'Diary' entry

Brownie mixture... irrelevant but kind of pretty.

Really I'm too busy to post, but I've allowed myself a small amount of procrastination time. I'm getting better about it- the pressure of having to live up to the previous semester's GPA seems to be motivation enough to limit my reading and posting time. Thanks to Gam for keeping up with the posts- and some great ones at that.

This week I have a whole bunch of stuff due. I'm largely on top of it, save for suffering a kind of 'block' when it comes to the most important assignment of all- the draft proposal for my 'thesis' for the nutrition subject I'm taking is due, ostensibly, on Friday, although my meeting with my supervisor (the kick-arse lecturer who I mentioned in a previous entry) is on Thursday, so it wouldn't be fair not to have it effectively done by then.

I also have two lab reports due this week, one on Tuesday and one on Thursday. I've slightly more than half-finished both- I spent all last weekend doing the Thursday one (which is worth more) even though we hadn't really received any proper guidelines for doing them. We received the guidelines at the prac last Thursday; luckily I've managed to include most of the things, but because we have to write them up entirely by hand (frigging backward microbiologists...) the things I've missed are going to be bloody hard to squeeze in. Not to mention that there are pedantic little rules like having to put the label for the diagram under the diagram, not over it. I thought it merely had to be consistent and clear, but no. The label must be under the diagram or we'll lose marks. We can't just label the diagrams with the names of the culture we viewed, and the magnification it was viewed under, either. We have to make clear that it was under an oil immersion microscope. Argh! The tutor has been very helpful in giving us a sheet with guidelines that she wrote herself- something I'm pretty sure she didn't have to do, but the subject in general sucks. There is no way in hell I ever want to be working in a lab, so everything they tell us in the pracs is pretty much irrelevant to me (the guy who runs the pracs is always talking about employment in the field of microbiology, and how important lab books are if we want to get a job... ). Anyway, I can handle that, the timing of having to hand the damn report in is just poor, is all.

Back to my nutrition woes- my problem, even though I now have a relatively clearly defined set of aims, is the sheer volume of studies I've read through... I think my brain is too full to start sorting them. Usually once I've read through things once I can just start typing and things will just kind of form a logical order; I have some idea of where things are supposed to go. This time, I haven't even been able to start typing... I think I'm putting pressure on myself to produce a result comparable to the subject I took with this lecturer last semester (in a class of 20-30), but I feel so much more conspicuous in a class of two, with each of us doing a completely different topic. I was confident going into the subject that I could produce a good result, but the topic seems so vast, not to mention fairly ill-defined in some important areas (although that's partly the point- I should be identifying areas that require further research, and emerging areas of research). The pressure was magnified at the last meeting when my supervisor said that if either of us achieve a mark of over 80% she will work with us to prepare the paper and submit it for publication. Publication would be the first tangible thing I've achieved in this degree so far, and while I didn't go into this subject aiming for anything less than 90%, now I'm worried I'll screw up somehow. I must say, this lecturer is extremely helpful, and really goes out of her way to get hold of things she thinks I might find useful, but I'm kind of daunted by the task... I actually expected to have a working draft by this evening, and yet I wasn't able to even churn out anything except a couple of rough ideas for the opening sentences until this evening after we arrived home from football.

Football at Indooroopilly. We had to forfeit last week because more than half our team couldn't make it, but we managed to have 8 to show up today, which meant we had a sub. We had our arses kicked, which is nothing unusual, but it was great fun. Gam and I started running in the evenings a couple of weeks ago, but we both got sick shortly after we started- my cold lasted only for one day, but Gam was really sick for more than a week, which put paid to the exercise (I suppose I could have exercised by myself but I'm really lazy and used the excuse of Gam being sick to stay home).

Bread oops...

Bread success!

In between bouts of study I've been baking bread. I've got the hang of it (despite one hiccup where I left it to prove for a second time, forgot about it and it rose to astronomical proportions... I would have punched it down and let it rise again, but Gam wanted to see what would happen if we baked it like that!). I've even managed learn how to coax a nice crust onto the loaves by brushing down the bread with water prior to baking, and leaving a tray of water in the oven while the loaf cooks. I'll post the recipe sometime- it's the only thing I cook that I don't have to feel bad about Gam and I eating the lot of ourselves (as opposed to all the cakes and biscuits I usually cook). Organic wheat and rye flour, some barley bran and wheat bran, extra virgin olive oil, macadamia oil and some sesame oil (for flavour), brown sugar, yeast, salt and water... healthy as.



In other food news, I harvested my first sweet potato... and learned that home-grown sweet potato leaves taste a whole lot better than home-grown sweet potato. It looked good raw. It looked and smelled great cooked, but it had these really thick fibres running down the length of the entire root, rendering it practically inedible! Bummer. I'll stick to my sweet potato greens, then.



Also splurged on some avocados to make guacamole... I love Shepard avocados, it almost seems a shame to mash them for guacamole- I'm always tempted to just eat them with a spoon (and years ago when they used to be cheaper that's exactly what I would do). Back to being frugal for a while, though.

On the wedding front... that's going to be a whole new post when I have a lot of time on my hands. Suffice it to say that my parents have decided it's best that I write grandma a letter and tell her that Gam and I are getting married... I think they're trying to put off having to deal with her reaction, and I don't blame them. I won't be answering the phone for a few days after I post it... Grandma never phones, but she has my number so she can call Mum and Dad when they're in Brisbane visiting us and she's home alone... no-one seems to have any doubt that she'll want to talk me out of marrying Gam. And that's something I'm not even going to discuss, even to tell her that I refuse to discuss it. I do hope she surprises us all by being overjoyed, but pigs might fly, too. More on the whole wedding thing later. I've procrastinated enough for now... I can afford no more time.