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!

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.

Welcome to my new blog....

By an amazing coincidence I set up this blog (dedicated to plotting the vagaries of my ongoing PhD in New Testament Greek linguistics at the University of Birmingham) only a few hours before I received the amazing and most welcome news that my application for AHRC BGP funding had been successful! My supervisor had left a message on my mobile answerphone telling me to check my uni email and, even with the message from admin. open in front of me, I had to read it several times to make sure it really said what I thought it did: that I was finally going to receive funding to support my doctoral studies! I immediately phoned my supervisor back and he confirmed that I had indeed been successful and that, barring a few formalities, the money was as good as in the bank. I still daren't fully believe it. I've self-funded both my undergraduate and master's degree, and after failing to get financial support last year, I've been self-funding my PhD thus far on a part-time basis. And it has not been easy, as postings (moans) in my other blogs (parablepsis and more books than sense) testify. I am extremely lucky in that my husband has been behind me all the way, from my earliest studies with the Open University encouraging me and buoying me up when I've flagged along the way. I could not have done any of it without his unfailing love and support.

What can I tell you about myself?

Well, I came to academia relatively late in life. After the birth of my fourth child in 1999, I joined the OU. My first course was Reading Classical Greek, and I was hooked. The following year I signed up for Reading Classical Latin, then in subsequent years, Advanced Greek, then Homer: Poetry and Society. This gave me a Diploma in Classical Studies and 120 credits. In Autumn 2004, I cashed these in to enter the second year at Leeds University's Classics Department as a mature student 'with advanced standing'. I spent a very happy two years studing Greek and Greek Civilisation, made some good, enduring friendships and emerged with a First Class Honours degree. In my final undergraduate year I was lucky enough to study New Testament Greek Textual Criticism under Professor J. Keith Elliott. I enjoyed this immensely and decided that I wanted to pursue this with a Master's degree by research in that discipline. In 2007 I submitted my thesis, A Textual Commentary on Paul's Letter to the Galatians. This stood me in good stead to apply to my current institution where, under Dr Philip Burton and Prof David Parker (who was the external examiner for my MA viva), I am currently undertaking doctoral studies. The title of my thesis is Aspect and Discourse in the Pauline Epistles. During the first couple of months I was also finishing off the OU Advanced Latin course.

But I digress....this particular blog is not intended to be an academic blog: anything remotely 'intellectual' will be posted on my logois KAI ergois blog. This blog is dedicated to posts detailing the day-to-day feelings, reactions, problems and highlights of a doctoral student. My parablepsis blog contains posts on life in general, particularly family life, and more books than sense contains ongoing confessions to do with my inordinate bibliophilia.

And the title of this blog? 'Skolex medaminos' is (I hope!) koine (New Testament/Hellenistic) Greek for 'worthless worm', a name chosen because, ironically, yesterday I was feeling especially lowly and worthless, having spent the whole day grubbing about and burrowing through texts with few visible results. Little did I anticipate when formulating the name that by that very evening, someone would deem this particular worm to be indeed of some worth......!