Bad Blogger

I've been a really bad blogger lately. Probably six weeks has gone by without a post. I've discovered that it's really easy to fall off of the blogging wagon. And once you're off, you start to wonder if you really need to jump back on it again!

Well, I've started this thing and I aim to finish it. So now with my finals winding down for the spring quarter, it seems like a good time to update this here website.

Today, I just turned in my final exam for my statistics class and am about to drop off my final research paper for my class on relationship-based interventions for children.

Here are some highlights from the last six weeks:

I brought Celia and Ferguson to an Arceneaux family reunion in Lafayette, Louisiana in early May. Flying alone with two young kids was one thing, and then Ferguson caught the croup an hour before our return flight to Portland. I was hoping to introduce the kids to the joys of boiled crawfish, but they both eschewed their 1/4 Cajun heritage on that point.

<--Two-headed Louisiana Turtle


We concluded the online survey of the youth mentoring field and the use of evidence-based decision making. I've been analyzing the data with SPSS and have found some pretty interesting stuff. I managed to craft a paper for my statistics class out of some multiple regressions I created with the data.

I went to Washington, DC, in late May to attend the Society for Prevention Research Conference. On the way there, we visited my brother-in-law near Harrisburg, PA. We had fun watching Celia and Ferguson play with their three cousins. It was a new experience to be at a conference and hardly know a soul. I was able to meet some friendly researchers who work on suicide prevention, though, and attended some interesting research presentations. Probably the highlight was having the opportunity to serve as a discussant on a panel discussing relationship quality in youth mentoring. As discussant, I was supposed to deliver some incisive commentary after the researchers presented their works and help kick off a discussion with the audience. I was pretty nervous about playing the role (usually taken my a senior researcher in the field), but I think I avoided making a total fool out of myself. It actually helped me confirm that I've learned quite a lot these past five months. I wouldn't have imagined doing that kind of thing with any degree of confidence six months ago.

Farmer's markets are in full swing around here and my current quest is to find the perfect strawberry.

I think that about catches the blog up for now. My time is winding up here in Portland. Over the next few weeks, I hope to reflect more on my experience and what I've learned and get it down in the blog.