What A Month!
The past 4 weeks have been pretty hectic and the last week has been just plain awful (more on that later). It probably best to start at the beginning. So far this month has consisted of …
- Christina and I had an engagement party in Sydney (which was great) and then another one in Canberra the next afternoon (which was also great). Photos are coming soon.
- The upgrades on the vacuum chamber for the HDLT were finally finished allowing me to reassemble everything (about 2 weeks of work) and attempt to get experiments underway. More on that in my next post.
- I had a French engineering student shadow me at work for a week. It was good to have the extra set of hands to help with things, but keeping him busy was draining.
- I’ve been off to the physio on average twice a week for treatment on my hand, which is improving so at last I can return to goalkeeping duties. My two games playing in defense were admirable but contained moments of madness including conceding a direct free kick for a tackle in the box. Fortunately our substitute keeper saved it (and my dignity).
- Canberra was forecast to get snow down to 500 metres (basically everywhere) and it didn’t. Such an anti-climax. All we got instead were a few nights at -6 deg C and a nice white blanket on the ranges.
- I traveled to Brisbane for Christina and my final engagement party. After some running around to organise things the day before it all went smoothly and was also good. I even made raspberry & white chocolate muffins from scratch (under Christina’s guidance)!! Photos coming soon as well.
- I’ve been staying up to watch the Socceroos woeful performance thus far in the Asian Cup. Thankfully they rediscovered playing professionally and beat Thailand to progress to a quarter-final showdown against Japan.
- Finally, I got the reviewer’s comments back on my first journal paper. Their comments were positive but much work is required to get all the changes they requested done.
The photo above is a of brushtail possum that was perched in one of the trees outside the Research School of Physical Sciences & Engineering where I work. The poor thing looked pretty cold and was happy to sleep there most of the day. Even the noise from the workshops didn’t trouble it.