Fertig

Ladies and Gentlemen, the 88-paged culmination of the past 9 months of my life:

it's so beautiful, at least until my committee rips it apart in front of my eyes on monday.

I guess I'm going to be doing this many times over in grad school. Say what?

mmm, bosons

The pressure of my thesis has driven me to incredible new heights in procrastination.

Examples of recent sources of procrastination:

1. Rube-Goldberg-ish fun courtesy of Japan
2. Elephants and their evolutionary predecessors. i.e. the difference between mastadons and mammoths. How dwarf mammoths existed on a small island in the arctic ocean until as recently as 1500 BC. The different genera of modern elephants and how mammoths are more closely related to asian elephants. And how there was one documented case of a birth to a living african/asian elephant hybrid that died after 2 weeks.
   
3. The Boston Craigslist site for apartments

And my proudest moment:


4. Reading about particle physics for 1+ hours. Whee

Thesis will be handed over this Friday. And then I will be free at last (except for my defense..and revisions..right.)

Goodbye Marbles

Things that drive me crazy (in a bad way):

• Spending several hours reading and interpreting a few sources and then realizing that all that work amounts to a total of three sentences in my actual thesis. GAH!
• That Endnote insists on deleting the rest of my citations whenever I add a new one to Word. Good lord.
  

Things that drive me crazy (in a good way):

• The return of baseball, especially when the Yankees start off hte season by putting the A's to shame and ratcheting up Zito's ERA to a lovely 47.25. Also the awkwardness of Tino Martinez on Baseball Tonight is just adorable. Baseball, how did I live so long without you?

Now, to counteract the craziness: a swimming hedghog
That's better.

Hello again

I realized I haven't posted anything in a while and since I have such an adoring fan base...

Spring break was slightly less stressful than the rest of the semester by virtue of having no class. But it was spent mostly working on my thesis (which, despite the time i spent on it, i still didn't get much done on) and making the trek to Boston just to spend five minutes handing in some forms about not being a felon. Home was nice for a few days, although I realized i've spent very little time at home/ny in the past year and it makes me kind of sad. I don't suppose moving to Boston in June will remedy that.

The weather's gotten incredibly nice these past few days. That first stint of good weather is probably my favorite time of year at Amherst. After hte long, cold (although it was only sort of cold this year) winter suddenly everyone's outside, wearing flip flops and studying outside. I walked out my dorm today to lunch and on the smallish quad in front of the dining hall there were two classes having class on the lawn, like ten people playing frisbee and however many dozens just lounging around. It's such a postcard college-y time (like the fall i guess, but then you still have the winter ahead of you). I also spent quite a bit of time this afternoon avoiding work by playing wiffle ball. That's the trouble with living in places with perpetually warm weather, you don't get the same effect when the spring rolls around; gotta have a depressing winter to work up to it.

The good weather is killing my productivity though. It's really difficult to get yourself into the lab or stay inside and slave over the computer while it's that nice out. Hopefully that will get better since i only have 28 days left to get my thesis out. I had promised myself at hte beginning of last summer that I would pace myself well on my thesis so I wouldn't freak out at the end. So much for that.

And to think that this time last year I still hadn't even started classes yet at Uni Heidelberg.