Things are busy busy. This month is going to be insane.

I am going to write another list: everything has changed since last post, and anyway I find it sort of calming.

1. Get paper submitted (tomorrow)
2. Kingston for 4 days to give a talk at a conference (June 7-11)
3. Kinda sorta triple booked (Stag and Doe {weird Ontario thing to make your friends pay for your wedding}, gig in Toronto, beach with Sandeep and Christine... not sure how that will all pan out) (June 16)
4. Defend :/ (June 22) (Date got changed due to committee availability)
5. Post-defense party! (ditto)
6. Immediately leave for portaging trip (June 24-28)
7. somehow get moved out (stuff shipped or stored) (June 30)
8. Melissa's birthday party in TO (June 30)
9. Canada Day Hip/New Pornographers gig (July 1)
10. Interview (July 2)
11. Leave for UK (July 7)

I also have to get everything sorted for leaving, get a few more manuscripts on their way, get a bit more data collected, make sure my projects are finished or someone else can keep them going.... it will probably all work out fine but right now it is looking pretty scary.

That said, my supervisor suddenly has nothing but time for me and is prioritizing submitting all my stuff that's been languishing forever (!) so I will take it! It would be great to have a couple more things on my CV for postdoc application purposes. Extra effort now will hopefully pay big dividends.

HOWEVER, I did get to go to Alberta for a week after a very burnout-inducing few months and it was awesome!! Lovely Lana and Paul wedding, saw lots of people I haven't seen for ages (even if half of them didn't recognize me until I started laughing), hung out with Steph and the Remkes Family and spent a couple of days in Rocky. It was extremely hard to drag myself away. Good thing dad drove me to the airport or I might have "accidentally" missed the bus.

BUT, for the first time ever, I had someone to pick me up from the airport at the other end! Sandeep not only came to pick me up but then brought me back to their place for dinner and booze. It is the first time I have ever returned to Guelph and not been 100% depressed for at least a week. Having a friend or two makes a huge difference. I don't know why it was practically nothing but toads for the first three years (with a few notable exceptions) but now the awesome people are coming out of the woodwork, but I will certainly take it.

Oooh, also - got my knee MRI. It was at 9pm at night and was kinda weird. A). I had to stick the wrong end in the scanner! Never had a scan that didn't involve my brain. B). They made me undress! Had to wear an open-backed hospital gown. WEIRD. But anyway, I guess the results take about a week so hopefully I will soon have some idea what the problem is. Unfortunately the outcome will likely be that nothing much will help, but I just want to know what is going on.

So I finally went to the doctor...

He thinks I have a torn meniscus (cartilage) in my knee. Awesome. However, that explains the pain, popping noises, stiffness etc. He says it's not a bad case (no swelling or locking) but I have to go to physio anyway. Annoying because you have to pay up front, although at least it will be reimbursed 80%...

Other than that, just bemoaning my lack of a social life/social support in Guelph and waiting for something good to maybe eventually happen.

Sunny day, sweeping the clouds away

Had a nice day today, even though it involved about six hours of marking exams. My housemates took me to St. Jacob's Market (which is largely Mennonite, hence the horses and buggies on the road). I bought super garlicky hummus and red pepper jelly and lots of berries. Then we had apple fritters and coffee, and they took me to buy groceries (no hauling them home on foot!) So nice to get out of Guelph, even for a few hours... it was cold but sunny and I was so happy to get some fresh air. I don't even notice that I spend all my time in my room or at the lab until I finally get to do something else.

I'm halfway through long answer question 3 out of 6 - still hoping to have this all (or mostly all) out of the way by Reading Week so I can take the week off from TAing at least.

Reflections on a Pizza-Cone

Hmmmm. Just was looking through old photos of me on Facebook (sometimes I do this and wonder what someone who didn't know me would gather just based on these photos... which is less self-obsessed than it sounds because sometimes I do go through the photos of relative strangers and see what I can figure out about them. Oh social networking, life is so much easier now that I don't have to just casually peer through windows while out for a walk when I am curious about the lives of others).

Anyway, long asides aside, I saw the set of photos posted almost exactly a year ago, after I went to New York for the first time. In fact, I saw a picture of us with pizza cones, and only last weekend I saw that exact same shop (now closed, boo) because Helena and I hopped into the city on the weekend to check out the charity shops. And that is so weird. A year ago I spent 18 hours total in a car on a three-day weekend to head into NYC, and I had NO IDEA that 365 days later I could casually jump on a train and for 1.5 hours and $14 each way go to the city whenever I wanted. Amazing. Makes me wonder what this time next year will look like - barring disaster, it's not inconceivable that I could be finishing/finished and...??? Stuck in Guelph, off on a awesome postdoc, scampering off to Oxford? Who knows. Should be interesting to find out, though.

It also occurs to me that is it difficult to overstate how much happier I am this year. It's pretty tangible: 8 blog posts for all of 2010?! Yeah, that was not a good year. Couldn't even bring myself to write about it. Stuck in Guelph, very few people who genuinely cared about me in town, Ph.D. projects going incredibly slowly, being constantly abandoned by Guelph-based "friends"... awesome. Obviously nothing earthshattering or tragic, but it's pretty excellent to be living somewhere I enjoy (except for the stupid pollution - I have conjunctivitis to rival London, yuck. No contact lenses for me) and having ACTUAL care-about-me awesome friends, and fun work... it's amazing.

Yep, am really having a great time at work these days. Sad but true, Helena and I both spent the entire weekend in the lab (well, 1pm-6 or 7pm, anyway, both days). Got a couple of projects I'm keen to get moving, and some EEG data to analyze, and since both experiment design and data analysis are my idea of fun, had a pretty great weekend. Sad, but I gotta own my nerdiness since it sure ain't going away.

Qualifying Exam

I passed my qualifying exam!!!! I think it went really well (all things considered) and spent the first half of yesterday being inordinately pleased with myself. It has been weighing on my mind for almost a year now - it is a long process, with two written and one oral component (plus supposed to be two meetings, but I only got one). I finished the initial written bit by mid-summer, but they couldn't schedule the meeting until September. Spent this semester stressing about the long written bit but got through it with the help of our postdoc, Alex. Then finally yesterday they got around to doing the oral exam. My labmate got pages of feedback to her written component (11 pages!), which the oral exam was based on, so that was what I was expecting. What did I get? Two sentences of feedback. So I was quite worried because I therefore had no forewarning of what to expect from the final. (I complained about the lack of feedback to the Chair, but he slapped me down with, "I can't believe you're complaining about NOT ENOUGH negative feedback!" He may have a point).

I felt like the meeting went really well. I DO know my stuff (thank you very much), and although I've never been a grade-grubber, I really like research and am therefore reasonably good at it. And luckily, that's what this exam was designed to measure. I definitely got more feedback from the meeting, some of it quite positive. There was one horrible moment when my supervisor asked me a question I had no idea how to answer, and there was a.... long.... uncomfortable...... pause......... while everyone stared at me. But then I just told him I don't know, said there didn't seem to be much in the literature on that point, and everyone moved on. At any rate, they only deliberated for a few minutes about whether to pass me (they send you out of the room! uncomfortable) so I guess that's good.

I'm proud of myself for how I am handling the pressure at the moment, too. Because I didn't know how to prepare for this exam, I was pretty stressed about it, and it comes during a week where I have to finish up all my work projects, mark 200 papers, and pack up and put my entire life into storage. But I've been trying hard to use exercise to manage the stress, and yesterday when I was nervous about the meeting I used my yoga breathing - sounds corny but works great! So I was able to walk in there feeling confident and somewhat relaxed, and paradoxically I think that always makes people go easier on you since you already seem capable.

Unfortunately yesterday didn't end as well as it started. I have a ton of papers to mark, and they're due in Monday (eek!), but I would have like to go out quickly to celebrate. My housemate was going out and said he'd text me when he got there. Needless to say... not a word (although I did get an apology text this morning). Guelph is reminding me more and more of how I felt in London.... NOT, I should note, a good thing. It's weird how some places you live work out right away, and some are just never going to be happy places. Generally speaking it comes down to the people. Fingers crossed Yale will be a good one (at least I already have one friend there!) and I can wrap up Guelph quickly. Getting past this exam is a huge step in that direction, for sure.

So on to the marking, the experiment-making, the paper-writing (we hope to have one ready to submit before I go!), the fMRI analysis, the packing, the moving and the leaving do. This is all going to be totally worth it when I get to spend an entire month with all my favorite people! (So screw you, Guelph.)

finally some excitement!

Sorry about the long silence. August was crap and not much worth writing about. Yuck.

But! It is September and I am feeling better. This weekend I got to both check out the Elora Quarry (a quarry with a spring in it and a little sandy beach - I swam around for over an hour) and a conservation area near Guelph (the downstairs neighbours were kind enough to bring me along on that one). It also had a little pond to swim in, which was quite cool. (Although then we went and sat by a stinky lakeshore for hours - didn't quite get that one, you couldn't even swim).

And now I have been invited along on a portaging trip to Killarney, which I am very excited about. It was a tough call, as this is a terrible week to be gone - I will be missing all the orientation stuff at Guelph once again, plus my first Neuroscience class. Bad. But I am SO dying to get out of here, and I couldn't pass up the chance to try portaging! We are renting a canoe onsite and (according to Neighbour Mark) not doing more than 5-6 hours paddling and portaging per day. It looks gorgeous and it's not supposed to rain (though I can imagine it will be freezing). I am currently packing massive piles of trail mix and quinoa for the trip. Exciting!

So see you after, if I don't get eaten by a bear... we should be back Saturday night.