kareina

Oh, dear, has it been that long since I typed up an update? My lifestyle really has changed since moving to Sweden, with far, far, far fewer hours spent on the computer.

On Wednesday morning last week I finally got around to taking the measurements of that black piece of linen and working out a possible cutting diagram in CorelDraw to turn the fabric into a skirt for me. I had much fun working out a different approach than I normally take, which is even more efficient with the fabric, and was quite surprised when I looked up when I was done to see that three hours had elapsed. When archinonlive came home from work that evening I showed him the pattern and he agreed that it looked workable, and that he was happy to do the sewing on machine for me (since it is modern clothes I don't mind if it is machine stitched, so long as the quality doesn't suffer). However, we agreed that first we should cut out the gores for the wool tunic we made him for 12th Night, but ran out of time to finish, so he wore it with slit sides instead of having side gores. After we'd cut the gores we discussed the fact that there was enough remaining wool to make a nice heavy bag suitable for decorating and carrying things at events. This reminded him that he has been wanting a bag with pockets in it to carry some of his musical instruments.

The next thing we knew we had started that project, instead of the skirt. Can I tell you how much fun he is to work with on projects? We took some lovely blue cotton he has and made the internal pockets for the bag, fitting each one to exactly the section of flute, recorder, or other wood wind (what is the name of the one that has a wide end far from the mouth, and one blows into a reedy thing that sticks into the end closest to the mouth? He doesn't know the English word for it--does that sound like a shawm, or is it something else?) that it is meant to carry. For the pocket fitting it was very helpful to have two sets of hands to play with, and as soon as he'd done a bit of the machine sewing we then had a couple of places which are better done by hand so that we could both stitch at once.

We managed to completely machine-stitch the bag together that evening, and the next two nights we both did the hand finishing (using more of the cotton we did the lining with to cover the seams--by sewing it to the bag when we assembled it and then turning it over the seams and hand-finishing it the whole bag looks like it is hand done. We are both quite pleased with the results, and it is a good way to carry all of those instruments.

On Saturday we went to our normal gaming session, which was quite fun. Afterwards they asked him for help salvaging a damaged hard drive, so a bunch of us walked back over here, and he spent some time digging boxes out of the computer server closet looking for something he needed to try to deal with the problem. I stayed out of the way while he did that by teaching one of our friends basic nålbinding. After everyone left he and I took the stack of boxes that had been brought out of the closet and organized them into piles of computer stuff and other categories. With all of those boxes out of the closet the closet is revealed to be quite large! The plan is to move the server itself to the other side of the closet so that the closet pole is available for SCA costumes.

We have been spending some time each day since then going through those boxes to separate out the things that he wants to get rid of, get out the things he wants to keep and should be accessible, and better pack for storage things that he wants to be kept but can be stored most of the time (like christmas stuff). In and amongst the things we've rescued from the closet are some cute stuffed animals that he made many years ago. They are now perched on the shelf by our bed where most of my stuffed animals will also go when they arrive.

We now have his boxes mostly removed from the kitchen, which is good, because this has been dedicated as the staging area for when my stuff arrives. He still has the largest pile, the boxes of computer stuff, to go through in the living room. But we have invested in a good set of shelves for the server closet, so when things go back in they will be easier to access in the future. The original estimate for delivery I had from the guy in Scotland who picked up my things from clovis_t said 28 March. More recently he forwarded me a message from the company which will actually be delivering on this end which said 29 March. I haven't heard anything since then, but to be on the safe side I moved my computer to the kitchen this morning so that if they did arrive I would actually hear them when they came to the door.

They didn't show up (not really surprised about that), so this afternoon I sent company #2 an email, and the lady there replied promptly saying she would chase up the appropriate person and get back to me. I didn't hear from her today, but perhaps I will in the morning.

I did my Swedish exam for the second term class (chapters 4 to 7 of the text book) on Friday. This exam was not as easy as the last. Remember that last time they warned us in advance that we would need to do an essay describing our typical day, so I wrote one out, got it edited, and then memorized it, and wrote it out verbatim on the exam. This time they told us that they would not tell us in advance the essay topic (which turned out to be a discussion of our time spent in Sweden). I probably should have prepared a bunch of sample sentences on a variety of topics anyway, but lacking direction of a topic I didn't make time for it. As a result the exam was much harder to do this time. Many of the things I would have liked to have said in the essay I could not say due to my lack of vocabulary. Instead I searched the other sections of the exam for sample sentences which I could modify to fit the assignment once I ran out of things I knew how to say without help.

I accidentally missed the first class of the new term. I forgot that classes started up again promptly after the exam, and vaguely remembered that this term class is always on Tuesday and Thursday, and I didn't actually look at my calender on Monday till late in the day. Then I recalled that while most of the term class meets on Tuesday and Thursday this week it meets on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Opps. Oh well, I did e-mail my teacher to apologize for that. Last term the first class of the term was the day after the final, and only two of us actually showed up for class, so perhaps it is normal for people to miss it.

In addition to sewing and re-arranging and organizing his stuff in anticipation of the arrival of my stuff we have continued with our normal round of folk dancing and choir *and* I have two editing jobs to do this week! One due Thursday and the other on Sunday. The editing is fun, and I am learning interesting things (as one must do--one cannot edit a science paper without first understanding what they did!), but it does help the week feel even more hectic than usual. Though having two jobs is good. When I hit a particularly hard to edit sentence in one I have the option of switching to the other paper instead of checking email to take a break. This is amazingly effective in terms of keeping me productive!
Now I just need to make time to return to my own writing, too.

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!

( first I discourse on the subject of today's post )

Then I do my progress report for the day in a more public setting than behind a cut:

Today's note-taking added only 494 words to the thesis, but skimming over the articles from which the notes were taken gave me a fair bit of useful information. No doubt if I hadn't been lacking motivation to work for all of the morning and afternoon I'd have accomplished more. Oh well, tomorrow I don't have the option to let the daylight hours slip away without working--I need to meet one of the departmental post-docs at Uni to learn the correct method for crushing samples to extract detrital zircons so that we can determine the ages at which they formed, and therefore have an idea of the oldest age the sandstone in which they accumulated could have formed (which is some time before it got buried deeply enough to metamorphose into my much prettier than a sandstone samples). It will also be useful to see if the zircons are the same age as my old generation of monazites, since they could have formed in an earlier episode of metamorphism, or they could have been detrital (already existed and got deposited with the sand/mud which ultimately became my rocks).