hot weather, cool houses, and useful advisors

[kareina]

The past few days have been rather hot in Tassie. No where near as hot as over on the mainland, where it has been brutal, but hot enough to cause the locals to complain mightily about the heat. But not me. I am one of the fortunate ones. clovis_t's parent's house, where we are living these days, is a nice double-brick house located at the base of a cliff at the confluence of two creeks. As a result much of our grass is still green, while just on the other side of the very small hill, where madryn_1960 lives, everything is brown and dry. To make this house even nicer--it comes equipped with an air-conditioner. They don't run it all of the time, but it is available to take the edge off in the early evenings, when the heat of the day finally soaks through to inside. However, I am avoiding going outside. This month's exercise log shows my worst January since I started my thesis. Still doing better than an hour a day, but nothing like the hour and a half a day I did last January, or the over two hours a day I did the January before that. (of course, I can't blame the heat on all of that--the extra hours I'm devoting to trying to finish up my thesis is a major factor, as is not going for daily walks with baronsnorri now that he has animals that need looking after when he gets off of work, making him unavailable for the adventures we used to do.

This morning I had an e-mail from my advisor with a list topics I need to consider/discuss when talking about the "big picture" (what the various temperature/pressure/dates I've calculated for these rocks mean) and a pile of recently published papers to read/cite when doing the discussion. Needless to say, today has been spent reading, rather than writing, though I've taken notes. It is interesting to me to compare our very different approaches to naming files. The papers he sent me have file names like "continentialsubduction09.pdf", telling me that what he considers most important about the paper is the topic. I agree, the topic is important, but I tend to name the files things like "Carry et al 2009", which is how I will cite that particular paper in my own writing. But then, I file my papers, each named for the author(s) and year of publication, in folders by topic "monazite" or "Tasmania" or "crystalization". I keep track of all of the papers with the program EndNote, which does the citations for me automatically. All I need to to is click on the appropriate paper in EndNote, then go to the Word Document where I am writing and push one button and the parenthetical citation appears within the paragraph, and the full list of author, date, title, publisher, etc. shows up in the list of references in the bottom of the paper. In EndNote I've got it set up to show me the author, date, title, format (pdf, or paper?), and name of the folder in which it is organized. I suspect that my organizational system is faster to use than his, because I just look in the data base for all papers on a topic and see the list, and their titles straight away. He's got to remember what he called the paper...

I don't think I posted a progress report yesterday. It was a day of scalpel wielding. I've hacked away huge parts of chapter three and moved them to an appendix. The thesis itself isn't the place to explain all of the techniques which didn't work! (but I did need the information there whilst I was still trying different things, so I wouldn't do the same thing twice). That chapter has been cut more than in half--fully 7,777 words wound up getting cut! But whomever my examiner turns out to be will thank me for making that part optional (and some of it may not even make an appendix, we will see).

Tonight is a contra dance. Here's hoping the hall is cool!