after the weekend...

I have to start eating sensibly now...I tried to write sensibly 3 times before I got it right, is my subconcious fighting me? On Friday night I went to Sizzlers and had pork spare ribs. There were a lot more ribs than I thought there would be. Juicy, tender, not fatty, lots of meat. mmmm. On Saturday I went out to "The Point" on the Strand to eat. Also very Yummy. Sunday I was quite restrained. Mum is going back to Target today to return the toaster I bought on Saturday and get another one. The one we bought browns well on one side and not at all on the other. I'm told this is a reasonably common toaster problem. Surely it would be easy to get toast to cook on both sides?

busy, busy, busy

I have been meaning to write my blog for about a week and a half..I've just been so busy..lets see if I can remember what I was going to write.
The reason I've been busy.
I went on a "Finishing your thesis - defeating self sabotage" course at the beginning of last week. It was enlightening and was run by a couple of clinical psychologists from Flinders Uni. They run it down there regularly and have seen all personality types and self defeating behaviours and thought patterns. Your mind can be very sneaky. It was possibly the best course I've been on with respect to getting personalised training. They didn't lecture on general types, they asked specific questions and gave specific advice.
Anyway, thats why I've been busy. Having realised how I was mentally shooting myself in the foot, I am now writing from 9am to 12pm Monday through Wednesday, and doing anything else after that (Thursday and Friday I'm employed to do something else). It has to be real writing too, not fantasy writing. The definition of fantasy writing here is tidying tables and formatting things, changing fonts etc. Real writing puts down actual sentences that move you forward. I wrote 8 pages on Monday. Now of course I've caught up to my lab work so my real writing time is spent analysing all the sequence data I have produced, and writing down the results :)
Doing all this work in the am means that I then have lots of small, but not mentally taking, tasks to do in the afternoon - hence no time to blog.
The show/s
Its show time again and there were two this year. For those who haven't kept up on the Townsville gossip, there was a disagreement between the show organisers and the sideshow people as to the rental cost of space at the show this year, so the sideshow people had their own show elsewhere. I won't go into the various gossip and slander about what went on behind the scenes/who's at fault, as thats all it is and I really don't know for sure, but I went to the real show, being more interested in displays and competitions than in rides. It only cost $5 this year and felt much more like a country show that the Townsville one. Not crowded, fewer rides etc. I liked it but even the displays were fewer in number. There had been a lot of furor before the show and I think a lot of people were'nt sure what would be happening so they didn't enter this year. I think next year I might enter the cooking section. I did the usual look at the winning entries and think "I'm sure I could do better than that"...so next year I'll put my cake were the judges mouth is and know for sure.
Birfday...or Brithday as I usually type
On Sunday I will be exactly half way through my alloted years. Mum and Dad and I are going out tonight to Sizzlers to celebrate. Tomorrow My cousin and her mum and I will go somewhere else to celebrate. Sunday I'll be all eaten out and will give it a miss :)
Speaking of food
My diet finishes tonight. I should actually do another week for the few times I broke it for special occasions, but I also broke it almost everyday this week - and especially after the show.:S I think overall I lost 3kg. I had gotten down to 4kg off, but I was naughty too often. Now my plan is to eat reasonably sensibly for a month or so but increase my excersize (from almost none to the advised amount). If that doesn't lose a bit more, I'm going on the 7 day diet again. If I can get down to 70kg and stay there I'll be quite happy, and healthy enough to avoid diet induced diabetes. I have, over the last 3 weeks, ridden my bike to uni once a week - twice last week. This may not sound like much but is a huge improvement on not at all. I also mowed on Saturday - which I consider the equivalent of walking up castle hill, only with a benefit to other people as well. I also dipped my toe in the water with respect to castle hill climbing. Last week I parked at the top of Gregory street and walked up to the first castle hill park, where I used to leave the road and go up the goat track. Then I turned round and walked back down. I broke a sweat and felt my leg muscles working, just by doing the bit I used to do as a warm up/down. ZSigh, some way to go in the fitness stakes.
Vouchers
Tomorrow I will take my mother out to the Willows and buy her a new toaster with some of my shopping vouchers. The pop up part of hers has broken and the toast will keep cooking unless you manually remove it. There's almost a tradition in my family of giving my mother white goods as presents. She seems to appreciate them a lot more than flowers, though not as much as chocolates.

I was having a good weekend...

Then my budgie made a mad dash for freedom. I was cleaning out the cage and while my back was turned Marc Antony slipped under the gap and vanished. When I turned back he was gone. My father thaought he'd seen something out the front and sure enough I saw the budgie fly onto a palm tree across the road. When I went over he wouldn't come down to me. We tried bringing the other budgie cage over and me eating a piece of bread (which usually results in budgie feet all over my toast in the moring if I'm not careful). Nothing worked. Then the wind blew, the palm frond fluttered, he slipped off and flew off into the sunset.
He hasn't come back. I'm told they don't if they get out, but he was so tame I was hoping when he got hungry he'd come home to eat. I left out cages with the door open and food inside, nothing so far. It's pretty cold and wet out today though. If he hasn't been eaten by a hawk and he isn't completely lost by now (a distinct possibility) he might come home. It's not like he'll find a mate, there aren't budgies around Townsville at the moment. Mum says I should ring up 4TO and put in a lost pet advert.
I'm also looking after a baby chicken right now - I'm calling him/her Solo, as she/he was the only one to hatch out of a batch in the incubator at uni. When it's big enough it will join the flock out here - or be lunch, depending on whether its a boy or a girl.
the big prize spending
I've spent more of my prize money. I ate $20 worth of salmon steaks over the weekend mmmmm yum. I had about 4 meals out of it. I also got myself a new pair of knee high leather boots. My old vinyl boots are dead and these are very nice corelli boots which were on a 50% off sale too :)

So some of my weekend was great and some was just a fizzer. I'm so conflicted.

My shopping list

Given that I probably won't be able to get a car CD player from Target, I have developed something of a list of options, in no particular order they are;

Deluxe facial from Elle Bache
MP3 player with voice record function
cappuccino maker - one of the girls at uni got a sunbeam one for ~$160 from target that got a big thumbs up from her barista friend
salmon fillets
swanky dress from one of the expensive shops I usually just look in from the outside
leather knee high boots (I'm partial to boots and my last pair self destructed this year)
the biggest box of chocolates from Darryl Lea :)....


How much did I get again? Thats at least $500 worth to pick from and I got $300. Feel free to add to my list if you think of something cool that the Willows will sell.

It was a good weekend while it lasted

In spite of having to come out to uni on Monday to set up some experiments, I had a good long weekend. It started with a hens night on Friday involving much gourmand pizza making. I have discovered that artichoke hearts on pizza is yummy and calabrese salami really is the best pizza salami. I also made dessert pizza (or desert pizza as I mentioned to Amanda). You get a base, pour chocolate sauce over it then jelly lollies and marshmallows, then cook till marshmallows are brown and spread over pizza. There were many complements.
The weekend continued with me winning $300 worth of shopping vouchers at the Willows cent sale. I will go out today and pick them up. I still haven't decided what to buy, I do need a new CD player in the car, but I don't know if they have such things at the Willows. What I will be buying are some salmon fillets to celebrate..yum yum.
Then my parents came home form their overseas trip and I have been feeding them while they are jet lagged. Last night I cooked a whole barramundi that I had in the freezer. Delicious, melt in your mouth mmmm. I think theres enough for two more meals :). They also brought me home thorntons chocolates, my favourite brand.
Hmm, I think my whole weekend was food related. No wonder it was great :D

Chapter 5

The latest chapter I handed my supervisor has been handed back with a "please sit down, think about what it is you want to acheive with this and try to rewrite, possibly with flow charts" comment. Apparently I managed to write a chapter that even the supervisor, who knows what I'm doing, couldn't follow. He said he tried his best but it was beyond him. Oh well, more work to do I guess. On an up note, I just counted my sequencing and I have a total of 38 000 bases of DNA sequenced for my next chapter...almost done there :)

A week later....

It took me a whole week to get over the bleary, tired phase of no coffee. If it weren't for the fact I enjoy my cappuccinos so much, I'd seriously consider not starting drinking again when the diet is off. Strangely I have had no actual coffee cravings, or any other cravings for that matter. I went off the idea of chocolate in a matter of days, in spite of the lindt chocolates sitting on the bench. This is the only diet I've been on where I've had a whole week without feeling deprived in some way, I hope that doesn't mean I'm not going to lose any weight. "No pain no loss" sort of thing.

On related news, I set the kitchen on fire on Sunday....or at least a pan, but with great presence of mind, and thinking about how badly I could splash burning oil round the kitchen if I was foolish enough to pick up the pan, I picked up the lid and dropped it over the top, thus putting it out. Then I spent ten minutes with windows and doors open, fanning the fire alarm to stop it beeping. Nice to know it works.

I'm now at stage two of my "while my parents are away I'm going to clean up the house" plan. I've tidied up the kitchen and done the household tasks that needed doing before my parents left. Now under the house. I'm going to haul out everything beside where the car is parked and repack it in some form of order with shelving involved. It doesn't help that most of this is bits of wood and metal my dad thinks will come in handy someday. I expect it will take all weekend.

Next weekend I have to have the kitchen cleared out as the renovators (read my uncle and aunt who have a house repair/renovation company) will be coming to gut the kitchen to build our new one. After all my efforts to clean, the house will be in disaster phase at just about the time my parents get back....of course.

Very Sleepy

I'm very sleepy. This is not a good way to start what will be a very busy week. I think part of it is that we are having a cold snap here and I just want to curl up in my nice warm bed. The other part is that my parents went to Scotland on Saturday, so I have the house to myself which is a little out of my normal habits. Not to mention I took them to the airport on Saturday morning and had to get up at 4:20am to do it. They will be tireder than me though. I calculated they were travelling for 38 hours to get to Edinborough. I also started a diet on Saturday so there may be toxins releasing from my liver as I type.

A chapter!!!

I have finally handed in chapter 5 of my thesis to my supervisor. Now I'm working on materials and methods - for a quickie hand in to make it look like I've done more work :) I'd be writing it now, but I'm getting bleary and I'm filling in time till the tangential flow cell is finished and I can go home.

Juicer

I have a new juicer and went to the markets yesterday to buy some fruit and veg. So far I've tried apple and carrot and apple carrot and rockmelon - yum, also easy to clean. I was going to try beetroot in there too and ginger, but I forgot to buy ginger and I've missplaced the beetroot. The juicer can also make sorbet, mince meat, make pasta and shave ice (though I think you need another attachment for that). I'm going to freeze some apple and make apple sorbet this week. I also saw a pizza maker which makes pizza in 5 minutes. I tried it - crispy on the bottom, golden on the top, gourmet style - amazing...If I had a couple of hundred dollars free I might be eating a lot of pizza.

Pink nails

I am currently typing this with nails almost 2cm long - plastic, pink nails. I thought I'd try the technology and see if it had improved since the last time I tried. It has. The nails look very realistic, are glued on with an instant set very strong glue (don't glue your fingers together - or worse, your eyelids) and seem able to weather the pounding I'm giving them. Most people think they are acrylic, professionally attached nails, so I must have done a good job.
Downside; typing is hard, doing up buttons is really hard and there are some other things that you have to pay a lot of attention to so you don't injure yourself while doing them.
Upside; I have long pink nails :) ..... Usually my nails are short, bitten and broken. And the fingernail polish is chipped within 5 minutes of application.

as promised, I'm writing more

I said I'd write more and so I am. That chapter I was talking about last month is three paper references away from handing to my supervisor. I found that I'd made an erroneous assumption in my discussion and had to edit, but on the up side, I found a paper discussing something I'd given up on finding an example of.

I spent last long weekend house sitting - air conditioning, 1m wide flat screen tv, extensive cable channels, evening strolls round the hills of Yarrawonga, looking at houses I'll never be able to afford...I didn't get very much work done. Maybe next long weekend I'll clean out under the house :)

In two weeks my parents are going on holidays for a month to Scotland. I'm taking this opportunity to go on the liver cleansing diet, as I've gained a lot of weight and this is a good way to clean out all the garbage in my system prior to seriously not eating junk food. I've done it before and know that there's no way I'll do it if there are other people in the house wanting to use the kitchen. You actually have to do proper meal preparation for it and it's too complicated doing that if my mother is cooking for other people at the same time.

My mum is buying a juicer - just in time - fresh vegetable juice is on the diet list. (I just skipped that part last time). And before you wrinkle your nose up, the next door neighbours have let us sample some of their vegetable juices and they are really lovely. The trick is to put a bit of fruit in to sweeten it.

Anzac day long weekend

Apart from shopping for a pair of shorts on Saturday and coming in to uni on Sunday and Monday to work - a PhD is never done - the only stuff I did was some scanning of my mothers old documents on the weekend.
Appropriately I found a picture of my great uncle Arthur in WW2 uniform - he survived. Of more interest was the photocopy of an original letter sent by my great uncle Victor to his mother (my great grandmother) at the end of WW2 from Singapore. He had been a POW and talked about building a railway line in thailand and Burma and being in Changi. Also about who had died there that his mother would have known and about what Singapore was like after being freed. I'll have to figure out how to attach it to this site. Lastly I found postcards from my great-great uncle William who went to Canada, enlisted for the great war from there and died in France. I think he's buried at the Somme - but I'd have to look that up.

my head, my aching head

I've had splitting eyestrain induced headaches and shoulder and back aches on and off for almost a week, held at bay only by wearing my glasses constantly and sleeping...and one night even that didn't help - with an early morning wakeup followed by vomitting. On Friday I had a massage and was told I was completely locked up. I was seeing the light at the end of the tunnel this week with conciencious glasses wearing and I decided to ride to work today...and left them at home in my purse. This wouldn't be too disastrous if I had lab work to do today, but all I have to do till 12:45pm is writing on the computer and reading - sigh - and I'm not riding home to get them. I might set my timer to ten minutes and do infinite distance staring every 10 minutes to change focus. How I suffer for my PhD.

googling et al

Thanks to Marco's gratuitous addition of links to this page on all the blogs he's commented on, googling "Jenny's Procrasrination page" now pops up Otherblog as the first hit...with the ability to then find my page. Strangely enough, lexifab didn't come up (on the first page of hits anyway).

Anyhoo, I now feel obliged to write my blog more often than once every two or three weeks. I'm writing now while I wait for the bacticinerator to heat up. Guess what that does :)

On the weekend I went with my mother to a cooking demonstration on preparing low GI meals - which is useful for diabetics as my mother is - and I came to the conclusion that if I don't lose 10kg I gained over the last year and keep it off, I'll probably end up diabetic myself. So I had fish and chips for lunch today. I think my subconcious goes "quick, she's about to cut back on the junk, lets get one last feed in".

Must go, bacticinerator awaits.

sigh

I had a depressing talk with my supervisor yesterday. We were trying to see how much more I needed to do on my PhD by seeing how many papers I could write from it as an estimate of whether an examiner would pass it. The problem is, all of the "lets find something new" aspects of my work have given me lots of information - but nothing new. So I have lots to write up, but nothing to really write a good paper on. My paid research work however has a world first paper I have to write up - shame it doesn't count toward the PhD. I'm going to try two more things now, once again, if nothing else they'll give me more to write up - hopefully they'll work well enough though to be the breakthrough.
On an up note I've filed away the just over a foot of papers I had piled up for chapter 5 - so my office is cleaner looking. I've finished the referencing. Now I have to rewrite so someone other than myself can follow the logic of it all. :) . This chapter will be shorter than the last (at about 7000 words instead of 10000) and I may send a copy to Chris to look at. If I'm really good I'll burn him a copy of both of the research chapters I've written.

I can't find me!

While sitting at another computer I decided to look up my page (among others) and did a google search on procrastination page - lots of hits, none me. I did find Magicdog vs tokyo though... and this Procrastination Creed on someone elses site.

The original author of The Procrastinator's Creed is unknown, but hey, whoever you are, you've got a true believer here!!!

1. I believe that if anything is worth doing, it would have been done already.
2. I shall never move quickly, except to avoid more work or find excuses.
3. I will never rush into a job without a lifetime of consideration.
4. I shall meet all of my deadlines directly in proportion to the amount of bodily injury I could expect to receive from missing them.
5. I firmly believe that tomorrow holds the possibility for new technologies, astounding discoveries, and a reprieve from my obligations.
6. I truly believe that all deadlines are unreasonable regardless of the amount of time given.
7. I shall never forget that the probability of a miracle, though infinitely small, is not exactly zero.
8. If at first I don't succeed, there is always next year.
9. I shall always decide not to decide, unless of course I decide to change my mind.
10. I shall always begin, start, initiate, take the first step, and/or write the first word, when I get around to it.
11. I obey the law of inverse excuses which demands that the greater the task to be done, the more insignificant the work that must be done prior to beginning the greater task.
12. I know that the work cycle is not plan/start/finish, but is wait/plan/plan.
13. I will never put off until tomorrow, what I can forget about forever.
14. I will become a member of the ancient Order of Two-Headed Turtles (the Procrastinator's Society) if they ever get it organized.

Then I came back to my computer and, using terms I had written on my blog, I did another search - still no me. I did find this interesting site though.

http://www.robsevilmindcontrolcult.org/

So, how do I get my blog site to come up on Google...any ideas?

babel fish

I had a student in my class this afternoon for whom English was her second language, so I found the bablfish translator on the web for her. She tested it out and indicated that it wasn't really that great at translating english to chinese...so i thought I'd try english to japanese and back. See below the original paragraph and then the reverse translated one.

http://world.altavista.com/

James Cook University will advance the economic, social, and

environmental well-being of tropical Queensland, the nation

and the world by delivering world-class education and

research outcomes across a range of disciplines, with

particular emphasis on subjects of special relevance to the

tropics and our location in Australia and the Asian-Pacific

region.

To the world where the cock university of (something untranslatable)
crosses the range of training the specific importance of special

connection subject to tropical district and our positions of

the Australian and the Asia Pacific area and transfers the

tropical queen's land, nation and economic of the world,

society, welfare of environment, is advanced to the result of

noted education and research.

She may have been right. Apparently I go to Cock University now :S

My list of 10 things

OK, bowing to pressure from other bloggers....10 things I’ve done that I don’t think anyone reading has done

1. Scrap booked my entire primary and highschool education into one chunky book

2. Been customer of the month 3 times running from my Avon lady due to large purchases

3. Done a silver smithing course and made novel silver jewellery

4. Managed to stretch out a PhD to five plus years without finishing

5. Won a skateboard in a road safety drawing competition (and for the first time in my life, this seems ironic)

6. Acted in a liberal party campaign advert. (Which never made the air)

7. Spent so much on molecular biology supplies that I won a coffee machine

8. Survived three computer deaths in less than a year, including the first one which lost me 6 months worth of data - backup, backup, backup.

9. Been paid to tutor a university prac class the same year as I was doing it.

10. Successfully hidden the fact that I am, in fact, an alien from the planet Bloorg, here to do a research assignment on the humans of earth. - Or alternatively, written a complete piece of obvious fiction in my list of 10 things :)

And now...back to chapter 5...Yes Andrea, I'm still polishing it :(

Exciting times at JCU high

It was 8:45am, I'd just arrived at my building after a 30 minute bike ride. It was the first day of lectures, so I'd ridden the bike to avoid all the main road traffic jams caused by inexperienced first years going up each others rear ends. I walked into Ray's office to get a drink and was informed we'd had another break in and theft. One more lap top bites the dust. I walked out of Ray's office and Phil tells me I can't touch anything in mine as they broke in via my first floor window and the Police will want to look at the crime scene. Leigh tells me they didn't take my really old desk top...I wonder why? In my office, the window is open, the piles of junk on the window sill have been removed - either shoved to one side, shoved onto the desk or taken out onto the ledge. My coffee machine, right beside where they'd have step down, is untouched - and it was rather delicately balanced too. The police arrived, had a look round, checked that the window would lock again and decided they wouldn't take finger prints becuase the window was too grotty to hold them - and nothing was stolen from my room. Now, somehow I'm going to have to focus and get all those things done that I didn't get round to Friday. Most embarrassing moment - when I had to say, "No, nothings been disturbed, it always looks this way."