilst maintaining the context as a semi-active background programme. His division of information as active, semiactive or inactive fits quite nicely with imperfectivity, perfectivity and stativity in verbal aspect though I'll have to have a good, long think about it. Discourse, Time and Consciousness is such an interesting book that it'll be quite difficult not to forget what I'm supposed to be up to, and get swept into digressive backwaters. I must discipline myself to recognise what is actually useful and what is merely fascinating!

Have finally overcome the moment of inertia and am happily gathering speed on the academic front! The mass - nay, morass - of admin. that cascades through the post and down the wire has been hacked through by the machete of persistence and grim determination. So now I'm officially registered (online) and I've done various lesser tasks such as applying for my NUS extra card, filling in my railcard application, sending off my latest work and routine supervisory form to my supervisor, and booking my train tickets for Wednesday (can't wait until I've got my railcard - it should save me a fortune!). I need to be organised to the nth degree, or I'll definitely forget/mismanage something: I have to have written lists!
I've been reading through my notes to get up to speed on my thesis and it's not as bad as I thought it might be, though I seem to have forgotten a lot of the background argumentation. I think that's what makes it all so tricky....keeping the salient arguments in your head. I'm not sure my mental RAM is very large! (hence the notes). I've got a LOT of books to look through, and it's a bit tricky trying to prioritise: they're ALL clamouring for attention. I think the best ploy is to start anywhere and just let an order evolve. I'm getting quite enthusiastic about the new term and getting down to studying in earnest again. The book I'm going to look at first is Wallace Chafe's Discourse, Time and Consciousness. Although it probably won't deal directly with verbal aspect/discourse prominence, it should be reasonably interesting on the phenomenon of perceived time.
Another good thing is that, with the children returning to school, I have claimed the 'study' room back for myself (at least, in school hours). It's south-facing, so a lot brighter than upstairs, and has my lovely old oak desk to spread my stuff out on. The 'satellite study' (a computer station in the bedroom) has been an absolute godsend over the summer break, and still is when the children need the family computer to complete their homework. I'm going to keep it as a back-up bolt-hole when I want to work on. The laptop is a boon in this respect.