Martha and Susan’s Excellent Adventures

Okay, school is good again. I started getting some interesting results, and since Budi, Roland and Ziv are in China at the moment (which I was really, really depressed about earlier this week) I have tonnes of access to the equipment in the labs now. One day I was using both fume cupboards, 3 furnaces, the Al evaporator and the spinner all at once. And no one complained! It was heavenly! I felt like Roland, except there are always people fighting for the equipment when those 3 are around because everyone wants to use everything at the same time then. Anyways, now for me, lab = heaven.

Other random news: it’s bloody cold here! Like, 0 - 10 C cold. I kept my jacket on all soccer practice tonight, even during the sprints and game and stuff. Insane. Our coach is going back home (Hungary or former Yugoslavia or somewhere) on Monday, and will be gone for 5 weeks. I think his mother is quite sick, and he missed his father’s death a few years ago, so he’s going home. We’ll have substitute coaches for a while instead. Should be okay.

And Ottawa! Holy crap! I’ve skipped school twice to watch you LOSE to the Mighty Ducks! Killing me! You must destroy Disney! Ken, one of the new Canadians here, is a big hockey fan, so we went to the pub on Tuesday morning to watch the match, then to the UniBar today. They’re playing the games live on Fox Sports here, which is awesome! We ordered a poutine at the UniBar, and the chef actually knew what it was because he spent 6 months in Edmonton last year! Had to leave just before the Stanley Cup finals though. He was disappointed about that. He also said there’s a chain of poutine or fry shops or something all over Edmonton, and all you can order pretty much is poutine. Phil, is this true? What’s the name of this place? It’s a chain apparently. I don’t think we have it in Ontario. I think I’d know something like that.

Well, signing off now is a much cheerier Martha. Thanks to everyone who sent me some kind of comment or message or e-mail over the past week. It was rough, so thanks!

School sux. I had to do a seminar last week. It was poor, that’s going easy on it. The only saving grace of that debacle was that everyone else was completely brutal. I was momentariy blown away by the presenter after me, until the end when the lecturer said “You didn’t make that presentation”. Turns out he just downloaded it from the ANU website. You can find his presentation here if you are interested. Sliver cells are cool dude.

Tomorrow I have to do metallization. Ana tried to do metallization today, but all of the equipment for it is messed up. She’s going to send out an angry e-mail to the group tomorrow. I’ll post it on my “rants” page if it’s any good. If not, I’ll do a proper rant on the lack of responsibility of certain members within our group. Again.

Today I have to hand in an assignment. I just finished it. It’s due in 5 minutes. I skipped soccer Tuesday night to work on it, and school yesterday morning, also to work on it. I’m glad I only have 1 more course to do after this, and then I am definitely done taking university level courses forever! There’s nothing after a PhD, right? Good.

Okay, must go to class to watch another 6 brutal presentations and try not to fall asleep. I can’t believe they’re going to examine us on this crap.

Maurice is one of the guys in my research group here at UNSW. Last year he won Alistair Sproul’s energy efficiency award - the only person Alistair knows who’s more energy efficient than him. Anyways, enjoy!

Green Guerillas Target Sydney

GreenFreedom.net

On-line that is. I thought I didn’t like my blog very much, but it turns out I do. Welcome back little website! I’m glad the hackers didn’t kill you completely!

So when I was going through blog withdrawal, I found Google Photos. Here’s a like to what we did on ANZAC Day:

Israeli Afternoon #2

I also found Google Discussions, and thought I’d revive the on-line book club idea in that form. E-mails have been sent out to a few of you, so we’ll see how it works out.

In other news, we won both our soccer games this weekend. If we win our games this coming weekend, we are pretty much guaranteed to be playing in the finals for both the First Grade and Reserve Grade Superleague competitions. It’s pretty exciting, especially the girls who were on the team last year and the coach expected this to very much be a building year. I guess we built up well.

Tonight I’m either going to watch Sydney FC play Shanghai in Asian Champions League action, or go to yoga. Depends if Andrew Barson has an extra ticket for me or not.

And I should be booking my flight home next week, so stay tuned for exact dates of when Martha will be next on the continent. (Joe, are you still thinking of planning a camping trip for the week after Kristy’s wedding? I still want you to count me in!)