kareina

My stress levels have gone down this evening--I actually managed to finish the figure I was totally re-doing. My one of my colleagues had given me a geologic map (pdf) of the region within which my field area is located, and another had given me a jpg of the map of just my field area (since it is also his field area), and together they were going to be figures 1 and 2 for the extended abstract I am preparing to submit to the SGA conference in August. However, when shrunk enough to fit onto the page the text was too small, and the one map was too colourfull, and the other black and white only, and I was not happy with the result, nor could I find a pleasing page layout for having them as two separate figures.

Therefore I took the time to trace these maps in CorelDraw, so that I could set my own colour scheme, that applied to both maps, and arrange them in a pleasing order. I managed to finish that task this evening, so now I have Fig. 1A showing my field area, Fig. 1B showing the outlines of Norway, Sweden, and Finland, with a rectangle showing the region within which my field area is located (Skellefte District), and Fig. 1C showing the geology of the Skellefte District, with a rectangle showing the location of my field area.

I have put it into the abstract, where it fits nicely on a page of its own (just room enough below the maps for the figure caption) between sections two and three of the text, and sent it off to my co-authors for comment. Assuming they are all ok with it I will submit the abstract tomorrow (deadline is the 8th).

The really impressive part about finishing this today is that I lost the whole afternoon to errands. My resident visa to live in Sweden expires in July, so today we took in the paperwork to apply for an extension to that visa (this is the last time that I will have to do this--assuming they approve this one I can apply for citizenship the following year in July). That errand took fully two hours, as there were so many other folk waiting to turn in their own paperwork for things.

Proof that I live in a small town: One of the other people waiting was a colleague from Uni--a geophysicist who also works in my field area doing remote sensing stuff. It was fun to run into someone I know there.

After we finished up with the visa extension application we went to a hunting store in the neighbourhood (having done the 30 minute drive out to Boden we decided to do the other errand we have been putting off) and ordered some forest skis. Not the skinny little things that are meant to go fast in groomed tracks--these are wider and intended for heading out into untouched snow in the forest.

There aren't any groomed ski tracks in our area, but there is plenty of forest, so these skis will be more useful than the other kind. But they don't actually keep them in stock, so we just placed an order (and took the ski poles with us). In theory they will come in next week, but I will be down in Boliden collecting rock samples, so I won't see them till the following week.

I have finished my yoga, and I have copied the files I worked on today on my home computer over to my office computer via the remote desktop, so it is time to wish you all a good night and go get some sleep.

Yesterday I posted to my other blog about some large garnets mentioned in an article I was reading. Soon thereafter I got a comment from another geologist, who said that he's often been underwhelmed when taken to see large garnets, which are rarely as big as "they" claim they will be. So I e-mailed the author of the paper (who is at an Australian University) and asked if he had any photos. He sent me some, with permission to post them on the blog, and commented that he'd heard that I'd moved to Italy to start a post doc with my boss (mentioned by name), and suggested that the garnet-location in question isn't that far from Milan and I should go visit it.
I was actually surprised that he knew who I was and where I was going for work, because until I was given his paper by my boss, I hadn't yet been made aware of his name. However, having enjoyed his paper, and seen the list of other things he researches, you can bet that I'll remember it and look for other publications of his--he does interesting stuff!