Christmas decorating

This weekend has gone past very fast. Yesterday was very oriented around the OYY-seminar. I was planning to only attend the actual seminar, which still lasted from 12 to 18, but I was asked to come to the closing dinner too. I was a bit hesitant since I had planned to get some things done still that evening and was feeling a little tired. I didn’t want to end up regretting not going though, so I accepted the invitation.

I’m an introvert person and especially when I’m tired I can’t be bothered to really concentrate on socialising. In my end of the table I had previously met only J, whereas the others all knew each other. That makes it more difficult to come up with things to talk about, since you do not have common history at all and do not have part in the common history of the others. The common nominator of course in our case was research, but the others were rather more social sciences and theory oriented than I am myself. If the discussion involves criticisms concerning the imprecise use of the concept empiricism and empirical sources, and you happen to be one of the people using the concept very imprecisely since you do not actually do sociological studies and it’s rather irrelevant what you call what you are doing...well, let’s just say that you can’t contribute anything terribly intelligent to the conversation then.

So it wasn’t the liveliest of all evenings, but food was fine, the speeches were funny, the acapella choir was great and I managed to make it to 23.30 train home. I didn’t spent today digging into the books of methodology and educating myself on the things that yesterday remained a little hazy to me. I spent a good part of it dragging things to the basement, cleaning up, bringing up the Christmas tree, setting up the Christmas tree and all the other decorations, baking and then settling down to read a little Eco, who is getting a bit more conventional and conservative than I thought at first.

Alrighty, I will settle down to watch the movie now. Good-natured, harmless, romantic stuff.