HAPPY BIRTHDAY DISSY!

Dissy's First Year

After spending a couple of months (and a lot of frequent flier miles) working on some research on coalition politics in Italy, I ran into what appeared to be a research dead end. My frustration centered around not being able to find out about local political party nomination procedures, which, it seemed to me, were an obvious source of political incentives that people should pay attention to. On my last night in Italy, I was sitting at a restaurant compiling notes about my trip (what else does one do at a nearly empty restaurant by oneself when the food takes 45 minutes to arrive?) when I realized that this stumbling block was really the central question I needed to address. So, in one sense my trip to Italy was a failure--I wasn't able to get many of the questions answered that I had traveled to get answered. And, I left knowing that my dissertation probably wouldn't feature Italy very centrally, which made the whole trip seem like a rather long, lonely, and expensive exercise in improving my miming skills. On the other hand, I came away with a much better dissertation topic than I previously had.

These days Dissy has me immersed in the depths of data on Lithuanian preference voting--not a place I would have expected to end up. But, I think it will be a strong chapter to follow the bigger-picture cross-national chapter I've already drafted. The plan is to have these two "finished" by the end of the summer, so I can go into the job market interviews with a respectable chunk of Dissy done.

Anyway, Dissy's birthday present arrived just in time.

I finally broke down and bought STATA for her, since my new computer doesn't seem to want to connect to the school's remote desktop, I've pretty much forgotten how to code in R, and I couldn't get PostgreSQL to work either. I'm excited to be able to do data analysis so easily for a change.

And, as an added benefit (how did they know it was Dissy's birthday?!), they included a bookmark featuring James Tobin. Yeah, I didn't know who he was either. Sorry Dissy, turns out mommy is not up to speed on her Nobel Prize in Economics winners. Maybe for your second birthday I can give you the entire Nobel Prize in Economics Winner Bookmark Series and we can use them as flashcards. You'll be ready to apply to the Ivies in no time! Oh, my little girl is growing up....