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.

WELL! Exciting news all around.

First: my supervisor tracked down my prodigal committee member after I mentioned it had been about six weeks since I sent the stupid thesis out (he eventually called her department chair to ensure she was still alive). Once back in touch, she turned around my thesis in a week and gave me excellent comments. To be honest, neither committee member had much bad to say and there were just a few major comments to address. This is a huge relief - when people don't give me feedback, I tend to assume it's because they're ignoring me again/didn't actually read the thing. But no, she clearly read it (lots of minor nitpicks of typos) - she just thought it was good!

HUGE RELIEF.

So, got the comments back Tuesday, been working like crazy since then, will have draft to supervisor tonight, getting Steph and Del to nitpick stupid details for me (spelling, grammar, format) over the weekend, and - hopefully off to the external by next Tuesday.

So second: just got this email from supervisor:

Hi all,

Just a quick note to let you know that we have a tentative date/time for Anne's final examination:
- June 20, 1-4:30pm.

The grad secretary will likely be in touch again before long with official confirmation, but thought you might like some advance warning in case it's helpful for managing schedules.

DEFENSE DATE!!!!!!

Summer solstice!

This HAS to be a good omen, right?

So this is my next two months:

May 15- thesis sent to external and whoever the heck else
May 23 - Edmonton, woo hoo!
May 25 - wedding fun-ness
May 30 - back to Guelph, back to work, get some freaking papers submitted (there are two right now basically lying on peoples' desks waiting for feedback)
June 7-10 - CSBBCS conference, Kingston (giving a talk)
Sometime in June probably: MRI of knee to figure out what is going on once and for all (physio says what we are doing is not helping and she needs to know what is going on via imaging).
June 20, 1pm - let's not think about that
June 20, 6pm - PARTYYYYYYYYY
June 25-29 - Escape from Guelph, portaging trip in Algonquin!
end of June: pack stuff, move stuff, give stuff away, dispose of six tons of paper from work desk, etc etc
July ? - off to the unknown....

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.

The dog ate it!

Two posts in one day (unheard of!) but this was too hilarious not to share...

So am TAing two courses this semester, and the one prof makes us mark six long answer questions from many hundred students, three times a semester (hence all the whining from me). Much as I might sigh about that, he is a great guy and this email totally made my day:

The return of exam two went well except for one thing: my dog ate three of
the exam booklets. I was in a hurry to leave on Thursday and left the exam
booklets near my front door. Tessa loves to eat paper and this was a golden
opportunity for her. Ten minutes later a number of the exams were spread
across my backyard and she was racing around in joyous frenzy with an exam
in her mouth! She completely destroyed one exam and damaged two others;
about five exams had mud on them. Fortunately, I had checked all of the
exams and was able to identify the students who wrote the damaged exams.
The students took the incident in good humor and I expect it will be the
only thing they remember about the course in a few years.

The Slog

I am so tired these days. It feels like I'm running a marathon (except without the health benefits). Spending all my time in the lab, but it ain't that productive... and when I do go out it's usually to sleep on Sandeep's couch while other people play board games. Now he and Christine are in Alberta for a few weeks, so no more social life... although Nicola does want to go to TO on the weekend, so I suppose there's that.

But yeah, super run down, man. My HPA axis has been overloaded by chronic stress for too long and it's bottoming out. (Would this be any easier if I didn't know exactly what my brain is up to?) At least the marking is out of the way for another week, and we managed to submit my Hot or Not paper (second chunk of my thesis) on Monday. To a journal with an 83% rejection rate (aim high!) so everyone please cross their fingers. Still, it's a good bit of work and it will get published somewhere.

Got two conference deadlines coming up and piles of data that may or may not hold anything useful. STRESSFUL! Yesterday was Guelph Neuroscience Day and I tried to do some data analysis after, but was just too exhausted. Public speaking/interacting with people burns me out. Talk went pretty well though. My entire thesis in an eight-minute talk! There were no questions: I think I stunned people into silence with the flood of information.

Steph called last night and ordered me to take two days off in a row. I don't think I've done that since.... probably my trip to Windsor/Detroit. (Which was awesome, BTW - saw MuteMath, who totally rocked, and convinced Sandeep to take us on a driving tour of the urban prairies. His risk-averseness kicked in and he wouldn't stop the car at ALL in Detroit, but it was still fascinating in a post-apocalypic kind of way). Anyway, that was months ago and maybe she's right. Easter coming up, I suppose. Sounds like a good reason.

Things going downhill at the dept. Definitely time to finish and move on... one of the girls who defended in the Fall says you hit a point when you don't even care about your defense any more because there is too much other stress. She said after that it's easy. So, given that I don't have a postdoc or job lined up, I should be right in line to hit that point very soon...

one step forward!

HANDED MY THESIS IN TO COMMITTEE, BABY! I am sure there will be revisions galore (my supervisor "has not carefully read through the entire thesis, but instead focused on hot spots"), but this is the step that gets everything moving re: paperwork and moving toward a date being set - as far as I can tell. Never mind that this three months later than I hoped... sorta expected that. At least I got there in the end. (And got permission to send it to committee... a good bit of that time has felt like it involved waiting for supervisor to have time to look at one thing or another).

Also got a paper sent out to a journal. Two things in one week... pretty much unprecedented!

Blahhhhhhh...

...everything kinda sucks right now. Caught whatever dread disease has been going around, my life is fraught with whiny undergrads and marking, and a thesis and two papers are looming threateningly over my head. Also looming threateningly over my head is the giant pile of boxes my room has become - although that is actually a good thing, as I FINALLY managed to get everything out of storage with the help of the postdoc. I think it's screwing up my feng shui, though! Going to bring all my old clothes into the lab and attempt to fob them off on Nicola the Kiwi or alternatively any other girls I can think of.

Had a great visit with Del over Reading Week. Too busy, as usual. We spent the first weekend in TO, where my friend Melissa gave us the grand tour. 2 x brunch (the second in a metal-bar-turned-brunch-place... quite the ambience, with the massive bald, pierced, tattooed waiter and the murals on the walls), 2 x local showcase gigs, wandering around the neighbourhoods and a trip out to the Distillery. (Which has a sake distillery in it, who knew?!) (Also SOMA chocolate... SO GOOD!) Then in Guelph for one night before haring off to Ottawa on a roadtrip with Kiwi Nicola. Ended up eating stew with her mates (Metis dude, Kiwi girl, giant baby apparently called Taane - TAW-nay) and also eating goose burgers for lunch at theirs the day before we headed out. Never would have occurred to me to make burgers out of geese, but there you go.

We stayed in a jail... Del always works hard to find the most random places to stay. Did not top the boat in Barcelona Harbour, but it was a good effort. Room was gorgeous, and after a few drinks (for me) with Nicola's mates and a long trip in the wrong direction due to being told the wrong way to turn out of their cul-de-sac, going round most of Ottawa's one-way streets at least six times and being honked at by multiple cabs, a lie-down was well deserved. Turns out the whole time we were basically one street over from the hostel, but due to the one-way system (ARGH) and the way the roads are labelled, we had no idea... sigh.

Anyway, managed to make it in the end (I was pretty happy Del is calm about this sort of thing) and spent the next day eating beavertails, walking around and checking out the Museum of Civilization. The drive back was horrific, including as it did the 401 through Toronto in the afternoon. Thus, we took it pretty easy the rest of the week and just went into the lab to work. (Woo-hoo! Lucky Del!)

So yup, now life is flat, stale and unprofitable. Nothing but endless writing/marking/teaching/answering seven million questions until I somehow manage to make a supreme effort and get everything ready for defense... which is looking further and further away. Blah.