Money worries

I got paid!!!!!!

Sorry, but I am excited. It has been a LONG year of not being entirely sure where the rent is coming from. The problem is that the university's casual payment system requires that you submit your timesheet by the 15th of the month, meaning you only ever get half that month's pay by the end of it. As rent is due on the first of the month regardless, this is a pain. In August I actually had to request an "emergency cheque" be issued. However, this month I got my October pay and the second half of September as well, and am very excited to have money left over. Having the Kiwi around is helping too - very nice to have a housemate who consistently pays rent (and if he notices I'm worried about money towards the end of the month, he always pays early, which is a huge blessing).

In other good news, I just got the unofficial word that I did "very well" on my thesis. Official marks are not released till March (!) but I am very very happy to hear I did well. 'Twas a lot of work. So here's official thanks to Steph, Del, Claire and the Kiwi for their help with editing/data analysis! Think it made a huge difference to the end result.

Back into the fMRI scanner this afternoon to run one more subject, but the bigwigs for this project were up from London last week and so the worst of the stress (on my part) is now over. Spent the day with a film crew following me around! That was a new one and will probably never happen again. Jordan I ain't. Was very weird having boom mikes hovering above me and giant bright lights shining in my face as I ran subjects. However, the film crew was lovely and easy to get on with, and I learned some interesting things about their jobs (plus they let me ramble on about what I will be doing for my PhD!) So in the end, despite the worry, it was quite a fun day and all went relatively well. (And by relatively well, I mean the program for the scanner didn't crash until AFTER the bigwigs had left - although the film crew was still looking over our shoulders!)