That wouldn't happen in grad school.

Best part about having a "real" job (even if it is a post doc)?  When your boss says, "It's 4:30 on a Friday.  I should stop taking up your time and let you go."  Amazing.

Wait, you mean ME?!

I've got a pretty big meeting tomorrow at Big Fancy University with a bunch of people I haven't met before.  It's going to take a concerted effort not to giggle when somebody refers to me as Dr. [My Last Name].  I'm pretty sure the only people who have called me Dr. [My Last Name] are friends or family who are mostly joking.  It doesn't help that Dr. [My Last Name] could also refer to my mother, father, or grandfather.  Which is ridiculous, I know, but you can probably understand now how I grew up thinking it was totally normal to go to graduate school.  Anyways, giggling when somebody addresses me as Dr. (as they should damnit!) probably doesn't do much for my credibility...

We'll see if this spurs me back into blogging.

Days like today I really need a couch.  It's been rainy, windy, and gray all day, and the chairs at my kitchen table (currently the only seating besides my bed) just don't cut it.  However I still find rain fascinating and wonderful a month and a half after leaving Tucson.

This morning I booked a campsite for Assateague Island for this weekend!  Woohoo!

Statistics are unbelievably, painfully boring.  It's taken an extraordinary amount of Cherry Coke Zero (like pre-oral studying quantities) for me to make my way through it.

If you had been walking down my street at approximately 5:00 this morning you would have seen me (though only barely, it was dark still), in a raincoat, hanging out my bedroom window (on the 3rd floor of my building) trying to figure out what was making the murderous-rage-inducing clacking sound.  The culprit was a loose slat of siding/roofing flapping in the wind, that I yanked off the house until a sufficiently large nail to hold it in place can be obtained.  I bought some big nails (I only had little ones for hanging things.) this afternoon and hung out my window some more this evening hopefully fixing the problem.  I couldn't hammer through whatever is behind the slat underneath the problem slat.  There was wood behind the problem slat but further up, but the pre-existing hole in the slat (I have no idea what this thing is made of, it's not wood, not slate, it's easy to put a nail through though.) was bigger than my nails, so I dug out some washers leftover from assembling my Ikea furniture and used those to hold the nail head in front of the slat.  Fingers crossed it doesn't clack on the house whenever it's windy anymore!!

My car payment booklet showed up today.  Sad.  Driving a shiny new car is much more fun than paying for it.

Some idiot managed to hit and knock down a light post down the street.  It's a street with enough traffic that you really can't go very fast.  No clue how they managed to pull it off...

I bought a basket of jalapenos to make green sauce a couple of weeks ago, but well, I only used two in the sauce... So I've been making things with jalapeno... Over the weekend Boyfriend and I made this pizza, and later this week I'm planning to make this pasta and these biscuits.

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The three of you who read this regularly may be wondering why I apparently fell off the face of the planet.  When I last wrote I had just sent my completed dissertation (aside from final revisions) to my committee prior to my defense.  Since then I defended, left Tucson, and slowly worked my way across the country as I moved to Baltimore for a post doc in industry.  It's not that I don't have plenty of material that I could blog about - heck, I took notes throughout the entire drive thinking it could contribute to a fun blog post.  But frankly, I just haven't felt like writing.  I've had plenty of time if I chose to do it.  Maybe getting this post out will motivate me to keep writing, though maybe it won't.  In some ways I miss it, but it's not one of those things that's worth making myself do.  So maybe I'll be back, maybe not, but hopefully.

It's out!

Just sent/gave my dissertation to my committee!  I only had to print one copy, as the other two committee members are out of town they got electronic copies.  I really should have taken a photo before handing off the printed copy.  It's just so pretty. :)

The Queen shocked me and actually read a second chapter!  Though why on earth she'd pick the two most boring chapters to read is beyond me (Intro/Background/Significance and Experimental)... Anyway, it's gone to my committee with my advisor's revisions on two chapters!  I think that might give me some sort of group record for highest % of dissertation read.  My labmate who's traveling with her now says she's actually reading another chapter, too.  Astonishing.

Helpful

The day my dissertation is technically supposed to go to my committee is a good day for my advisor to start reading it, right?  Helpful?  No.  Not so much.

This morning I was more than irritated to discover the only thing she had read over an entire weekend of travel was the 350 word abstract that she's already read.  And the only comments she made were ones she could have and should have made the first time she read the damn thing.  I got Chapter 1 from her this afternoon.

I decided last week that I was giving my dissertation to my committee on Wednesday regardless of how much she's read or not read or how many corrections I've managed to get through.

As punishment for The Queen aggravating me I decided to work from a printed copy (at her expense of course) of her revisions rather than juggling multiple documents on my screen.  I really should have printed them in color...

Purging

I'm a month away from moving (and just over 3 weeks from defending!), so I've started gradually packing up stuff I won't need (mostly books so far) and getting rid of stuff I won't keep.  I'm using a U-box (U-Haul's version of PODS) to move, so I'm only keeping what fits in one 8'x5'x7' box.  Which means I'm getting rid of most of my furniture (Thank goodness. The vast majority of it is second hand/goodwill/hand me down junk.) as well as a lot of my stuff.

I'm hoping that doing some work early will make the week between my defense and leaving less stressful, especially because I'm sure I'll want to spend that time hanging out with people rather than frantically packing and cleaning.  I've already pared down my wardrobe to only the clothes that fit and are in good shape, which means I've donated or sold nearly half my clothes.  Lots of books and movies have made their way to Bookman's, and fortunately I've managed not to buy more than I've traded in so far.  (The dinosaur cookie cutters were an awesome find.  I couldn't pass them up!)  

Last night I was going through some less obvious stuff.  Stuff that seems stupid to move, but not really sell-able or donate-able, and a shame to just throw out.  Like the basket of  yarn.  I'm keeping my knitting needles and such, but I don't really want to move a couple cubic feet of yarn.  Or the stack of gift bags, tissue paper, and wrapping papers.  All perfectly good, but foolish to waste limited space moving.

Other than the stuff I just mentioned, purging is So. Much. Fun.  Seriously, it's wonderful.  And not only because I'm looking forward to getting some decent furniture and clothes that actually fit me.

I'm in full on clean-out-the-pantry mode, too.  I don't think I've ever bought so few groceries in my life.  I have a few more weeks of my produce share, so I still have to eat around that, but rather than making whatever I want from my produce, I'm specifically pairing it with stuff already in my pantry.  The eggplant and zucchini salad that called for pearl barley?  I used the rest of my bulghur and some of my wheat berries.  E and I baked for another classmate's final seminar the other day, and we specifically decided to make pumpkin chocolate chip muffins and nutmeg maple cookies to use up my E's pumpkin, my chocolate chips, and my maple syrup.  It's almost embarrassing how excited I was to use up my almond flour, almond extract, amaretto, extra chocolate frosting I'd stashed in the freezer, and maraschino cherries making cupcakes for some friends' birthday last weekend.  Angie and I had a blast playing empty-the-pantry in college, though I seem to remember the resulting meals being a whole lot weirder then than they've been so far... (Sadly I still have lots of curry and whole wheat flour.)

(If you know someone in Tucson who wants some yarn, gift wrap materials, or school supplies, let me know!)

Venn Pie-agram!

Nerd alert!  I made this awesome Venn pie-agram for my labmate's birthday a couple of weeks ago.  He uses a LOT of Venn diagrams to describe his research, so ever since I saw this idea online I've been waiting for an opportunity to make him one.

Unfortunately I didn't take a picture of the empty pie tins, because it took me a bit of thinking to figure out how to cut them.  The instructions I found online completely removed the edges of the middle section, but I wanted to keep them so I could use more pie crust, because who doesn't like pie crust?  Here's a Microsoft paint illustration of the cut I made. :)  I stacked the two pie tins, made one cut through both tins, flipped one over, and hooked them together.  In the second pie picture the top pie is apple with a lattice crust, the bottom is mixed berry with a crumb topping, and the middle is obviously both.  It was the first time I tried making a lattice top crust, and these instructions from Annie's Eats were very helpful.  The pie was a huge hit at school.  The Sri Lankan students especially liked the crust as they seem to generally not care for super sweet things.