I've been having a hell of a time sleeping the last week or two, and it's starting to catch up to me. I've still got this cold, that's been hanging on for the last 3 weeks or so, and it's manifest itself in a horrible dry cough I just can't get rid of. It's generally okay during the day, but it gets bad at night. What seems to happen most of the time is that I wake up around 4:30 / 5:00, hacking and wheezing, and have to skulk downstairs and suck on a couple of Halls while watching TV for a half hour or so, in order to not wake Kirsten up.

Although waking up at 5am sucks, what sucks worse is that the only programming on at that time of the morning is telemarketing and Saved By the Bell. This morning, I watched two episodes back-to-back: Zach and Slater get into a huge fight over the new girl in school, and Zach scoops Lisa out from under Screech's nose. I think I'm now dumber as a result.

In other news, the next few weeks are going to be quite busy. This week, I need to start the groundwork for one of my two research papers. I want to write a paper on the Internet's effect on independent film over the past 10 years. I think I'll be using Gidden's theory of structuration to look into the topic -- essentially:

a social structure - traditions, institutions, moral codes, and established ways of doing things; but it also means that these can be changed when people start to ignore them, replace them, or reproduce them differently. (source)

On the weekend, my Dad is coming up to give us a hand putting up a new wall in the basement. We decided to create an extra room downstairs, making it a 4 bedroom house. The new room will end up being my new office, which will give me a little more space, and a little more light than the office I've got now (which, don't get me wrong, is still nice and spanky to have). Hopefully, with Orion's help, we can get it done quickly, before he has to head back home.

On the 16th, Kirsten is heading off to New York to attend our friend Irit's ordination at rabbinical school. She'll be gone until the 21^st, making me a (very boring, sedentary) bachelor for a few days.

Within minutes of her being home, another friend of ours, Nancy, is coming up to visit for a week. It'll be nice to have Nancy visiting - she's always a bundle of energy. And this time, we likely won't be working on academic stuff together (over Christmas, we spent a few hours at Kirsten's folks' place working on our respective papers).