Rain, rain go away….please?

As many residents of Oregon do, I suffered from the winter blues. Whether you call it SAD (Seasonal Affectiveness Disorder) or simple a hibernation instinct I find the rainy season particularly difficult to handle on any year. This year, however, I am finding it particularly tough. After an entire year without seeing winter (I left for Australia in October and returned in March) I feel the cold and the inescapable wet as an almost physical weight on both mind and body. I don’t want to do anything except eat, sleep, take hot baths, and sleep some more. However, I must go to school, play with the dog, cuddle the cat (best done while napping though) and perform other seemingly pointless chores every day. How do I do this? Honestly some days I dont. I stay in my pajamas, I drink lots of tea and cocoa and I play video games if I am not napping or bathing. (Some times I think I should grow gills the amount of time I spend in the tub.) Previous years I have battled the blues by retreating to that haven of warmth and skin cancer known as the tanning salon. Peter has made me promise that I will save my skin and future health by ceasing that uplifting practice. So I have replaced it with workout at least once a week (twice or more is best) and sitting in the sauna in the women’s locker room when I am done.

On the plus side, the complete lack of any desire to go outside has given me many long days in the office working on school and research. I have come up with a couple of good ideas and gotten some rather good experiments run.

So, how do you deal with the rainy season?

Catching Up

It’s been a month since I posted but it like an eternity.  What has been going on since Mother’s Day you ask?

First Peter came to visit for two and a half glorious weeks.  Sadly I was still in classes we didn’t get to do much traveling. However, we did join my Grandmother, Mother and Gene on a birding trip through Malheur National Wildlife Reservation. It was gorgeous and well infested with mosquitoes. I saw many new birds, such as the Yellow Headed Blackbird and Bobolink. The drive out there from Corvallis was agony but worth it. On our way home we spent a night in Bend at my Grandmother’s so we could have a leisurely trip through the McKenzie pass with lots of exploration stops.

Yellow Headed Blackbird

Cinnamon Teal

Family Portrait

Me with Hard Cider @ St Francis School in Bend

Peter and I in front of the Three Sisters

Peter and I at Sahalie Falls

After Peter left school became my main focus and nearly overwhelmed me. At one point I nearly decided to take my master’s and hot foot it back to Australia but good sense prevailed. I will stick it out though I retain some bitter, angry feelings about it.

Now that the term is finally done I will turn back to my long forgotten research in hopes that I will have something to publish by the end of the summer! Tomorrow I return to Australia for a 3 week vacation but will spend some time at ARI working and chatting with my dear Aussie friends that I have missed terribly.

Now, I just have to pack.

Back to School

So today I talked to the species distribution group about some of the work that I did while I was in Australia. The group today was composed of Tom (my adviser), Weng-Keen (another professor), Rebecca (name may be wrong, but new post-doc) and Phoebe (another IGERT student). While I felt that I could have gotten more done during my time in Australia I really felt pretty good about the progress. I was proud to show the maps I had created and was pleased with my grasp of the data, the data collection process and the policy impacts my work could have. Tom however seemed less than impressed. I am not, nor have I ever been, a student that was interested in the nitty gritty details of machine learning algorithms. I am however, endlessly intrigued by the possible applicaitons of them outside of the field of CS. Perhaps this means that I dont pay enough attention to the details of such algorithms and I am sure that this frustrates Tom but I told him I wasn’t interested in theory. It was just a real downer to come from ARI where the ecologists really like my work back to my university where it apparently isn’t meeting standards.

I take my quals this month. I am wondering if Tom is going to pass me or just suggest that I get my masters and go.  That would crush me but I would try to get into University of Melbourne and do my PhD there I guess.

Le sigh.