Traffic jams on Monday

A tiring but good day. Started off with my usual habit of waking up early but then it was a bit different. I was wide awake from around 3am till 4:30am. At 4:30am I decided to have the dreaded extra 5 minutes in bed and unsurprisingly woke up an hour later at 5:30am and quite a bit later than I wanted to. The reason for my wanting an early start was to avoid the traffic jams on the way to university at Huddersfield, there are road works for a year on my way to Huddersfield and knowing how bad it can be without them I decided to set off as early as I could. As it turned out I needn’t have worried. Apart from the usual morons pulling into my lane of traffic at the last minute it was uneventful and stress free. Consequently, I arrived at university in plenty of time for my meeting at 9:30am but this meant I could relax and catch up on emails and stuff. I’m doing a Masters by Research in Education. The good thing about this is I have a free, creative rein on what I can do. The bad thing is I have no structure to follow so I got some books from the library on how to write a Masters dissertation to give me some much needed ideas! I also looked up ontology. Although I’ve a degree in sociology and the terms ontology and epistemology are familiar to me I have always had a problem understanding ontology and just exactly what it is. Well today I finally came to an understanding of ontology. Epistemology is the understanding of knowledge and how we come to know things. Ontology questions what things are for instance what is a car and what does it mean to people. The epistemological stance would be what do we know about cars and how have we come to accumulate that knowledge. As with most things philosophical this is my interpretation and it may differ to someone else’s interpretation, but I’m happy with what I’ve got now and can make progress with my dissertation. My meeting went well and soon I was back on the road home. Out of Huddersfield to Ainley top everything was fine and my journey went without a problem. Then I hit traffic, traffic tailed back because of the road works that will take forever. For the next hour and a half I crawled along a mile of road with other equally frustrated road users all consigned to having to bide their time until they get through the road works. Maybe it was my sense of resignation and the knowledge that I couldn’t do anything about my situation but the hour and a half passed reasonably quickly. I have been stuck in traffic jams for shorter periods and it felt a lot longer. I thought about the traffic in the Brazilian city of Sao Paulo where traffic jams can reach over 100km in length. Wouldn’t it be easier to just drive to work on a Monday and stay there till Friday? To Sainsbury’s for petrol and food and then home. And today I re-potted some plants for the first time ever! Whether they will survive or not remains to be seen but I am so pleased with myself and hoping that they will. End the day watching TV, University Challenge and Have I Lied to You. All in all a good day.