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kareinaThe snow that greeted me when I arrived in Durham last Sunday, and the icy walkways that followed it, are both long gone, and my legs have recovered from the shock of tons of walking and ice skating in Edinburgh last weekend so the daily walk to the office is now feeling pretty easy, and has gotten down to only 25 minutes each way. The short version of the walk follows a fairly busy road on one side of the river, then ducks down the hill, over a pedestrian bridge over the river (which is so not frozen), up a foot path, through a tiny gap between some buildings, then along another fairly busy road to the campus. On the days I have walked in with A & G we instead bypass the bridge, walk around a sharp bend in the river and head up the stairs to the heart of the old town (which is built right in the heart of a very tight U in the river), where they go into Gwen's school to drop her off, and I continue through the narrow streets and over another pedestrian bridge, and then double south and back to the University, which is located just below the bottom of that U in the river. Both paths have a fair few stone buildings along it (sandstone). Since there is a tourist side on the far side of town explaining that the area has seen a fair bit of coal mining, except for the seams under the cathedral, I had guessed that both the sandstone and the coal date to the carboniferous period, but looking at the wikipedia page for local geology it is more likely that the sandstone used in the buildings is Permian or Triassic.
After recovering from my digestion issues on Tuesday I have plunged into work--nine hours on Wednesday, and more than 11 each yesterday and today. I do much of those hours in the grad student office at a "hot desk". There are a number of us in the room, and we all work silently. When I went home tonight at 18:30 there were still a number of them there, hard at work. Despite my long hours I have been getting home on time to do acroyoga with Gwen for 10 or 15 minutes before she has to go to bed, which is a nice change from work, and so little effort to hold her weight--the advantage of a six year old flyer, but she is given to suddenly wiggling unexpectedly, so I have to work hard to keep from dropping her.
After she goes to bed I usually do a bit more work before I do my normal yoga and then go to bed. Tonight's extra work was getting to a grant application that should have been written by now, since the application deadline is the 31st, and it would be nice if I can get some feedback from Karen on it before I submit. Luckily, it is just a little grant, asking for money to attend a conference this summer, so doesn't need so much. All that I have left on it is the 750 words saying " the aims and context of your research, the significance of your project, and previous results that are of relevance to this application". I hope to get that done tomorrow and send it to her, so that she sees it when she comes in on Monday (unless she checks mail over the weekend, which I doubt).
After recovering from my digestion issues on Tuesday I have plunged into work--nine hours on Wednesday, and more than 11 each yesterday and today. I do much of those hours in the grad student office at a "hot desk". There are a number of us in the room, and we all work silently. When I went home tonight at 18:30 there were still a number of them there, hard at work. Despite my long hours I have been getting home on time to do acroyoga with Gwen for 10 or 15 minutes before she has to go to bed, which is a nice change from work, and so little effort to hold her weight--the advantage of a six year old flyer, but she is given to suddenly wiggling unexpectedly, so I have to work hard to keep from dropping her.
After she goes to bed I usually do a bit more work before I do my normal yoga and then go to bed. Tonight's extra work was getting to a grant application that should have been written by now, since the application deadline is the 31st, and it would be nice if I can get some feedback from Karen on it before I submit. Luckily, it is just a little grant, asking for money to attend a conference this summer, so doesn't need so much. All that I have left on it is the 750 words saying " the aims and context of your research, the significance of your project, and previous results that are of relevance to this application". I hope to get that done tomorrow and send it to her, so that she sees it when she comes in on Monday (unless she checks mail over the weekend, which I doubt).