Just my little corner of the Interweb
You might just have eclectic music tastes if you’ve ever uttered the following:
“Honey? Do you think I’d like this 2-disk set of George and Ira Gershwin in Hollywood, or the 2-disk collection of Devo?”
There was no sarcasm involved….
The plan was to go to The Hulk after my defense, but I only wanted to go to a matinee showing (I’m cheap, and I hate crowds). Unfortunately, the defense went about 20 minutes too long for us to make the last matinee (at 4:45 PM). Instead, we went straight to the Macaroni Grill for dinner, and then I dragged Andrew around the mall for several hours. (Oh, shut up. He needed some new shorts, so part of the trip was for him.)
I dragged him into the Build a Bear store (for probably the umpteenth time). He was a good sport, but I could tell that he was tired of taking me in there every time we went to the mall. So, I decided that it was time to put together a bear for myself. But what to do? Based on the day, it seemed appropriate to do a PhD-candidate bear. What does this entail? Well, we dressed the bear in grad-student clothes (a peasant top, shorts, sandals and glasses), and bought her a school bag (the kind that has a flap under which you can insert pencils and a calculator). Her name is Felicia , and she’s working on her thesis in my home office as I write this. (She even has her proposal defense talk in her bag with her.)
The proposal defense was at 2 PM.
All morning I tried not to worry too much about the defense. I did do a bit of cramming, trying to track down a tidbit on column density/flux correlations in Seyfert 2 galaxies and how this might indicate that not all Seyfert 2s are created equal, but I couldn’t find it. Fortunately, I didn’t need it.
At about 10 AM, I decided that it was silly to cram for the defense. I had no idea what the committee might ask, so there was no way to prepare any more than I already had in writing the proposal and presentation. So, I went back to analyzing the Akn 120 data set. It’s odd how playing with data has a calming effect. In some ways, it’s so mechanical that the brain can just go on autopilot. On the other hand, there’s the knowledge that this data set might, just might, hold some cool bit of science that no one has seen before, and if I could just find it. I didn’t get further than fitting the first spectrum to my four models, but I was encouraged that it showed a strong sign of reflection (which none of my other four sources so far had shown). I had been getting worried that I was doing something wrong with the data.
At 11 AM, I received a very encouraging e-mail from my UMD advisor (“Try to have fun this afternoon… you’ve got a good proposal that should sail through, so you can mainly use this as an opportunity to harvest ideas from Cole and Pat.” — Cole and Pat were the committee members, besides Chris and Kim). Unfortunately, I didn’t feel any less nervous after that. Sigh.
I tried to think about lunch at noon, but couldn’t manage to get too excited. I didn’t really want to put anything into my stomach that might just end up coming back out again. I did manage to have a bag of Veggie Chips, and a small cup of applesauce, but even those made me feel barfy.
My plan was to leave for the university at 1 PM. It only takes about 15 minutes to get from Goddard to UMD, but I thought I’d stop by Stef’s office for a bit, and let her boost me up a bit. Just before leaving, I decided to check my favorite blogs. I skimmed through Wil Wheaton ‘s entry for yesterday , and paused as I got to the “Thought for the Day”:
Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined.
–Thoreau
Holy crap! How appropriate was that for me today? I have wanted to go as far as my intellect could could take me in my education for as long as I can remember. I’ve known that I wanted to be Dr. Barb since I entered college over ten years ago. So what if I’ve hit some bumps and slow patches on the way? So what if I took the scenic route for a couple years? So what if I had to take a year-long pit stop to find the strength to pursue my dream again? I’ve made it. I know where I want to go. I know how to get there. And all I have left to get to full candidacy is this silly little proposal defense today. Somehow, the thought that I was finally following where my dreams had led me was more encouraging than anything anyone else could say.
That’s not to say that I wasn’t still nervous. I won’t go into details on the defense itself. Let me just say that it went pretty well. There were a few questions that Chris had to lead me toward the answer to, but overall the committee thought the project was worthwhile. I’m excited to get back to work on it.
I worked a couple more days on the proposal this week, incorporating some comments from Kim, and I declared it finished yesterday. I’m certain that any omissions will come up during the defense next Friday (YIKES!). I’ll admit that I’m starting to get nervous….
I spent the bulk of the day at the library doing a complete re-write of my thesis proposal. After re-reading the draft I sent Kim and Chris, I’m completely embarrassed! Chris sent me comments, and I began to wonder if we had read the same paper, but as I combed through the paper more today, and read over my stack of journal articles, I saw his point, and what I needed to do.
Andrew came with me, and I was worried that he would get bored, since the plan was to stay until the re-write was done or the library closed. It was nice to have him there, though, since he reminded me when I needed to get lunch. (We headed off to Anita’s around 12:30 PM — after I’d been working for 2.5 hours, and completed reworking the first big section.) As it turned out, he had plenty to do looking up books on how to buy a used car. He also went out to a nearby comic book store for a bit. And I finished the re-write by 3:30 PM.
I spent another 4 or so hours at home entering the re-write into LaTeX, but overall the day was very productive, and I’m happy with the resulting proposal. It’s much stronger, and more coherent than the draft I turned in on Monday.
I was nearly panicking yesterday when I realized that while I could get Xspec running (an X-ray spectral fitting program that I’m using for my thesis), I could not get it to plot my spectra. I could set the plotting device without a problem, and the pgplot server would seem to come up. However, when I asked it to plot, at first X11 would crash, but after installing a few more libraries, nothing happened. No plot. Oddly enough, if I asked for a hard copy of the plot, the PS file would look fine.
Today I decided to try using XDarwin instead of Apple’s X11 beta. Lo and behold, the plotting worked fine. Since I had Xspec and pgplot working fine under X11 on the old Mac, I wonder if the problem has to do with the new OSX update (10.2.6).
We bought a new Mac, since Andrew is leaving his job — we had bought the current one through his work’s computer buying benefit. Rather than buying off the old one, we decided that we could get more computer for the same price if we bought new. The new one is a dual 1.25 GHz G4 processors with a 120 Gb hard drive. (No, that’s actually not excessive. If this was just a regular home computer, maybe, but I’m working on my thesis at home, and the data takes up a lot of room. In fact, I filled my 50 Gb partition on the old Mac before writing out 20 Gb worth of CDs.)
We spent much of the day copying stuff from the old one to the new one. Now I just need to get Fink and lheasoft (thesis stuff) going….
When I was in first grade, my Mom told me about the May Day tradition of making up baskets full of goodie. leaving them on the doorstep of friends, and trying to get away without being seen. She didn’t tell me about the rest of the tradition. My friend Corky knew the rest of the tradition, though.
It must have been 1978 when Mom told me about the May Day tradition of May Baskets. That year, on May Day, I made little baskets out of construction paper. Mom and I went to the store and bought a couple packages of candy, and I dolled them out between my homemade baskets. The memory of who I made baskets for has faded — certainly there was one for Gretchen and one for Debbie (two of my best friends) — the one person I remember, though, was Corky. He was my one friend who happened to be a boy.
When I had all my baskets made up, Mom drove me from house to house to deliver the baskets. All of the other deliveries were uneventful. I left each basket on the doorstep, rung the doorbell, and ran behind a nearby tree or bush. When the coast was clear, I went back to the car, and Mom would drive me to the next stop.
Corky’s basket was the last one I delivered. I remember his house being on a bit of a hill, with the road at the bottom. I trudged up the hill, left the basket on the doorstep, and ran around the side of the house. Just like all of the other deliveries. Except this time, I heard Corky coming around the house, too. I frantically looked around for a better place to hide, but I didn’t see anywhere — not that I could get to without completely exposing myself. Mom was trying to get me to run down to the car, and make an escape that way, but I didn’t see her. I was done for. He was going to find me.
I ran when I saw him round the corner, but I had nowhere to go (going to the car didn’t occur to me for some reason). Plus I’m not, nor ever have been, much of a runner. It was easy for him to catch me.
And when he did catch me? He kissed me! My first kiss.
I must admit that the kiss wasn’t entirely welcome. Mom forgot to tell me that May Baskets were really part of a courting ritual, and that a young man was expected to kiss the lass who left him the basket, if he could catch her. I’m sure Mom thought that it was very precious. I, however, was not the least bit amused.
I dragged Andrew down to Arlington to get a free cone at Ben & Jerry’s . I suppose we spent more on the Metro ride and Metro parking than we would have spent on a cone, but I wanted my Chunky Monkey .
It wasn’t a completely wasted trip, either. We started with dinner at Big Bowl — I had the kung pao tofu (which should not be eaten the night before an annual ob-gyn exam, as I found out the hard way last year). When we walked by the B&J’s on the way to Big Bowl, the line wasn’t long — just to the door of the shop. After dinner, the line was out the door, but it turned out to move quite fast — we were happily licking our ice cream cones within five or ten minutes. Yum!
I had my first visit to the dentist in over 7 years in January of this year. The only thing they will do for new patients, in all of the offices I called, is get a set of X-rays and assess what needs to come next. I only had two cavities, though I also needed to have my wisdom teeth removed and I need a night guard (for nocturnal teeth grinding). Today was my first visit — my next is scheduled for July. (Curse me for choosing the “HMO”-like plan. It takes three months to see anyone. I lucked out with my January appointment, because they had someone cancel just before I called for my appointment.)
The practitioner and the dentists in Birmingham City Centre did say that I didn’t have too much plaque. Weird. It’s been seven years, so it’s amazing he’d say something like that. I was expecting excessive bitching over my long absence. Oh well. Actually, that reminded me that when I was still on my Mom’s health insurance, I had a hygienist tell me the same thing, and they promptly changed me to cleanings every 9 months instead of 6. I figured that they just wanted to see me less frequently. I really appreciate Frisco, TX orthodontists, since I’d previously had trouble with that same dentist — they were very skimpy with the novocain, and I started feeling the drilling before he was done (it was only one cavity, too, so not like I was having a string of them done). My parents had experienced the same thing, so it wasn’t just an aberration. Anyway, despite the pain, I decided not to say anything, because I figured he was almost done drilling, and I just wanted to get out of there.
Copyright © 2025 My Silly Life All rights reserved. Theme by Laptop Geek.