kareina

Today during my yoga session I learned that while I am strong enough to get my legs off the ground for pendulum pose when they are crossed in a full lotus position, if my cat places only her two front paws on my thigh, that is enough additional weight that I am promptly sitting on the ground again!

I am still writing in chapter 3, with some detours in to parts of chapter 5 that hadn't been done yet, now that I have come to artefacts that were found very near source quarries. I really need to wrap this up and get on to chapter 2 and the discussion and conclusion chapter as soon as possible. But I am enjoying it--engaging with the artefacts, even virtually, is fun, and learning the geography of random corners of the country where they were found is also fun. So is making the figures. It is only the looming sense of overdue deadline I am not so fond of.

I am not doing much else right now. Well, on Monday when Keldor got home from work he suggested I take a break and join him in the forest, there being plenty of chanterelles to pick just now. I went along, but while he walked here, there, and everywhere picking lots of mushrooms, I stayed surprisingly near the car picking blueberries. 1.5 hours of squats later and I had more than 1.5 yogurt buckets worth of berries picked, and he'd filled his huge waist pack with mushrooms. We dried the berries (about 0.5 liters dried) to add to muesli later, and he cooked up the chanterelles straight away in butter, most of which to freeze for future meals, though he's eaten some already (I am not a huge fan, so I save them for those who are).

My Swedish is noticeably better these days. Funny how much it improves when one actually uses it. Nowadays when I write to museums for more information, I just do it automatically in Swedish, without even thinking about it and do most of the editing and grammar fixing myself, before I toss it into google translate to see if I missed any typoes that happen to be some other word.

Heard today that one of my friends in Tasmania has died. She is one who was at least as old as my mother, and didn't look at all young when we met, in 2003, so it isn't so surprising that only 20 years later she's gone, but it is sad. She had a facebook account but literally never posted anything on it, and I don't think she ever saw the chat messages I tried sending to her (she never replied), but she was delighted to see me when I was down there for a conference in 2015 or so, and she often pressed like on my FB posts, so I know she hadn't forgotten me. I hope my adventures brought her some amusement, and that her friends and loved ones are comforted with happy memories of time spent with her.

A year or so ago I tried downloading the DownDog yoga app on my phone, and that phone couldn't take it, so I uninstalled it, but had managed to get on their mailing list, and ignored and deleted their not very frequent messages as they arrived now and then, and just continued with my normal daily yoga routine. However, for some reason I happened to glance at one of their emails in early January announcing that they had a new app for High Intensity Interval Training. I had been feeling bad about how much time I spent in the autumn and early winter curled up on the couch with a good book and some food, and thinking I should start working out again, and, being curious, downloaded their new app.

And loved it. The new phone has no issues at all with downloading the videos, the workouts are totally customise-able, and interesting enough to keep me doing them. This prompted me to try downloading their original yoga app, and I love it even more. I am downloading their "advanced" yoga workouts, and they mean it. In every session I can do most of the poses without problem, but there is always one or two in the middle which are still a bit beyond my current abilities. In other words, it is actually forcing me to challenge myself, after (stops to count) 16 years of daily yoga that was more along the lines of maintaining than challenging. I am loving it.

Since I tend to do yoga just before bedtime, and am often kinda tired by then, I started with short sessions (20 min), but they felt like they were too fast, so I upped it by five, and then again, and again. The last couple of days I have done the 45 minute sessions, and they are still feeling like they are over so soon after starting, so I might just do a longer one tomorrow.

Add to that my 3 to 5 days a week meeting Johan for acroyoga, plus Swedish folk dance on Sundays and Herrskaps dance on Wednesdays, plus I actually made time to walk to work one day last week and biked in yesterday, and my log says that so far I am managing 2.6 hours a day of exercise this month. It will be interesting to see if I can keep this up and what the average looks like at the end of the month.

In other news, I have finally received my official notice--my job will end on 2 December. I have known this was coming since April, and thus I have been applying for work here and there when I see something interesting. I will keep doing that till either I find something, or the job is getting closer to ending, and if I haven't landed something my then I will expand the search to things that aren't as appealing.

When I walked into our music/dance/living room tonight to do my yoga I looked out my window and saw a beautiful clear stary night with a large, bright moon causing the snow to sparkle. So I did the logical ting and bundled into,my snow pants, boots, down coat, hats and mittens and went out to enjoy it. There is something magical about doing yoga outside on such a night; I love it! -15 C is so much nicer than those super heated rooms some people do yoga in.

I stayed out till some clouds started coming in. They didn't take long to cover the sky, and, if I am very lucky they will snow on us. Now I am going to do a bit more yoga, witout clumpy boots on, and then go to sleep; there is lots I want to do tomorrow.

I felt like doing something a bit different for ( today's meal )

Yesterday during the day I didn't accomplish much, other than heading out to the store where I'd purchased a lamp the day before and trading it in for one that works this time. the rest of the day time was spent goofing off on line and hanging out with friends. However, starting around 21:00 I finally found my motivation and settled into work. The evening's task is one I'd been putting off, but it really needed doing--I went through all of my various data files I've generated and checked them for consistency. The single file that contains all of my microprobe results now actually has the correct information in the field stating if the analysis was bad or good, and which phase it turned out to be, and the total number of bad and good analyses for each phase (one file for each type) now actually matches the total number of analyses I've done--there are no more cases of a single analysis appearing in both the good and the bad files for a phase.
It is amazing how many little data-entry errors can creep in when the data accumulates a bit here, a bit there, over the course of a year. That major cleaning, which I worked on non-stop and without noticing time was elapsing, took until 03:00, and was a necessary first step to today's task.

However, once I finished working last night I didn't actually choose the sensible course of turning off the computer and heading home. Instead I hung out with clovis_t on line, caught up on reading Lj/Facebook/blogs, and finally sent out questions for people in that question meme that has been going around. I finally went home and did my yoga for the day at 32:16, followed by reading my 1000. It is a good thing I define "day" with respect to when I sleep, rather than what the clock happens to say, or my number of days in a row daily yoga and 1000 words a day of geologic literature read wouldn't look nearly so good. (I just checked, I've done daily yoga for 2,177 days in a row, and read my 1000 for 220 days in a row.)

Today I slept in till nearly 13:00, but when I arrived at uni actually got straight to work--today's task was sorting out the problem sample. One of the experiments run by a predecessor a decade ago happens to have two different capsules in a single holder. Based upon the way the names are written on the holder we'd assumed that the one on the left was bulk composition "H", and the other "L". However, I'd noticed some time back that a graph showing the talc compositions for this sample show two very distinct clumps, with the old data from a decade ago plotting in position A for the H composition, and position B for the L composition, while my data plotted the opposite. A few weeks back I tried checking the other mineral phases for that sample, to see if the opposite plotting pattern is consistent, and the sample is just miss-labeled. But when I did I was getting a hodge-podge of results, and gave up in disgust. Strangely, now that I've done the major clean up of the data and I'm plotting *only* the true and correct data, It is working much better. To make it easier on myself, I first changed the names of my analysis points so that instead of "H" and "L" in the names I now have "W" and "J", then I plotted for each sample the old data for H in red triangles and the old data for L in red squares, and my new data for "J" in blue triangles, and my new data for "W" in blue squares. Sure enough, all of the triangles plot in one clump, and all of the squares in the other, for every phase present in this sample. Problem solved. Then it was a simple matter of changing each "J" to an "H" and each "W" to an "L" and update all of the files appropriately (changing the codes to show which symbol mathmatica will use to plot these as appropriate). This task took only 3.5 hours, before taking a food break, and now it is only 22:22--the day is young, and I've got time to go through and use mathmatica to do the calculations on the average composition for each experiment so that I can put them onto the poster for the Budapest conference at the end of the month.

This evening clovis_t was out (lucky boy, having finished his thesis & degree, has developed a social life, whilst I, who am still working on my thesis, gets to stay home), so I was on my own for yoga (one of our friends agreed to do yoga with him while he was out, so that he wouldn't miss out on it). While I very much enjoy the yoga-as-shared-time that we normally have, this evening I very much appreciated the yoga-as-solitary-meditation. There is nothing quite like not having anyone to talk to to really make one aware of how one's body feels, and to encourage one to push the stretch that little bit further, and to hold some poses that little bit longer. It felt so good, I wound up doing a couple of extra minutes before I realized that the normal elapsed time (23 minutes a day, this year) had been and gone.

So, how is my thesis going? Still not fast enough to suit me. Granted, I did lose more time over the weekend than I meant to. Sunday morning I came up with a cunning plan. You see, in the time I've not been attending fighter practice the site we use has replaced the dreadful port-a-loos with a building with real flush toilets, sinks, a shower, and electric lights. Therefore I decided that rather than staying home while clovis_t went off to practice without me, I'd go along, bring my computer, and get work done with people nearby, and, perhaps, get in a bit of social time myself. Alas, the silly folk who installed the new building forgot one very important detail. Electric outlets. There is not one. Not in the toilet stalls, not in the janitorial closet, not in the shower room, and not in the hand-washing room. We even checked behind the mirror. There are also no outlets on any exterior portion of the new building, nor on any of the older buildings. None at all. Alas, this meant that I managed only 30 minutes of uni work while at fighter practice, because that is how much battery time my computer (which is never called upon to operate on battery power for longer than it takes to shut down if there is a power failure at the house) was able to manage. I did, however, enjoy the afternoon, and made far more progress on my sewing project than I would have if I'd have been working. And I did accomplish a reasonable amount Sunday evening after we got home--indeed more than I managed Saturday. Between the not-enough-but-still-some work over the weekend, and today, I've managed to mostly finish up the "other regions" chapter of the thesis--one more sample to go on that, but my eyes were too tired this evening, and yoga beckoned. With luck I will finish that one tomorrow, and make good progress on the southwest coast samples as well. It would be so nice to be done with this part!

Today I managed over seven hours of uni work, despite doing another two loads of laundry, and running three different dishwasher loads over the course of the day. This is a *much* better total than I've managed recently, and I am encouraged. First I finished incorporating my advisor's suggested edits, which decreased chapter two by another 423 words, then I applied for the job I mentioned in my last (friend's locked) post, then returned to chapter five, which is now longer by 218 words and two figures. My 1000 words have been read, and I've done some exercise, so there is nothing left between me and sleep save our daily yoga ritual. It is amazing how much the daily yoga helps--it makes me feel better physically, emotionally, and mentally. It is such a small time commitment. Even with the annual one minute increase we are only up to 23 minutes of yoga a day, but I love the fact that we've never missed a day (though we have, on many an occasion, done it as late as 25:00 or even 26:00 on our way to bed).

Tomorrow it would be nice to finish chapter five. Wish me luck!