Another Year Down.

Yesterday was my 26th birthday, and all-in-all, it was a pretty great weekend. I spent time making merry with people I love, and really that's all you can ask for in this world. Mortality has begun its slow creep towards me though, and I already feel like I'm staring down the short end of my twenties. I've reached the age I'm going to be when I get married, which is a strange but exciting thought. Andrea and I have been talking alot about how we're going to spend the next 5 years (and the next 50+), but so much is still up in the air that we're infuriatingly unable to satisfactorily plan for even the next 5 months, seized in the sludge of bureaucracy and bet-hedging.

On a related note, Friday was science jounalist Brian Switek's 27th birthday, and on his blog Laelaps he presented the cover of his forthcoming book, Written in Stone: Evolution, The Fossil Record, and Our Place in Nature. It made me realize that, if I can clear my life of distractions, I too am perfectly capable of completing such a project by the age of 27. As I've said before, I've been diagnosed with a serious case of shiny-ball syndrome and I need to structure my life as an academic accordingly. This point motivated me to download the Firefox Add-on LeechBlock:

LeechBlock is a simple productivity tool designed to block those time-wasting sites that can suck the life out of your working day. All you need to do is specify which sites to block and when to block them.

I configured the system so that I'm unable surf one set of time-sink websites while I'm at home at night, and a whole slew of others while I'm at work during the day. The next step is to complete the final 10% of the work necessary to submit my thesis work for publication. I'm not sure why I have such a mental aversion to working on it. I'm so ridiculously close, and yet it still feels ages away from completion. Its the worst case of writers block I've ever had in my life, so I welcome any strategies or advice for overcoming it!