I’m sitting here in our campus copy center waiting to get my thesis copied. It is a whopping 61 pages total, and I need 10 copies before 4 PM. Of course you had to expect it to come down to this after all the work I’ve put in over the last year just to get my research done. One thing I wasn’t expecting was the cost of all this. I have color plates in my thesis, so it’s going to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 bucks for the copies and then another 100 dollars to get it bound. The library should pay for the copies they keep and the department should pay for the copy they get as well. That is about 30 dollars in binding right there.
In other news, I got an iPad for graduation. It is what I am typing on right now, and let me tell you that steve jobs wasn’t lying when he said it was magical. This may be a topic I discuss in greater depth later.
I turned a year older 11 days ago, and while I don’t think that anything ever changes magically upon your birthday, I think my workload this quarter is starting to catch up to me. My head is filling with way to many different techniques for analyzing biological experiments with ANOVA and it’s many variations. Plants evolved extremely slowly, and just getting to that part of my Evolution of Plants class feels as if it has taken three quarters of the Ordovician just to make it to a point where we can start discussing just how plants evolved. Time for my thesis research is few and far between since each assay run is 9 hours and I have much less than that available to me each day. I know I’ll get it done, but these things weigh on you after a while, June is coming up sooner rather than later.
Given all of the above, tonight I was so tired I chose chocolate milk. I got home and set my stuff down, and rather than choosing dinner and a beer, I chose dinner and a glass of chocolate milk. Good ole comforting chocolate milk. Creamy, chocolately and infinitely more relaxing in this situation than a beer. Now, after watching two and a half episodes of Criminal Minds (I admit, I have a problem), I’m finally starting to unwind. I know things will get better, I just hope it’s before June.
Like many people, I have a few things I’d like to get done before 2008 shuts its doors and 2009 is open for business. In the spirit of productivity (something you may note that did not happen yesterday in my case) tonight’s blog-off topic is your list of things, projects, etc. to complete before 2009 opens it’s eyes in a little less than two weeks.
I have quite a bit on my plate, so realistically, I’ve had to adjust some schedules. My biggest task is finding papers and finalizing my thesis project, which most of you should know has changed drastically from the original topic (and eventually PI). I may not have this complete, but I’m gonna try my darndest to get close. I was at school looking for papers today and will be doing the same tomorrow and probably saturday morning. I need to get this done for a lot of reasons including getting the hell out of Cal Poly, but it also applies to my financial situation as I need an approved GS-101 (graduate program contract) to get a tuition waiver as a TA for winter quarter due to the ridiculous budget cuts (Fee waivers for TAs are less than a percent of the total budget, so what do you say we cut something bigger, like the salaries of the presidents?).
On a much less important note, I have a book that Allison gave me and that has been floating around for like a year. I have restarted it and am hellbent on finishing it, maybe even as early as Sunday. Yep, friday book reports may be coming to this blog as well and as a matter of fact, I have a book i will be finishing tomorrow.
Finally, I need to review/study correlations and regressions. I am taking advanced biometrics, and not having taken Cal Poly’s Biometrics class (basically biologically oriented statistics), I need to get myself in gear to play pro ball with a professor that really knows his stats and with students that have a very thorough stats background. This I’ve started too and really I just need to look at regressions that are nonlinear and then probably review the linear stuff one more time.
Aside from those big ticket items above, I’d like to get some sort of training plan set for 2009 as well as plan race dates. This gets especially hairy considering my running has dropped off considerably with the early darkness and my inability to get up at 5AM as of late. Apparently I am part bear and my body really wants to hibernate.
Ok, so what’s on your end of year list?
Hope’s getting a little testy about having to think of a topic every morning, so I promise to start pulling a little more weight in el blog-off.
I have to give Hope props once again because she is occasionally (and sometimes it becomes often) my personal Mac tech support line. Just today even, she answered yet another of my dumb ass questions and bam, I was all set in like 4 short minutes. This kind of tech support is awesome, I mean I try not to abuse it, because mostly of the time I am able to get the info I need from some sort of help file or manual. What I would like, however – I know that this is just one of those facts of life – is 24/7 tech support for life. I’m not talking about someone here every second of the day, I like to think for myself, but really, how cool would it be if you could just stop, yell tech support and have someone appear on your shoulder to give you some reassurance? Clearly I’m stressed. I am falling behind at school and it’s not for lack of trying. I’ve been doing literature searches for close to 9 months now (yes, some babies have probably been born in the same time frame), and now, looking for a new project, I’m even hitting some barriers, albeit smaller ones. One of the professors that I’ve been talking to about a project specifically with fish told me he didn’t see the ecological relevance of comparing native, introduced and hybrid fish that occupy roughly the same area of a river. It took me about a day to see his point. It’s true, humans just create too much of a universal disturbance to really worry about natives being wiped out. We’ve created this issue, now we need to deal with it. What I still feel strongly about, is that we need to at least recognize that we do this and we need to study these natives before they’re wiped out, so at least we have a record that they existed should they pop up again sometime (weirder things have happened). So now I need tech support. I need someone to swoop in and give me all the answers. I can’t stay down here forever and I refuse to be one of the graduate students that has been in the program for 4, 5, even 7 years. I just won’t accept it in a program that should really take a max of three years. I know this isn’t going to happen, and this really isn’t quite as desperate as it sounds, but I can’t help thinking “wouldn’t it be nice.” By the way if anyone finds my instruction manual to finding a thesis project, let me know.
Random | dustin | 
June 8, 2010 1:18 pm | 
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