The Perfect Holiday Gift :>)

Well the last few weeks have seen a mega price drop for the book. It now comes into the realm of not so bad, even if I originally had something else in mind. I am up to 80 libraries (well 80 as of a few days ago, now at 76 in one search with an extra one in another, go figure) according to the latest WorldCat check in.

Long Time No Post

It's been a while since I posted. I have been extremely busy, even more so than usual. But my work for a conference got piled on top of other things. I presented a paper at the Internal Federation for Psychoanalytic Education Conference (IFPE). I am also chair of the research committee, so I attended the all day board meeting on Thursday before the conference. It was a good conference in many ways, and I enjoyed seeing many old friends and colleagues, getting to hear about the research of Mark Solms (who is showing via neuroscience that Freud's dream theory still has many legs left), and getting about to some good restaurants in Toronto. I took some pictures this morning. Toronto has a very modern look and feel, and we were sure in an interesting part of town, judging by the restaurants anyway and happenings. The hotel is connected to the Rogers Center, where many Toronto sports teams play. The restaurant inside the hotel overlooks the ball field. That picture didn't come out too well. The CN Tower, evident in the picture, is the tallest made man structure in the world, although it doesn't appear that way when you are standing close up to it.

Even Little Projects can be OK

And this was a little project. I had some small trees cut down and a lot of stumps ground down. I used some of the new space to make a little seated project in the backyard. Not much, but it makes things a tad more interesting.

The Making of a Paper

I'm working on a paper I'll present at the 2007 Conference of the International Federation for Psychoanalytic Education in a few weeks. Because of the gyrations inherent in many organizations, the panel I organized isn't going to work in the way I was planning. We'll have less time than planned. Sparing you all the bloody details, I've decided (with my panelists) that for a variety of reasons my co-presenter would basically keep her paper at original length, while I would drastically cut mine. Because I was going to tweak the paper anyway, I thought I was simply going to tweak then cut. But, I could see that wasn't going to work. Instead, I used some pieces of the paper I was working on, but reworked it in a very different way.

My paper is titled, "Why Can't the English Learn to Speak", a titled derived from Lerner & Lowe's My Fair Lady. The musical is based upon George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion. I use the fictional account of Henry Higgins teaching Eliza Doolittle to speak as proper lady as the backdrop to discuss some of the assumptions behind the push to manualize psychotherapy.

Writing a condensed paper has been quite a challenge, but I let some of the lyrics do the talking, and I try to write this version in a style, which I hope will work for condensing this subject. We shall see. It has been fun in its own way. The posters above show the various versions, and that also illustrates part of the theme of my paper.

Learning Podcasting

I've been figuring out how to create podcasts to place on the web. I've decided to take my time, so that I don't create a bigger problem than I can solve. I'll be creating podcasts for MSPP of various paper presentations and also doing some interviewing of a number of professionals with "things to say". I'm hoping that this proves to be useful to psychologists that I know and those that I don't know. It is interesting to be able to put something together like this that has the potential to reach an audience beyond our humble confines. I have worked a little bit each day this week to create the first one and to create the web page on which people can visit to listen to or download the podcasts. I hope to have this up and running fairly soon.

The Long and Winding Road

Well, I have gotten my bike, although I was too busy to blog about it before now. I picked it up at UDM with the help of Jerry. It was an up and down experience in many ways. I got the bike started, and the seller, John Staudemeyer, SJ, came out from his meeting to say goodbye to the bike. As Jerry and I were discussing the best route home, I tried to start up the bike again, but the battery was dead. We tried various things for a long time, before eventually being able to reach John, who provided a jump with his car.

A few blocks away from UDM, I stalled when starting from a red light. Again the battery was down and out. Jerry knew some folks near by and was able to get some jumper cables, while I waited around in inner city Detroit at dusk. A biker stopped by to see if I was OK. He listened to my story, recommended I get a new battery, and I sent him on his way with a thank you. He said if we bikers don't take care of each other, who will. We were finally able to get going again. I rode it out 8 Mile Rd until we got to Farmington and then headed into Plymouth and finally back to Ypsi.

I drove out to Jerry's on Sunday Aug 12th to drop off an auto emergency kit as a thank you. It was a fun ride and I was getting the feel for the bike. As I got back into Ypsi, a strange sequence of events happened that could oly happen to me. I stopped at a Stop sign. As I put my foot down, I unknowingly stepped in a patch of oil and my foot started to slip. This caused the bike to become a little unbalanced, and it started to fall. I hopped off to prevent it from falling, but my left foot had no traction due to the oil. Blam. The bike goes down. After some EMU kids helped me check out the bike, I thought I was ready to go. One problem. The bike had fallen onto the handlebars, specifically the clutch. It had broken in half. There was no one to control gears.

I walked the bike back home. It was crazy trying to get it up my driveway. I was able to get some help from my next door neighbor. But I haven't had time to get the bike to a shop to repair the clutch and mirror, which broke when I was trying to get it up the driveway. I'm sure I'll get the hang of this sooner or later, hopefully sooner.

But it was a lot of fun to begin, and I will get back on the road soon enough.

A Second Printing

My book has now goen to a second printing. Yeah! I didn't get too excited, as it is not because of overwhelming sales. The publisher needs to replenish its stocks. So, I figure that it has been distributed at a variety of bookstores, and they are running low at the publisher. Still, it's better to have a second printing than not to have a second printing. The publisher didn't give me a lot of time to look it over though. They had made a mistake in the original by misprinting the Greek text that I used in a few places. They have corrected that and let me look that over. I wasn't given enough time to fix my errors, however.

My cousin Greg had found a bunch of errors dotted over the course of the book, usually punctuation problems and the like. Nothing terribly egregious, but it added up. I have now had the opportunity to fix these mistakes. The publishing representative said I could send her that when I finished and they would incorporate them into the thrid printing, providing that each page corrected begins and ends with the same words as the original. She sounded optimistic about a third printing, but I've got to find some classes to use this as a textbook, or the copies will really start gathering dust at this price. I asked about going to paperback, but no dice. I would need to guarantee that 75 would be purchased in order to do that.