Committee Meeting

Today was my committee meeting.  Things seem to be going pretty well.  My supervisors think that I'm doing quality work and that my rate of progress is satisfactory.  However, I do think that I will need to ramp things up a bit to get done with the year.  For one thing, I've been told that I should start writing my thesis (or at least the introduction to it) now.  I'll be working on that, as well as a few other things over the next few weeks.  I've got the annual report basicallly done.  I have my application for conferance funding ready to go and will turn it in tomorrow.

 

In my free time, I've been playing through the old Warcraft 3 expansion and having a lot of fun with it.  The bonus level is a bit challenging, and I'll be retrying it tonight.

Fish Feast

I really enjoyed the fish that I prepared last night.  Just got some cod fillets, dusted then in flour, then pan fried them in olive oil.  I do this fairly frequently because its pretty cheap, tasty, and easy.  Served with some fresh green beans and French rolls.  Tonight is going to be a bit of an experiment with pasta, sausage, and ricotta cheese.  The sausage and cheese are leftover from the calzones that we made earlier this week and they need to get used.  I have a meeting with my supervisors this afternoon, so I'm spending most of the morning getting ready for that.

Drawing some more

I'll probably end up filling quite a large number of blog posts with this, but I want to continue with daily updates, so that means discussing my daily work.

I spent two hours today working as a TA. I teach for a civil engineering class, helping them to learn about rocks and minerals. It's a bit of a crash course for them, but I really enjoy it. Today was sedimentary rocks, which is probably the easiest week. The difference between a mudstone and a sandstone is readily apparent, even if you don't have eyes.

When I wasn't involved with that, I continued my work with the drawings, and finished up the sketch that I started to work on Friday. I had to learn a new tool in Illustrator, so I'll use that as the excuse for why my work took so long. I won't be showing a picture today. Out of a sense of (probably) unreasonible paranoia, I don't want to show off any of my finished drawings until I've got them in my thesis. But I think it looks pretty good.

Tomorrow, I have a meeting with my supervisors, which should be interesting. I get to show them these drawing that I've been working on, and discuss what more needs to be done.

Tonight, I'm planning to make some fairly tasty food. Pan-fried fish might be one of my favorite simple meals. It'll be accompanied by some veggies and pasta. Bon appetite.

Drawing and Such

It has certainly been a long time since I have done a blog post here. I'm thinking about trying to do a daily/weekly/something report on my thesis progress. For one thing, it will help me see what I'm really getting done and make sure that I keep up the work.

Most of my time today was spent tracing a photo I took of an outcrop. I'm also writing up a description of each of the soils that I saw at the outcrop in the standardized NZGS format. Here is a sample of what this is looking like so far.

I still have a bit of work to do on it. Things like adding a scale and describing all of the soils in it. Work like this has been one of the major focuses of the past month for me. I have a lot of logs I've done in the field, and nearly all of them need to be digitized for use in my thesis later. It's a lot of work, and I'm trying to get through it quickly, while still producing good quality work.

Me at Starlight Symphony