Horror indeed

Perhaps I should go as a physicist this halloween...
I just attended a colloquium of three graduate students giving talks on their research in magnetism. Two of them were brilliant Chinese students, and the last speaker talked on the Hall effect, which with the accent came out as "Horror" effect. This student had just handed in a draft of his thesis (PhD) to his proud supervisor, who introduced him - after 2.5 years. He had also published 11 papers. The effect on my already fragile self esteem was pretty horrendous...
Other halloweenish features were invented in my dreams of last night. Imagine mutated bedbugs, taking on the characteristics of ticks, in very detailed and credible dreams. Yep. I didn't have a hard time jumping out of my bed this morning. After the fumigation, life has been glorious for a few weeks, but the morning David jumped the ocean to surprise his mum on her birthday, I accidentally created a bridge to the bed by leaning the backpack to it, allowing a small bedbug to get a last supper off of my finger, before being trapped in a trap and killed with a hairdryer (no, I'm not evil, that is the quickest way of killing them!). Hence the nightmares...
Now going back to face the first horror. I don't know which is worse - finishing a PhD or bedbugs, but right now the PhD wins. IF my nightmare turns true, it might change later on...

(good thing the rest of my life is so beautiful... :)

Thesis update

My life, as most of you know, has one major component, which has grown bigger and bigger the last year. I don't want to be as asocial as I am, I'd like to have people over for dinners etc (the latter has another reason though - upstairs neighbour saw fit to acquire "new" furniture, that apparently was bedbug infested. Gravity and the nature of bedbugs did its thing and yes - we got a few new pets as well. We barely had noticed it until our truly sweet and awesome caretaker called us about a spraying, but since it was just precautionary, I'm not sure if they were as thorough as they could have been. We had an intense week of vacuuming, freezing bedding, scratching, sleeplessness, and searching, combined with finding the darn bugs a little here and a little there as they were affected by the poison along the walls. Then I discovered that despite the metal bedframe, some bugs had managed to make themselves comfortable in the bed slats (wood underneath mattress). 2 rolls of duct tape later, we're now bite free, and haven't seen a bug for quite some time. van Vliets vs bed bugs 2-0 (as far as we know...). One thing is for sure - we have the most spacey bed slats I've ever seen... end of longest parenthesis I've ever written).

The thesis is getting substance, and substantial as well. I've written an introduction draft, a chapter on classification (chapter 5) and a chapter on modelling (chapter 4). I've received feedback on chapter 5, and am now back to it. But today, I started writing the data and reductions chapter (2) for some reason. Might as well, as long as I get stuff done. With these 2.5 chapters I'm already at 100 pages. I am however about 1 week behind schedule (a schedule that has already been revised twice). Some tension is the result of that, I can assure you. I am so much looking forward to the weekend's general conference to relieve some of that tension. It would be so much nicer if all the research and analysis was already done, but there is SO much to do in parallel with the writing. Some days I wonder if I'm ever going to get done. And other days I'm sure I'm going to go nuts...

At the time of writing, the smell of a banana cake, Swedish version, is filling the apartment. It smells rather divine (a new recipe I had never tried before). If it tastes half as good as it smells it's going on the recipe blog.

Now dear readers, I would like to invite you to make comments on my previous entry. I am intrigued and really would want to know what people feel about the topics presented therein. Be frank. Write anonymously if that feels better.