Diary, 09/01/19 – Difficult decisions

New year, a kind of quiet month and time to sit down, organize, see what I’ve done, what I promised to do and what is left. In sum, time for a mid-term evaluation. Do I pass? Hardly. I have to recognise I have been a bit naive in the design of the project, but also a bit reckless.

The first difficult decision I had to take, is about the planning. Things have not been as smooth as I thought. Money and time constraints are important at this stage and I cannot afford to do as much as I wanted when I wanted. As a result, I have a slight delay in many lines of the project and I will have be more realistic and say bye to the focus on Italy. This was an extra I did not promise in the application, so it is not going to be such a drama. I just wanted to do it. Anyway, everything else is still on motion, and these days I am closing details for our first conference and associated activities, as well as many other details.

This project runs in different times… it needs a lot of preparation, meetings, interviews, but mainly planning and scheduling for trips, fieldwork, etc. This means, little by little information is accumulating and most of it will come out together. And this is why planning is so difficult. For example; I was expecting to publish some materials along these months, but besides other commitments, etc. my main difficulty is being to actually produce relevant results from the partial data I still have. However, I will be doing some things and trying to move forward.

So, my New Year commitment is to actually sit down and get things done to catch up…

What is coming in this first months of the year?

• More trips… get ready to keep seing the Mediterranean beauties.
• Fieldwork in Greece and Morocco.
• Exciting news on the further outcomes of the project.
• Exciting news on other things I’m doing while here…
• A cozy conference in the old building of the University of Athens and other activities with Cervantes Institute.
• And maybe a surprise… that I should have done time ago, but will try to do now.

Keep tuned and follow #pubarchMED