kareina

This has been yet another busy week full of progress on projects in addition to the normal round of social activities.

We have nearly finished a new wooden ice chest to take with us to Double Wars (we leave on Friday)--my old wooden ice chest is in quite bad shape from years of heavy use and several intercontinental shipping experiences, so it is time to replace it.

I finished nålbinding my sun hat, felted it, and have sewn it to a frame to dry in the shape I wish it to be. Sadly, I forgot to get photos of "before"--it was huge, floppy, and the brim was very, very ruffled--it covered my entire head with folds hanging loosely to my shoulders. After felting the brim was still ruffled, and was floppier than I want it to be, so I dipped it in water containing cornstarch, ran it through the centrifuge in the laundry room, and sewed it to the frame, where it sits yet. The sewing process got the brim to flatten out and become large--it now looks very much like the straw hat I had to leave behind when I left Italy because I didn't have space to bring it on the plane, and couldn't pack it safely into boxes to be shipped. Hopefully it will still look like that when I take it off the frame.

I have managed to accomplish some armour repair that needed doing, and even cleaned off some sword marks from the front of my shield. I had to, really. One of the black sword marks just happened to be positioned over the closed eye of the sleeping cat, exactly perpendicular to and centered upon the eye, so that it looked like the cat had and X instead of an eye--just like a cartoon dead creature. Very funny looking, but so not acceptable! (again, I didn't think to take a photo--somehow I never do. Then again, do I really want photographic evidence of a dead cat on my shield?).

We got the last of the fitting done for my 12th Century underdress done--there is just a bit of seam finishing left to do on that one. I did this one with the really, really long sleeves that runch up on the forearms. The upper arm is only just exactly wide enough to put my arm in it, which puts the square underarm gusset exactly in my underarm, giving me a good fit *and* full range of motion. We got the body to be exactly the same diameter as my ribs just under my breasts, which means that the gown is fully supporting--I can jump while wearing it and my breasts don't go anywhere. Yay to not needing to wear a bra! When I take in my bliaut so that it, too, fits properly across the shoulders and ribs this outfit is going to be so comfortable. Granted, it will then be very important to neither loose or gain weight in such a way as my diameter over ribs or upper arms changes, but since I am quite happy with my current shape this should be easy enough to manage (not losing any mass shouldn't be an issue--there isn't a whole lot available to loose over my ribs, anyway).

On Thursday we went to a sewing workshop with the local Folk Music and Dance group. The project of the evening was a traditional man's shirt, so that archinonlive and the other musicians will have appropriate costume for upcoming performances. I was very delighted to see that fashions in Northern Sweden never really changed. While the shirt cuffs are late period in design, with the full sleeve gathered to a buttoned cuff, the torso and sleeves are a straight rectangles, with a square underarm gusset--the same style they have been using for many centuries! We did take photos of some of the completed shirts that were available as models, and of the cutting pattern we settled on--used every scrap of that bit of wool--it was necessary to take one of the underarm gussets from the neck hole, because the end of the fabric wasn't cut straight at the store. I might make time to post those photos another day.

Friday we had a couple of people over for a gaming night as part of a mini gaming convention that a friend of ours runs. Sadly, our weekend was so booked we got to play in only the one game, but it was quite fun. We played While the World Ends, which was written by the guy who organized this mini con. This is the game we played at Gothcon early this month that I so enjoyed. ( It was fun this time, too )

This makes twice now that I have played this game, and I really enjoy it. It is much more like reading a book (or even watching a movie) than traditional role playing adventure games, but it is a shared activity with friends. Even though I think of myself as a reader not a writer, with the formal structure of the game it is easy to come up with things my character might do towards achieving his goals, and so it is easy to set the scene. I recommend it to anyone who enjoys gaming, story telling, reading, and just spending time with friends

Saturday morning was an SCA bbq and fighter practice. After practice the local knight authorized me, so if he has done whatever paperwork goes with that I am good to fight at Double War next week. In the evening we had a party for the choir. Not many of us could make it, which made it a fun night, as we were able to ( play games )

Sunday we didn't have fighter practice, since it was on Saturday this week, so we used the time for projects, and also skipped the folk music session in favour of project time. However, we did attend folk dancing in the evening. This is the last practice before our performance, the day after we return from double war, so we had live music and everything, and we ran through the performance set three full times, working out last minute details to make it all flow smoothly and prettily. I also picked up the costume I will borrow for the show, which will need slight modification to get the vest to fit me properly.

My goal to pedal at least 10 km a day, five days a week is progressing nicely. I didn't actually manage a ride a week ago Friday because archinonlive had the day off of work and I spend the time with him instead, but the week before that I did an extra 10 km, so it has all averaged out. I did manage this Friday, but only barely--I got distracted actually working on that paper from my research, and suddenly it was 16:00 and I hadn't gone yet, and it was necessary to start some soup to feed myself and the gamers. Luckily, about the time I went to the kitchen to start cooking archinonlive came home from work, so I left him to cook the soup, and I went for a quick lap around the lake (which is not quite 10 km, but I had done a bit more than 10 the day before), getting back just as the food was ready.

In other news, I have booked my tickets back to Australia--I will be flying on 30 June, the day my visitor visa expires here (assuming that there are no volcanically caused flight cancellations then, of course). I land in Sydney on 1 July, which is a Friday. I still need to book travel for within Australia, but the tentative plan is to head straight to Canberra to head that Monday to the Swedish Embassy there to submit my visa application to move to Sweden to live permanently with archinonlive (which paperwork *must* be submitted in one's home country--one may not apply for such a visa from within Sweden). Once the paperwork is filed with the Embassy I plan to visit Melbourne to see my mother and step-sister and her family (mom will be visiting Australia for around a month, so that timing is nice). Then I will go to Tassie to await the visa approval. While there I plan to meet with my PhD advisor and finish up paper(s) for publication. I have no idea yet when I shall be able to return to Sweden--the paperwork processing on their end could take a couple of weeks, or many months. I will be renting a room from mushroom_maiden while her usual housemate is in Iceland. With luck the timing will work out for me to head back to Sweden before the housemate returns from Iceland.

Part way thorough my PhD program I decided to start tracking how I was spending my hours, and set up a spreadsheet to keep track of half a dozen categories

*uni work
*exercise
*reading/e-mail/livejournal/etc. or, more rarely, watching a movie, play or concert
*useful tasks
*social
*sleep

looking back over the graph most of these categories have very wavy lines--up one month, down the next. There is only one category which shows a consistent downward trend, and that is sleep. The first four months of my record I averaged more than 8 hours of sleep every night. Then spring arrived, and I started getting less sleep each night, with the average dropping to right on, or only barely below, 8 hours/night for the next 7 months. Then I hit the need-to-finish-the-thesis-ASAP crunch, and sleep dropped to only about 7.5 hours/month (other than the month I finished, where it dropped to less than 6.5 hours/night average for the whole month (keep in mind that half of that month was thesis finishing, the other half was traveling, and I am pretty certain that I got more sleep while traveling, so the low was certainly even lower than that!). Since finishing my thesis a year ago and moving to Milan I've been averaging between 7.2 and 7.6 hours of sleep/night (looking at the totals for each month as a whole).

This explains why I've generally got dark circles under my eyes, and now I'm wondering if I'd have better luck keeping my hours of uni work/week as high as I want it to be if I were getting more sleep. Therefore I'm going to try an experiment--with a new month starting in a couple of days, I'm going to see if I can push my average hours of sleep for August to (or even over) 8 hours/day, just to see what it does to my energy levels and uni work. This will be an interesting month to try this because I'll be traveling for part of it, and when I'm not traveling it will likely be way hot, which could interfere with my being able to sleep at all. I'll try to remember to report back on the topic at the end of the month.

In other news, it was a lovely day today--it rained this morning, and never got hot all day. I was able to walk to the store which carries the cheese I like (a 30 minute walk, each way), and the cheese, butter and yoghurt was all still nice and cool when I got it out of my backpack when I got home!

Today's uni progress report: Started a word document for a paper that will summarize the results of my research here, using a paper written by my predecessor as a template (at my boss'es suggestion), filled in a bit of data in bullet points in the outline, then spent some time processing data. Confirmed that the experiment that I'd started before leaving and which had the heat turned off just before I left had, in fact, been re-heated and it is going fine--we should be able to download that one next week. Booked time for the microprobe for the following week to analyze that experiment.

Now it is nearly midnight, and I still need to read my 1000 words of geologic literature and do my yoga before bed, so if I want to get more sleep I'm either going to have to sleep in in the morning, or get a nap at some point...

One of my Facebook friends asked all of us what our goals are for 2010 and how we intend to accomplish them. I hadn't yet thought in those sorts of terms, but now that she's mentioned it, I thought it might be interesting to spend some time this morning doing just that.

Uni:

* Publish papers from my PhD research
- finish up the modelling I was having problems with when last I looked at it, or figure out another approach
- re-write the paper on the growth of the garnets from the southwest coast of Tassie including the results from that modelling
- write the paper summarizing Tassie’s Cambrian Metamorphic history

* Publish paper from my post-doc research
- run more experiments
- analyse the results and compare with the previously published literature
- write paper about it

* Return to reading 1000 words from the geologic literature every day (I confess for having quit for the holidays)

* Line up next post-doc (or teaching position?) to start in January of 2011
- actually publish those papers as above
- get in contact with people doing interesting research in interesting places and see about working with them

SCA:

* help get Milan shire up and running
- do more advertising for our weekly dance practice
- help with garb-making sessions for new people
- help organize our first official event

* Kingdom level
- choose events worth spending € on airfare and attend them

* projects
- make Clovis the new tunic from that decadent green herringbone wool purchased at Brytex
- make me an undergown from the decadence herringbone linen purchased at Brytex
- replace lacing on bileaut
- finish blue silk/wool tunic
- finish embroidery on black wool tunic
- finish Colvis’s cloak

*Health/fitness
- keep doing my daily yoga and morning situps/pushups etc.
- get out for walks or rollerblade 3 to 7 times a week
- make it to the Alps for adventures once a month (or go on adventures whilst travelling other interesting places)

On Thursday evening I realized that a major factor in my not having accomplished much uni work for the past couple of days was that I hadn't set myself any specific goals as to what task I'd undertake next--in the absence of something specific to do and knowing only that I needed to do "lots of uni work", it was terribly easy to let myself get distracted with various chores around the house, e-mail/livejournal/facebook/blogs and other such diversions. Once I realized that I instituted a new "rule"--I now set myself a specific goal for my next work session before I need it. This means that before I go to bed at night I know what specific task I shall be doing for uni work in the morning, and before I leave the computer to take a break during the day I make a note of what specific task I shall be doing when I return.

It is amazing how instantaneous the transition was. After a week (or two?) of little to no motivation, I woke up around 06:30 Friday morning early and inspired. I started the day with a jog "around the block" and then settled into my assigned uni task for the morning. Took a nap from about 8:30 to 9:00, then got up, did more uni work, baked some cookies to take with us,and when in to uni around 15:00 as clovis_t had some errands to run (one of which was picking up his Honour's Thesis, which is now bound, so the final step of his degree--turning a copy in to the library and to the history department is now complete!). Once at uni I worked non-stop on tasks that couldn't be done at home (since they involved the use of microscopes and my actual rock samples, rather than just the photographs thereof) till time to go pick up a friend at 18:30. We made a brief stop by the SCA social night on our way to the Contra Dance, and then spend a very fun evening dancing to the music of Crowfoot, a band visiting Tasmania from Quebec. They were fabulous! There were just the three of them, but their music has such richness it sounded like there were more instruments than that.

Woke up early again this morning, started some washing, did my morning sit-ups,and have just finished reading e-mail. Time to start on today's uni task...

Over the past few days I've been cleaning up chapter five, with an emphasis on getting the figures consistent, making certain that a figure exists for each figure reference, and there are references in the text for each figure, and coming up with a consistent approach to what things need to be illustrated. In the course of this, I also edited the text as I went, but I didn't bother to do daily word-counts or figure counts. Having just looked at the new totals, I am pleased to report that there are 24 new figures and 418 new words in the thesis! (Note: in many cases the graphs for these figures have existed all along, but they hadn't been referenced in the thesis do to a lack of consistency on my part during the initial writing stages--these things happen. All too often). This brings Chapter Five (timing of metamorphism) of my thesis to a total of 16,846 words and 112 figures. I'll want to give it one more read/edit before sending it off to my advisor, and then I can devote my energies to the all-important discussion and conclusions section of the thesis. I am seriously pushing my (oft revised) deadlines, but there is a *chance* that I'll get that far enough along to create a draft abstract before the end of the month. *If* I manage that goal, and turn in the abstract draft to the uni, they can begin the process of arranging for examiners, so that they are ready for my submitting the complete document at the end of February. This goal is still possible, but it will be a challenge.