Fannish Argosies

Gacked from deborak. I don't usually post these, but I found this one more interesting than most. I like the artwork they use, as well.

( Cut to spare your flists )

In other news, an unusual cool front has moved in and made my area actually livable! It's back down into the 80s now and not quite so humid as it was, so outside activities are much more enjoyable. I spent the day at Harrison Bay yesterday with my family and had a nice time walking along the lake, hiking a bit, and having a cookout. Mm, s'mores.

My boots arrived and they fit rather well, so I'm all set there. They're not quite as tall as I would've liked, but for what I'll be using them for I think it'll be okay. I can always get better ones later on if jobs require them. I still need a lightweight waterproof rain jacket and a daypack, and then I think I'll be just about set for Montana.

Sadly, I'm going to miss Saturday's Who, b/c I'm heading off to Florida again with shanola22. No Valentine's Day silliness this time, I'm afraid, and of course her family will be there to chaperone. Thwarted again! Oh well, we shall have fun on the beach nonetheless. I am armed with SPF 80 sunscreen and am ready to poke around on the beach and see what fabulous marine life I can photograph.

*off to pack*

Am finally in Auburn, CA - fed, changed into comfy clothes, and ensconced in my motel room for the night. It's only half 8 here, so I have plenty of time to relax and practice my presentation for tomorrow. Don't even have to get up until 8 if I like, so lots of time for sleep, too. Whee!

All wireless in the airports was very much not free and rather expensive, so am just now getting online. Not sure whose wireless I'm using, but from the name I think I'm nicking it from one of the local apartments. Thank you, whoever you are!

Am still way nervous about the presentation part, though I think if they like me I may be a shoe-in for the job. There's only three of us here for interviews and they said there are two positions at each of the two offices. I may have an edge on the other guy I've met so far - he's younger and is just now finishing up his master's, so it doesn't seem like he has any more experience than I have.

Still, it's a tiny little place, so I have no idea if I'll want this job or not. Their offices look so wee! It's so flat here, omg!

*flails more*

Still nothing about a job, or even an interview. Am starting to mope.

I'm thinking of doing some substitute teaching for a bit, just to have some money coming in while I wait. It'll give me something to do and it'll be an easy job to quit whenever I do get a real job. I used to work for the school system here, so I'm sure it'll be no trouble to get put on the list so that the teachers I know can call me in.

Tomorrow I'm putting an application for this job in the post. It's a research assistant job at Newcastle University, helping with a behavioural project on birds. I'm hoping my combined degrees and the fact that I have an extra psychology degree will help overcome my lack of a PhD. No idea if I'll be able to get shortlisted for this one, but I really would like to have it. The pay is excellent, and with the exchange rate such as it is I could pay off my student loan easily within the two-year contract of the position. The research experience would look great on my resume, as well, and it's still within the area of animal behaviour so I wouldn't be going too far off the beaten track, topic-wise.

*crosses fingers and toes*

Pleeeeease, someone hire me. I can't hang around in limbo forever. The boredom alone is killing me.

I'm finished.

Sort of.

The main text is finally tweaked to my liking. All the pictures, illustrations, tables, maps, and other figures are in place and labeled properly. References have been checked and double checked to make certain they're all there. The appendices, which took me all damn night and half of today, are finished. I have a table of contents and an abstract. Working on the lists of tables and figures now, thankfully just a copy-and-paste job. Still have to do acknowledgements and page numbering, as well as make sure in what order all the fiddly bits at the beginning are supposed to be.

Sadly, I can't get it to the bindery until Monday, but that will give me time to triple check everything. I need to find a good place in town to get it printed, on good paper so the photos will turn out. And maybe get someone, like my mother, to give it a read-through. I hate the thought of there being any little typos I've missed, things I won't be able to fix b/c it'll be hardbound and out of my hands and future students will read it and catch these things and shake their heads and go "tsk" at it.

Or I could be just paranoid. Either one, really.

95 pages. God, that's the most massive thing I've ever written.

The goal here is to get at least 72% on this thesis. I forgot to post about it before, but we finally had those external examiner meetings, so they finally gave us our results back from the taught portion of the course. I got a B - 68% with the possibility of a distinction. So close to an A, dammit. Happily, the thesis can make up for those percentage points. I need a 72% to get a distinction for the master's degree overall. And, while I'm happy to get the degree at all, now that it's tangible and has a number to it, I do want the distinction. Probably won't mean anything to anyone later on down the road, but it'll mean something to me.

Just hit 11,000 words! Woot!

Yesterday was highly unproductive, as hours fiddling with stats on the cuttlebone section I'd skipped and saved for last led to no end of frustration. I think I know what stats I need; however, once I added the data for the juveniles to the adult data I'd already tested, my data set suddenly became both not normal and of unequal variance. Both log and square root transformations didn't help, so I'll have to either take out a few outliers somewhere or use nonparametric testing. And for that, I'll need a macro the stats department wrote, which means a trip to the library before my access runs out. Argh. I just want to finish that one section. It's pissing me off greatly.

Today, however, has been highly productive so far. I've been able to incorporate more of my literature review than I thought was going to be possible, which pleases me. Yes, I still have graphs and maps to add, some diagrams to draw, and my references and appendices to sort out, but that's just filler. I know what those are, I just have to organize them properly. And that could be done after I turn the draft in, if needed.

Anyway, I'll make it in time for my personal deadline of handing in the draft tomorrow. I have a meeting with my supervisor to talk about my work, which is nice but most annoying. The bastard emailed me on Wednesday saying he'd gotten the initial stuff I'd sent him and asking me to come by to discuss it. The annoying part? I sent that data over two weeks ago. He went on yet another holiday without telling anyone, after only just getting back from the US the week before. I even told him the Friday before that I'd be sending some stuff his way that Monday, but did he say anything about going away? No, of course not. He said great, lovely, good job. I like the guy, but right now I could strangle him. I had to get the news that he'd gone away from his daughter, as no one else seemed to know where he was. I'm sure he had email access, so even a short note saying he'd gotten my email would've been nice. Did he really expect me to sit on my hands for two weeks until he replied, doing nothing? I had to keep going on my own just hoping I was on the right track, and I truly hope he won't sit there tomorrow and say oh, you should have done this and this and oh, how about this as well?

Perhaps I should be grateful. If anything, this project has taught me that if one is going to get anything done in research, one just has to go and do it one's bloody self. I've done most everything by myself this summer and although I'll be expected to list my supervisor first in the acknowledgements, if I were going to be fair I'd list the PhD student I worked with and all the technicians first, as they helped me more than anyone else did.

I need more caffeine...

Well, it couldn't last forever. As fun as it's been having the house to ourselves the past few months, Christina and I finally settled on a new housemate. Another guy, but this one seems much cleaner/saner/more polite and MUCH better at English.

Feisal (sp?) is from Saudi Arabia (I think that's what Christina said) and is here in Bangor on scholarship to do a PhD in business. Extremely well spoken and polite, from what I can tell, and possibly a bit shy as he said he'd never lived with girls before. Not sure of his age but he looks mid twenties or thereabouts. So far I'm not getting any creepy vibes from him, though he's only been here a few hours. Evidently he's spent time in LA, a brother or cousin or something who's studying there, so there's a hint of American influence in his accent. It's nice that we've kept our house diverse but still maintain the ability to understand each other.

ETA: I just had a chat with him as he was going out to do a few things at the university, and he seems really quite lovely. I found out he's studied in the US himself, both at the Uni of California, Long Beach and at Uni of Colorado. His English is just brilliant and the conversation was very pleasant. We may have found a winner! Hopefully no terribly weird quirks will surface in the next few weeks ;)

In other news, just finished a 14-hour night shift on the ship for the mussel cruise thing. Disappointingly there wasn't anything new for us to do except experience being on the ship overnight. Basically we were free labor for the school's ongoing mussel study in the strait, kept busy with filtering seawater for chlorophyll and SPM (suspended particulate matter) after each CTD drop. It's more boring than it sounds, if that's possible. Still, it was nice being out on the ship again, and we got cabins this time so we could sleep or do whatever on our off time. Plus, the captain of the smaller boat who picked us up this morning took a few minutes out of his time to take us closer to Puffin Island so we could watch the puffins and seals, so that was a nice bonus.

Tonight will be finishing up my (final?) project proposal, the more detailed one that will be given to the external examiner. We'll have presentations next week so they can identify problem areas before we actually start. I spoke to Chris earlier in the week and now I have a more detailed plan about what I'm doing. I'm quite excited now! I'll be doing some filming of mating behavior to get an overall description of the process (doesn't matter if it's been described before by anyone else, and there's always the chance of seeing something someone else missed), looking at age and size in relation to sexual maturity and possible observational learning in male visual displays, and most excitingly looking at chemoreception in mate choice. For this last one, we're going to build a Y-maze and look at mate choice and preference b/w recently mated males and not recently mated males. If there's time, I can look at sperm flushing and mate guarding as related to sperm competition. Dependent on how many animals we have and what replicates I can get, he said I might not have enough to perform much in the way of statistical analysis, but that this is perfectly ok and having a thesis that's mostly descriptive isn't a bad thing at all. So I'm quite pleased about that :)

Man, I slept all day after getting home, so I'm sure I'll be up all night now. Oh well, maybe I can get a few things done. And maybe type up my thoughts on the first half of the new House two-parter, which kicked all kinds of ass.

A better pic of the new do under the cut, for those interested.

( Redheaded hedgehog? Now rotated to save neck strain :P )

Damn, five in the morning. Off to bed now, really.

I can't believe I didn't rec this before, but for those of you who haven't seen just_eunice's new Dogma vid, go here to download it.

cimmerianwillow, I thought you might especially like this, b/c this may be the same song you love so much. Do the lyrics on your LJ come from this song?

Anyway, yes. Movement and humor and awesome beat-whoring, not to mention some rather touching bits as well. I dare you not to tap your foot to this one.

While I'm reccing vids, check out birgitm's latest Farscape vid, Wonderboy. John and Scorpy and Tenacious D. No, really.

Hope everyone had a happy Thanksgiving. I had fish and chips rather than turkey, and spent most of the day working on the Shell Island report, but all in all it was a good day. The holiday was also topped off by snow. Actual snow. In November. Definitely new for me, but lovely. It's mostly gone now, but the mountains are still all white and beautiful. Will post pics of that soon. Also on a good note, the papers from the bank came in the mail, so I should be able to have the loan thing wrapped up on Monday. Whee!

One last bit of squee - OMGWILDWILDWESTISCOMINGTODVD!!!. Ahem. That is all.

( Pics from our offshore fishing trip on the RV Prince Madog )

Am exhausted, but it was a profitable day. It's nice to learn new things that are both fun and useful. I've never eaten some of these things before, but I'm going to get some tips and give them a try.

Today is more flailing about doing the stats for our barnacle report, and writing up the fisheries essay. Monday is more ship work (this time just taking measurements here at the pier) and writing up the barnacle report. I'm not sure how good this report will turn out, considering how little time we've had to learn about this and do it, but I'll do my best. See you all after the deadlines...