yesterday and today

[kareina]

Yesterday morning I went into uni and turned some of my rocks into sand. Playing with the hydrolic crusher and the ring-mill is actually kind of fun. Next week I'll go back and extract the zircons from the sand. While I was at uni I had a useful meeting with my advisor and we decided that, even though this is the "writing up" portion of my thesis, and the "data collection" portion is meant to be long done by now, that not only will I do the work analyzing the zircons, I will also analyze one new sample which contains chlortoid, a mineral which is rather rare in Tasmanian metamorphic rocks--it is present in only three of the samples I've got, and in two of them it isn't joined by the minerals whcih would need to be present if we were going to work out its temperature and pressure. In the afternoon I took a nap and then in the early evening took a few more notes towards progress on the section I'd worked on the day before. Then, all of the sudden, I felt *done* with the computer, and rather than even stopping to post a progress report, I shut down and went and made some progress on a non-uni project instead. I took a hammer to some shiny metal disks (silver-coloured copper-nickel alloy) and pounded them out and dished them ever so slightly. I then drilled holes in them, and sewed them to my blue-wool knit cardigan in progress. Buttons! Pretty, shiny buttons which contrast nicely with the dark blue of the wool. I also took a scrap of the wool and did a test button-hole, to see if the knit would unravel when I cut the hole, and it didn't, so I did one button hole on the cardigan itself, and, indeed, it works. But by then it was late, so I did my yoga and went to bed, and I'll have to finish the other button holes another day. It is amazing how much more time elapses between the start and finish of a project when one only makes time to work on it once in a great while!

This morning I received an e-mail from a geologist to whom I'd written a "like your paper, know anyone who needs a post-doc?" e-mail. He suggested a couple of names, and listed several others with whom I might wish to collaborate on projects if I could obtain my own stipend. In checking out the University web pages for those to people, I saw a summary of a survey one of them had done on the "Geo-metamorphic list server". A quick google search on that topic just gave me the page for the survey (and, indeed, I'd searched for such a thing months ago, and didn't find one then either), so I e-mailed the guy and asked if the list is still in existence (the survey was from a few years back). He sent me the details, and I joined the list and read over the archives for this month and last month. I will very much enjoy being on this list. Not only have people asked and received answers to very interesting questions, but people post announcements for jobs on this list. Several of the ones posted recently are for positions for which I will be qualified as soon as I've completed this degree. And since these are positions looking to start in Aug/Sept of next year, they are reasonable for me to apply for! Now I just need to make time to actually apply...

This afternoon and evening I managed to take the notes I've been generating for the past couple of days and transform them into some actual writing, with references. That portion of my thesis is now over 2,000 words, and yesterday it was less than 1,000 words of notes (which is *not* the same thing as text!)