David pointed out to me that spending winter in Boston and summer in Raleigh is precisely backwards from what a sane person seeking moderate weather would do. I am not sane, but I do appreciate moderate weather. And for me, moderate means "over 70 degrees Fahrenheit, consistently, with sun." Which begs the question of why my state of legal residence SNOWS IN THE MIDDLE OF OCTOBER.

I'm mildly tempted to spend 2-4 weeks in February working from Nashville or Florida or California or somewhere... warmlike, in order to not be driven batty by extended lack of sun. The streets tend to reappear in Massachusetts sometime around March. The only problem is that I'm still hoping to take some sort of marketing class this spring, though the more I think about the way I learn, the more I wonder whether it would be more effective to...

  • ask people who have studied Marketing what the end-of-term assessment looks like (how do you tell how much you know?)
  • make a list of topics/resources/things to read and work through (read: apply), in 12-15 batches of one week in length (there are plenty of books in libraries and open course materials online)
  • carve out a consistent time each week to meet with Somebody Who Knows About Marketing, then begin bribing people with cookies to hang out with me (online, in person, whatever) and look at what I'm doing, field questions, etc. at that time. This would be instead of "class," but would keep me going and regularly accountable for something. It could be a different person every week, so long as all the weekly slots got filled
  • put together some sort of assessment at the end, depending on how Marketing students get evaluated. I think the way I'd love to do this is quals-style - get smart people who do marketing for a living in a room for an hour or two some afternoon (again, bribe with food...) and have them grill me ruthlessly on anything and everything they can think of, poke holes in my logic, criticize the miniprojects I've done (likely with Fedora Marketing) in order to apply the stuff I've learned through the "semester" and force me to assess and defend them, etc. and then tell me where I can be better.

Wait. I just realized this basically describes a self-designed grad school course. Huh. Maybe I should do that and get a notion of how I handle this sort of workload.

Maybe I should go to sleep.