kareina

When I started my PhD program in Tassie I set up an Excell spreadsheet to track what I did each day in terms of research. I have continued to use that same spreadsheet evers since, and it is helpful to be able to find out when I did certain things. When I set it up, I added a formula in the top row to calculate how long it has been since I enrolled in that degree. That formula has been sitting there ever since subtracting my enrollment date from today's date, and I haven't even looked at it in years. (who looks at the heading row of a spreadsheet one uses daily? one knows where to do today's data entry without reading that bit)..

Today I looked. This June it will be 18 years since I enrolled in that degree! How has it been that many years?

This week I had two appointments in town, and we still haven't made time to fix the issue with the breaks on Keldor's ca, so we decided to bring the cats in and spend the week at his dad's house.

We also brought my new work recliner and lap-keyboard desk thingie, my computer, and a second monitor. As a result, I have worked quite happily here. I am loving the new set up (though it is, of course, better with the even bigger external monitor at home), But having good posture while I work matters, and that is easy to achieve in a recliner, and with the keyboard on my lap, and my mouse or computer pen and tablet on the shelf we attached to the armrest of the recliner my shoulder doesn't hurt when working, because it is neither too high nor too low for my body. As a result I have created lots of figures for my thesis, worked out the figure number scheme for all of chapter 5 section 3 (the laser-ablation ICP-MS trace element composition maps which form the backbone of the thesis), and created the correctly labeled figure pages for all of them, ready to drop the images into. I have also written all of the figure captions for the figures that exist, and some other text that ties into all the above. Bringing the thesis itself to 21,368 words, plus 1,515 words in the figure captions.

Monday's appointment was for an x-ray which I hope wasn't really needed. Back in December I noticed a little bony lump on the top of my right foot (the light hit it just right whilst I was doing yoga, so I saw it, and then poked at it to determine that it really is a lump). It isn't in any way uncomfortable or painful, and I might not have ever noticed it if I hadn't been looking at my feet just then. But one isn't meant to have a lump just there, so, this being a country with medical care available for everyone, I called the local health clinic to ask for an appointment. I made it clear when I called that since it didn't hurt or cause problems they didn't need to try to find time to see me before Christmas, but if they could put me on the list I would appreciate it. As a result I went in to see them on 1 February, and the medical student who first saw me did all of the interview questions (yes, I am healthy, no it doesn't cause me any problems, but what is it, and should I be concerned?). He called in the actual doctor to have a look, and her first reaction was "if it doesn't cause a problem, it is probably nothing to worry about".

Then she pointed out the calluses on the sides of my big toe, and said that they can be a symptom of my toes shifting their position into bad alignment, and that one can buy corrective things to help straighten them back into place, and if left unchecked it can cause your shoes to no longer fit and become uncomfortable, at which point they recommend surgery to scrape away the excess bone that develops along the side of the joint at the base of the big toe, and she showed me the scar from her surgery for just that problem. My big toes haven't yet shifted out of position so much that they interfere with comfort wearing my sandals or my winter boots, but it does explain the calluses that had started to form on the inner edge of my big toes, which had never been there before about a year or two ago. I had been trying to eliminate those calluses by wearing five toe socks and trying to make a point of flexing my toes wide whenever I think about it. Perhaps strengthen my feet muscles will also solve the symptom she pointed out, especially as now I am more aware of it. If not, I can try one of the thingies to encourage them to go back to better alignment.

While I was talking to both the docs I remembered that my right foot had been x-rayed in october of 2021 (when I hurt my toes falling from an acroyoga balance and landing wrong), and wondered if the x-rays happened to show the part of my foot that has the lump? They couldn't look it up, as the x-rays were taken when I still lived in Norrbotten county, and the local health centers in Västerbotton county can't access my on-line health records from Norrbotten, so they asked me to call Norrbotten and request a copy of the Xrays. I did, and was given the choice being snail-mailed either a paper printout (at no cost), or a USB thumb drive (for 200 SEK, but which would have better resolution than the printout). I asked "how about email", and they said "we don't email medical records" (which I think is stupid, but they didn't make that rule, which is likely a side effect of GDPR).so I asked for the usb version.

In the meantime I got a call to the xray clinic in Skellefteå, which surprised me, since I thought we had only discussed obtaining a copy of the old xray to see if the lump existed already in 2021 and I just didn't notice. So I called the local health clinic, and the nurse said, yes, the doc really does want a new xray too.

Therefore I went in on Monday morning for that. I told the xray technician that I had the usb with the old xrays if they want to compare, but it turns out that while the local health clinics can't access my heath records across county lines, the xray departments of the hospital can access my old xrays across county lines. I guess that the doc will get back to me later about the results, and if either or both of the old and new xrays show the lump. But I just stuck a reminder on the calendar for mid April to call and ask if they haven't gotten back to me before then. (Given that I want to finish this thesis during March, April sounded like a good time to return to this question.)

My other appointment was with the hearing clinic at the hospital, to see how I like the new hearing aids they gave me a month ago and do they need any adjusting before we decide that they are keepers? I love them. They work much better than my last pair, and it is much easier to hear (the loudest loud setting is actually too loud for comfort for most things, so I mostly don't use it, unless I am trying to hear something quite quiet). They also connect directly to my telephone, and way faster than the external bluetooth adapter I needed for the last hearing aids. I had her make a minor change (turn down the volume when the hearing aids announces the name of the program I just switched to using the phone app, plus adding a couple of standard programs). She suggested that I come back in a month for final check in before deciding if I am going to keep them, and I countered that given how far away I live, I would be ok with skipping that visit. She said, ok, I will give you a month to decide you want to see me, if so, call us and book time with me, If you don't call before the end of that time I will assume that everything is good, and we will send you the bill for the new hearing aids (I think she said they will cost me 500 SEK each).

The big advantage for us living in town this week is that Keldor has been able to stay after work each day and make progress on my new helmet. He finished the construction today, all that remains is padding and strapping it. He has built it with a very open pattern, inspired by the Vendel period Valsgärde helmet, and he designed it so that I will be able to wear my hearing aids in there, without any part of the helmet coming into contact with them (I will use my old ones for this--they may not be as good as my current ones, but they will be way, way better than wearing my old helmet without any hearing aids at all, and then if something goes wrong and they are somehow damaged by a freak accident, it won't cost me my new ones).

So now we have one more work day, then we will head home for Friday evening and Saturday during the day. We will return to town for the Shire annual meeting on Sunday, and probably stay to help out a friend with projects on Monday.

We have till Thursday to have practiced enough with my new helmet that I have it well calibrated so I can fight in Nordmark Coronet on the weekend. We will drive down Thursday evening/night, sleep at his brothers house, and then do the last bit of drive on Friday during the day. It should be a good event, and I hope I get enough thesis writing done between now and the drive that I can enjoy the weekend without feeling like "I should be working".

I just heard about a FB group for people wanting to leave academia, and joined, and started typing the below, and decided it would make a good blog post, so I moved over here instead...


I don't know if this is the right place for me or not, so I will give a little of my background, and you can tell me if I am just weird, or if there are others like me here...

Growing up I loved school, and didn't want a job. The adults I knew all complained about having to work, and it sounded terrible to do so. But school, that was fun, and I loved learning, so I wanted to be a student forever. No one in my family had attended college/university, but that was no reason not to enroll when I finished high school.

I then spent the next six years, enrolled at several different institutions, taking anything and everything that sounded interesting, with no intent to ever graduate, but my social life was not on campus, it was 100% focused on the medieval recreation society I had discovered in high school.

Then one of my friends from high school told me that he was pondering which graduate school offering him money he would accept. Wait, what? There is a way to be paid to be a student? (At that point I was working registration each semester to earn enough to pay my tuition at a state school, which was doable, and working as a live-in housekeeper for some friends, so I had a place to sleep and plenty of food, and life was good.) He explained that if one majors in a science that it is often possible to get paid to be a student by teaching labs. New goal!

So I picked a major (geology, not available at my then uni), and applied to a university in another state, got accepted, took out student loans, and moved. Kept doing the medieval thing, fell in love, spent the summer with him, and discovered that the state college across the street from his house also had geology available, so transferred and enjoyed the next three years it took to fulfill the requirements for that degree (since it was a small college the required classes were offered every other year), so I graduated after 10 years as a full time student with 365 of the required 175 quarter credits to graduate.

I got accepted into a Master's program and then enjoyed several years enjoying getting paid to be a student, and continuing to spend all of my free time doing the medieval thing. When my funding ran out, and I wasn't quite done with the thesis yet (and had completed way more than the required number of classes) I moved in with my parents for a bit as I finished up.

I finished the Master's in Geology around the same time the US Geological Survey was laying off everyone and their brother, too, so the rest of the geology job market was seriously flooded with experienced potential workers. However, I never really wanted a job, so I didn't bother competing with them. Instead I moved in with a friend in a tiny town that was desperate for substitute teachers, and required only a high school diploma, and spent the winter earning enough money for some travel, while working a random schedule, with the right to just not answer the phone if I didn't feel for working, and, of course, still doing the medieval thing.

A couple of years later I fell in love and moved to Australia, and my new partner was about to re-start his studies, with a new major. I didn't think it would be fair for him to be a student while I had to work, so I applied for a funded PhD position, and really loved my next five years as a student, with a medieval recreation hobby taking up the rest of my time.

I finished up just as my funding ran out, and, this time, actually applied for jobs, landing a postdoc position in Italy, which meant that my medieval hobby suddenly was happening in real castles. That job ended just around the time I fell in love, so I moved to northern Sweden, where the local uni had a geology post doc position that sounded fun. I got accepted, and enjoyed 1.5 years in a job that felt just like being a student doing research again. However the funding application to extend the contract to long enough to actually finish the project didn't come through, and I was loving where I was living too much to want to relocate.

But just then they needed someone to manage the new LA-ICP-MS lab, and I applied. Then they discovered that the other division that had been going to cover half the budget wouldn't do that after all, so suddenly the job was a half-time position. This sounded perfect to me, so I took it, and enjoyed a number of years doing a fun job, with lots of time left for my Medieval hobby, and gardening.

But I missed being a student, so when I saw an ad for a PhD position in Archaeology with enough funding to cover a half-time student who wanted to work half time, I contacted them, and wound up getting accepted to do a second PhD, as a long-distance student. This led to a really fun first seven months as a student, but then I found out that the geology department was having financial issues and considering outsourcing the lab to a private company, which had plenty of technicians, and wouldn't need me if that happened. Given that we had written my project proposal with the thought of doing analyses in the lab, this was worrisome, so I started doing as many as possible, without taking the time to process the data in-between. Eventually I got my official notice that the job would end, but as I had been with the uni for years, and my position was classes as "permanent", I had another ten months of work, which gave me a chance to do an awful lot of analyses, but no data processing.

But one must continue to eat, so I applied for a few other jobs, and landed a short term, half time contract as an archive assistant at the local museum, just in time for the pandemic (so while the rest of the world was working from home for the first time, I was going into the office regularly for the first time, since I had always worked from home if I didn't have a specific need to be in the lab).

For a variety of reasons I wound up taking a leave of absence from my studies, though I tried to make as much progress on the data processing while I wasn't enrolled as I could. Then I fell in love and moved again, to a tiny town, an hour from the nearest university, and I really don't want to live in a city again.

I hope that I will be able to turn the research I have already done towards a second PhD into a Master's degree and have it done, but I don't know what to do thereafter. What kinds of jobs exist that have the parts I love of being a student: self directed, work from home, interesting, task oriented in ways that are both challenging and well defined enough to be achievable, and still leaves plenty of time and energy for one's hobbies?

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After typing all that, I re-wrote the final paragraph, and pasted only the blow to the group:

What kinds of jobs exist that have the aspects I love of being a student: self directed, work from home, interesting, contributing to the sum of knowledge (or other contribution to the betterment of the world would be fine), task oriented with goals that are both challenging yet well defined enough to be achievable, and still leaves plenty of time and energy for one's many hobbies?

I am new to the group, and don't know if this is the right place for me or not, so I thought I would just ask, and you can tell me if I am just weird and dreaming, or if there are others like me here, and they have found something that matches this description that they can recommend.

I am in academia because I have always loved being a scholar, and I love research, but I don't want to teach.

My thesis supervisor replied to my last message saying that we could meet on Friday, but she would need time to read my revised draft before then. Yah, the one I have been doing XRD data processing for, so that I would be able to write it. So I put in nine hours yesterday and 11 today, and I have the XRD results section written. I had hoped to also write a new bit in the discussion section about the XRD results and how they do and don't relate to the LA-ICP-MS results, but instead I added a highlighted note there saying to write that part, and sent it off to her. Now, if she checks mail till tonight (I sent it at 18:30 UK time, which is a bit late for reading work email, but impossible) or early tomorrow there is a chance she will have time to at least glance at it before we meet, which means that we may meet.

I hope so. We should have had a meeting months ago, but it hasn't happened, for reasons.

I have just sent a reasonably complete draft of my paper in progress to my thesis supervisors!!!!!! (there are not enough exclamation points to properly convey my joy in this accomplishment). True, I do still need to create figure 4 and then fill in more in the results and discussion sections based on what it shows, but it is mostly done!

A week or so ago my thesis supervisor called my attention to a conference session that sounds perfect for my research: Lithic Raw Materials in Prehistory: Methods, Practice and Theory at the upcoming 27th Annual Meeting of
the European Association of Archaeologists: Widening Horizons and suggested that I submit a poster presentation.

So I wrote up a quick abstract draft:

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Can Steatite Accessory Minerals be used as a key to “fingerprinting” steatite quarries?

Steatite, an easily carved talc-rich metamorphic rock, has been used to make household objects for as long as people have been working with stone. Due to its high heat capacity, it was especially popular in Viking Age Scandinavia for making cooking pots and has been found even in settlement locations (such as Iceland) with no local sources of steatite. Archaeologists wishing to better understand which quarries were supplying which settlements have made many attempts over the years to use whole-rock trace-element geochemistry to determine the provenance of steatite household objects. However, many of these papers discuss the challenges inherent in trying to use whole-rock composition for a rock type which is known for being inhomogeneous at the outcrop scale. Therefore, this pilot study focuses on the accessory minerals present in the soapstone, particularity the opaque sulphide and oxide minerals, which are the phases most likely to contain many of those trace elements.

Laser-ablation ICP-MS trace-element composition maps of accessory minerals (and their surrounding matrix minerals) have been made from samples collected from a variety of Swedish and Norwegian steatite outcrops to determine the ways in which these minerals are or are not zoned with respect to their major and trace elements, and to investigate the differences in these patterns from one location to another in hopes of developing a more reliable way to quickly match steatite to its source quarry.
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And sent it off to my supervisor for comment. Today I got this reply:

"This abstract is absolutely excellent, Riia. It is so close to being a paper that could be presented orally! What do you think, Kamal? It would be ideal if you had just a couple of archaeological examples to use as test cases for this to be an oral presentation. As a poster, this is perfect. I have no corrections to offer. It is clear and interesting and well written as is."

So I just turned it in, with a big smile on my face.

This morning I saw an email from ResearchGate suggesting that they had found jobs I might be interested in (they are usually totally wrong about that), but I was having problems focusing on work, so I clicked on it to see what they had, and saw a Senior Scientist for Metamorphic Geology position with the Finnish Geological Survey (GTK), specifying that the location would be either Espoo, Kuopio, or Rovaniemi. Of these three, Espoo is not at all interesting--it is in the greater Helsinki area, which is way too far south and way too densely populated for my taste. Kuopio is in the middle of Finland (slightly further south than Umeå, Sweden (which is about three hours south of me), but inland, and so perhaps it gets better winters? Rovaniemi, on the other hand, is just north of the Arctic Circle, so, from my perspective, the most interesting of the set (but I don't know if either Rovaniem or Kuopio have SCA people).

Metamorphic geology is what I did my PhD on, and if LTU had a metamorphic geology research group instead of an ore geology research group, I would have stayed in research instead of switching to being a lab tech years ago. However, my recent application to the Norwegian geological survey didn't even get me an interview (my contact there tells me they had way more applications than expected), so I called the person listed in the ad and asked about it. I told him that I wanted to be certain that they wouldn't move my application into the reject pile straight away since I have been in the lab for some years and thus my field experience isn't recent. After asking me some questions about my experience he encouraged my application, saying they hadn't had many applicants yet.

Therefore I spent this evening revising my CV. I had pared it down quite a bit to make it all fit on just a few pages, and I wonder if that was a contribution to not getting an interview in Norway, so I put back in more details about my research, focusing on things that are relevant to metamorphic geology, which bumped it from 3 to 4 pages. Once that was done I had a look at their application page, and saw that this was one of those which require one to fill in text boxes for every single job or bit of education one has, showing start and end dates etc. At this point (17:40, Sweden time) I emailed the person I spoke to this morning with thanks for the call, and asked if GTK is one of those companies that puts most weight on the information in that form, or if it is an option to write "see CV" and skip that part? Half an hour later (or 19:13 Finnish time) I got a reply saying "I think that it is better to just upload the CV. If somebody questions it I will tell that it was my recommendation. Please upload also the list of your publications if it is not included in the CV. Lycka till!"

So I wrote up the cover letter, filled in some bare-bones info on their forms, along with "see CV", and submitted the application (including the requested publication list), then I sent another follow-up email with thanks and letting them know I had taken the advice.

It will be interesting to see if anything comes of it. The deadline for this application is 3 March, so I might actually hear something fairly soonish?

In my meeting with my thesis supervisor the other day I commented that one of my problems is that I get really into what I am doing with my data processing, and then I stay up till 02:00 working on it, and then I make myself go to work on time the next morning, and then the next afternoon I am too tired for more data processing. She suggested a brilliant solution: Hit the Ground Running. A technique she says that psychologists teach writers as a way to overcome writer's block. Instead of continuing to work long enough to "just finish this part", take a few notes about what you are doing that is so interesting, and where you want to go, and put it down for the night. Then, the next day you will be excited to start again. My "do yoga, go to bed alarm" went off at 21:00. It took a little while thereafter to remember this good advice, but now I have taken those quick notes, and am ready to hop back in the middle of this sample tomorrow. Hopefully, this trick works!

I didn't get the last load of wash out of the machine last night till well after midnight, and didn't manage to put down my phone and go to sleep till nearly 02:00, so it was no surprise that I slept till nearly 09:00. I have been making it to bed well before midnight all week, since J needs to be at work by 07:00, and I try to go to bed when she does, so that I can get more accomplished with my morning.

But this weekend her aunt in Kalix (about 45 minutes drive north of here) is getting married and J and the Priest's daughter are the only two witnesses. So she took off Friday after work, and I spent the evening mostly being useful (and a little reading DW and FB) and stayed up considerably later than has been my habit since she arrived in early June.

I woke up thinking about my research and the program fotoalbum, which will let one set it up so that it automatically assigns key words to the photos based on the names of the folders in which they are in. I haven't been using photoalbum for my laser maps yet--so far I have only used it to organise the museum artefacts. But, of course, it is a great tool, and if I really want to have a good understanding how how the different quarry samples are similar and how they are different I really should use it.

So instead of starting my day with a workout, as I have for the past seven days, I sat down to the computer and started creating the folder structure. I already have a table which organises the samples first into the orogeny (mountain building episode) in which the rocks were formed, their sub unit, which county, which quarry, which sub quarry (if any), the sample name, the sample number, and the date(s) they were analysed, so I just followed that structure from left to right, making a folder for everything in the first column, then opening each folder in turn and making a sub folder for everything in the next column, and so on. Till I got to the hard part, when I got down to the level of the folders for each analytical session. Then I have to pay attention, because, often, I analysed more than one sample on a given day, and for this to work for getting the sample name into the keywords, I need to have the data for each sample in its own appropriately located folder. This means opening each folder and copying over the relevant files to the new folder (better to copy, so I don't risk losing anything by getting distracted somewhere in the middle of this).

I managed to get the first seven (of 34) samples copied over, and then got hungry, so I took a break to eat, at which point I opened DW to read the new posts while I ate the last of that yummy Pear and Mango Custardy cake that I made the other day. Somehow that lead to also having some cheese, and some thinbread (the paper-thin Swedish yeast bread that I eat like crackers, but David breaks into small chunks and covers with milk for breakfast), and also reading one set of FB (till I hit the note from SocialFixer saying that if I want to keep reading another 50 posts I should press this button). I opted not to press that button, but instead commented on a couple of posts here, and decided to do my own post, as a way of letting myself know that I am done with social media for now, and should do other things next.

My alarm has been going off for a while to remind me that I should still do that workout, so my plan is to do that, and then either resume the coping of data into those folders straight away, or, perhaps, carve a bit on my soapstone pot first. Wish me luck that the rest of the day is a bit more productive.

If this works, then we should be able to see a photo of one of my epoxy-mounted sets of samples from soapstone quarries, which I attached to the trello card for the list of samples that need analysing, so that I can sit at the computer, pull out my phone, and see which rock chip is which sample, without the bother of bringing my office computer to the lab.




It could be useful to know if DW is able to access the Trello photo storage area on other occasions, since my free account needs me to point to an existing URL elsewhere to share a photo here. I can see it on the preview, but then, this computer is logged in to both Trello and DW. If anyone can't see the photo let me know...