Post
by Euphonium » Wed Jan 30, 2019 12:41 am
I suppose I should pop in.
I'm Kurt, and I'm closer to the end than the beginning of a Ph.D. in Russian history. In the (admittedly unlikely) event that anyone cares/is interested, I study religious minorities, conscientious objection, and migration in the late Russian Empire/early post-revolutionary period. My dissertation examines the emigration of several thousand members of one branch of a Christian movement known as Dukhobors to Canada around 1900, with a focus on the networks that arose to support them in their migration or that they took advantage of, and the ways in which they were able to maintain both personal and conceptual connections with their home country. I'll be travelling to Ottawa in about a month for another segment of archival research, and I'm really looking forward to it (never been there before, and it's reasonably close to Montreal and Toronto, both of which I've also never visited).
Beyond that, I keep busy with way too many different things. When I can take a weekend off I like to camp, and when I can't I'll try to set aside a few hours for one of my other hobbies. In particular, I am a hobbyist (and probably not very good, but hey, I'm doing it for me) computer programmer, working on a few projects right now: a roguelike computer game, a data management and visualization tool for researchers in humanities fields, and a tracker for Microsoft Flight Simulator (oh, I also waste way too much money flying pictures of planes around a pretend world on the computer). I also conworld, and I like to emphasize the complexity and mutability of religious and oral traditions in the societies and lives I imagine and create. And I try to set aside at least an hour every night for pleasure reading--my tastes there are all over the place; right now I'm reading Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis (my second-favorite American writer, after Willa Cather). I have an amateur radio license, though I haven't done anything with it in years.
Also, I bake all my own bread. Started about two years ago, never look back.
In any dispute between labor and management, the workers are always right.