who only by moving can balance

No noticeable improvement in breathing, and my sleep is even more disastrous than normal. On the plus side:

1. I have my desktop working again, and even looked up some more arguments I can apply to redshift for better screen colour temperatures.

2. While I did not learn as much about MySQL as I wanted, I have learned some.

3. I have made a tiny tiny dent in the towering pile of terrifying PhD work, which makes the future a little less scary. (I made it into work during normal working hours for the first time in three weeks yesterday. I barely made it out of my room today, but hey, so it goes. Have I mentioned round these parts that I'm a bit wrong at the moment?)

4. The necklace arrived in the post: it is deliciously heavy and does all the right things with body temperature.

5. I have dealt with the washing up. (Hello lovely housemate I hope the 3am washing up didn't bother you it seemed like the best option at the time.)

6. I have read a whole pile of book - finally got around to Long Hidden, and have several authors to follow up as a result (and have already read more Nghi Vo, who I think I am hoping to nominate for something Hugo-related).

7. Lock In arrives in e-book format tomorrow, entirely breaking my rule of "don't buy books, especially not books by straight white cis men, while the in-ereader to-read pile is over 50" (the exemption for "unless you're going to read it straight away" is only really supposed to apply to people who aren't... white men), but do you know what there's a fair chance I'll find it pleasing escapism, so.

8. In more "spending money will totally make me feel better, right?" news, I have Dealt With My Lack Of Post-It Notes, Thank You eBay. (The yellow gingko-leaf-shaped-ones are probably going to be for writing nice notes to myself and sticking up places; the pale blue square ones are for work when I want to use the whiteboard for three things at once.)

9. I am enjoying the rain.

10. I have not yet finished the pear-and-apple juice we have in the house, but the blueberries we finished earlier continued delicious.

In... nine hours' time I am giving a talk to a bunch of 11yos about why geology is awesome. Consequently I have just finished putting together a presentation, and I am going to find it easier to type my notes on what to say for each slide into this box than I would do to put it anywhere else. I suspect it is pitched entirely wrong but um I am out of cope for doing anything else.

In related news, I Will Never Leave This Basement Again, But Maybe I Am Finally Getting Data?

( Slide notes )

-- or, better: every now and then, I'll be merrily getting on with handling some "recent", "young" rocks, and then I will stop and think holy shit, this thing I am holding is sixty-five million years old. Or I'll remember the first-year lecture where JJ stood at the front of the hall, tossing a piece of rock in the air casually, before coming out with, "I'm holding a piece of the mantle in my hand - and it's green."

xkcd's not wrong.

I manage to keep the sense of awe and wonder on the occasions I'm lucky enough to be in the same room as pieces of meteorite that predate the Earth, or in rocks that actual people have actually brought back from the Moon, but it's a little harder to remember in my day-to-day dealings.

Only then I do, and my mind gets blown all over again.

(Probably some of this is because, in chemistry - I used to be a chemist - femtoseconds can be a long time, and navigating the tension between timescales when I was studying geology and chemistry in parallel was... rather interesting. And yet here I am, and here the Earth is, and I can lie down on the ground with my shoulders against the earth and I can feel - I am surrounded by - my subject of study, my love. There's a reason I've got this icon of Toph. Now I walk in beauty, indeed.)

I wrote the vast majority of my report under Windows using MikTeX, occasionally making reference to detexify. (I also wrote a little of it in a text editor under Debian, but that's a story for another day. ;)

I used Scribus to make a fold-out A3 page (as well as my project poster!).

I edited images using the GIMP, Inkscape and Microsoft ICE.

I created heatmaps using QuantumGIS.

I used Veusz to plot my graphs, and a synthetic data generator provided by the University of Alberta to simulate clustered data points.

OpenOffice featured extensively, predominantly in terms of spreadsheets, eurgh.


I speak a lot more LaTeX and read a little more python than I did when embarking on this particular endeavour, and I am nearly. sodding. done.