No, I haven't Forgotten about the Blog

Things have really picked up over the last month or so. I've been doing a lot of traveling and spending a lot of time putting a plan together for what I'm going to do over the next year and a half and how I'm going to do it. A lot of things are still up in the air, but I finally feel like I'm really getting some momentum and clarity about what I need to be spending my time on.

It looks like a big part of my project here is going to involve carrying out a survey of rural farmers. I'm sure the Sanford folks out there will envy my opportunity to return to the always fascinating questions of survey design, sampling strategy, weighting, dealing with bias, and all the other pressing concerns we dealt with under the watchful eye of P. Cook. Hopefully those lessons will be applicable to surveys that aren't about gun ownership.

In other news, Ramadan ended last week. The big thing about the end of Ramadan is that everybody has to buy new fancy clothes. Of course everybody is buying their new fancy clothes at the same time, so they all end up paying twice as much as they would have paid if they had bought them a month earlier or later. I've tried having this discussion with several people, but it never goes anywhere. Anyway, the city seems noticeably more lively now that Ramadan's over and people are all smiles strutting about in their fancy new robes and boubous.