Starting the thesis

The second-to-last chapter of my diploma studies has begun: The thesis. Once I finish that (in about a year), I have but to clear the last oral exam, and I’m done. At the same time, this is the first time in my life that I’m working 9-17 instead of a student’s typical leisurely schedule. Well, students do a lot of work, but very much in their own time, as you may well know. I was a little unprepared for how much of a difference that makes. I come home at 18 o’ clock, pretty much wiped out and find myself with a scant six hours for eating, social activities, relaxation, hobbies and everything else. Compared to the decadent days I used to spend chatting with friends, painting and watching anime, it’s a restriction. Compared to real work schedules, it’s still very moderate.

My supervisor at work hasn’t been around much the past few days, and when he is, he’s hardly demanding of me. Most of the time, I’ve been doing stuff on my own and then showing him my success or failure. Actually, I’ve toiled a bit, but had some significant successes. What I’ve done so far is analyse old ultrasonic spectra from measurements my supervisor took about two years back. I’ve now managed to get my peakfinder and fitting algorithm to a reliable state, so I can start using the results it produces.

Despite the lack of pressure from above, I’m kind of stressed out, and today wasn’t a picnic, either. I helped my neighbor move out, then painted my bookshelf, bought groceries, cooked, and spent two hours trying to set up a content management system for the dorm’s homepage. It’s been a long day. Tomorrow might feature a hike and reading some books. In other words, I want to actually relax before the week starts again. At the same time, I have ideas for a new painting floating around in my head, I need to practice for the choir again, I’m meeting friends monday evening and so forth. My room needs cleaning, I’ve just gotten over a very annoying cold and it feels like my last holiday is too far away. It ended on tuesday, by the way. Oh well. I guess I’ll get used to working 35 hours per week. Heh.

Home from England

I’ve been back from the Midlands for a few days, so I thought I’d supply the rest of my stay there. On saturday, my sister-in-law was busy with a survey she’d volunteered for, so my brother and I just went out on our own and got ourselves a dose of the famous english countryside. Contrary to initial planing, we did not in fact visit Bosworth Field or Rutland Water, because these turned out to almost an hour’s drive away. So, we stayed more in the region. First, we walked up Beacon Hill, one of the heights overlooking Loughborough. We got a really great view on Loughborough, and north towards Nottingham (albeit not TO Nottingham, a little too hazy for that). We also caught a large helping of wind, as the fabulous blue sky and sunshine was accompanied by winds in gale force. Quite unexpected, and at least for my brother,  a reason not to stay too long on top of the hill. After getting back to the car, we moved to nearby Bradgate Country Park, which mainly features a conic hill with a small stone tower on top, with a great view in a different direction: South to Leicester. At this point, my brother was confirmed in his statement that Leicester was a really ugly city. Seriously, not a beauty. After having our fill of Bradgate park, we drove around through one of the more pittoresque country villages, before returning home to tea and cookies (no, not scones).  Saturday evening we had australian dinner with friends of my hosts from Mensa. Very nice people, whom we actually agreed to visit on sunday evening.

Sunday was Leicester day. Leicesterday, all my troubles seem so fa- uh, never mind.  We had several museums that might be visited and a definite recommendation for kick-ass vegetarian curry. Supposedly, the indian rugby team eats there whenever they’re in town. We started off with the Jewry Wall roman museum, which features a roman bath excavation and some interesting exhibits. The text accompanying those are total bunk, with spelling mistakes galore and moderate content. In a museum free of charge, I can’t really complain, though, and some of the exhibits were nifty, like the roman wax tablet with stylus for taking notes. Lunch was at the curry place, which was tiny, drafty and ever so delicious. Spicy yoghurt soup, yum. Also, the name of the place sounded very much like “sayonara”, which amused me a bit. After lunch, we went on to Abbey pumping station, the small industrial museum, which is mainly concerned with early industrial amusement and sewage. Yes, everything from toilets to canalization can be seen there. Curiousities like a cast-iron toilet tank abound. Again, nice exhibits, poor text and no fee. That works, I guess. We skipped the space center, because it would have been 30 £ for the three of us. Way too much! In the evening, we visited the Mensans again, and enjoyed excellent conversation, along with choclate fondue and a garden hottub. Oh yes.

Monday was my last day, and since I had to leave in the afternoon and spend roughly 7 hours on the road, we just stuck to Loughborough. We took a walk around town, looked at the park and visited the local museum in the old public bath. It had nice exhibits, so-so texts and was free of charge. See a pattern here? I eventually packed up my things and left. Took the bus to the airport, checked in (totally stressfree), flew to Cologne, took the train to Aachen and caught the last bus to my dorm. Excellent. My suitcases were full of english books and english sweets, with most of the latter going to my family. They’re the ones in love with ginger cookies.

It’s “darrbee”, not Derby

As a finish to my holidays, I decided to visit my brother and his wife in Middle England. For those who don’t know, Middle England is the area around Derby, Leicester and Nottingham. Somewhere north of Birmingham and south of York. No sites and attractions immediately come to mind, but once I started looking, I found several interesting things. My hosts have been quite helpful as well, and so far I’ve had two very nice days here.

I arrived late wednesday evening, after a screwed-up bus connection and a marvellous flight. Seriously the best check-in I’ve ever had in an airport – I took 10 minutes from entering the airport to the gate. Got picked up, went shopping at the 24/7 Tesco and went to bed. Thursday was spent in Nottingham, the town most famous for Robin Hood. Nowadays it’s the murder capital of England and sometimes called “Shottingham”, although that doesn’t seem quite fair to me. It has several interesting museums to offer, the best one being the galleries of justice, a museum that shows you what Britain did to its convicts over the centuries. Treatment gradually improved to its current standards, leaving behind some disturbing chapters. Initially, wardens had no income at all but made a living by selling amenities to the prisoners – not overcharging a penny, no doubt. Later, prisoners were often forced to do meaningless hard labour, like turning a hand crank with no purpose to it. If that isn’t Kafkaesque… later I went over to Nottingham castle, which had some strangely incoherent exhibitions, but did show several interesting pieces of art. I also caught a tour through the caves under the castle.

Today I slept in late and woke up a little bit before we went out to lunch with colleagues and friends of my brother. After that, we spent some time browsing the shops downtown in Loughborough, before walking to today’s main point: The Taylor bell foundry. It’s the largest bell foundry operating in the world, employing some 40 people. They cast new bells, but most of their profit comes from repairing the fittings for old bells. It’s a business for the ages: Some of the bells they have in their shop are over 500 years old, and the company itself stems from 1781.  The guide had some very interesting revelations concerning the procedures and acoustics of bells, especially concerning tuning, bell shape and material.

We’ve got a couple of major points left on the todo list. One of them is visiting the Bosworth battlefield, familiar from Black Adder if nothing else. Another one is going to Leicester and experiencing the most indian city outside India. I’m a little bit concerned about the weather, which has grown significantly colder today. The forecast actually talks of snow on Monday, and it could definitely rain before that. I’m not too keen on doing an outdoors day in that sort of weather.

Resurrected from the ashes

Once again, I have lapsed in my posts a little, haven’t I? I somehow tend to do that. I keep meeting people and telling them what has happened, so as a result I don’t immediately feel like “telling” it to the blog, again. Since a lot of things have happened the past month, I’ll give a quick bullet list

• I’ve re-done the theoretical physics exam and passed with A+. And there was much rejoicing. This means I’m very much in the run for summa cum laude. I just have to A+ my thesis and then get an A in the last oral exam, roughly one year from now.
• I’ve started an evening course in acrylics. It’s a beginner’s course, so they’re starting with the very basics. Of course, it’s only 90 minutes per week, which is a little short, but it’s still pretty interesting
• The choir is starting on its summer program, which means a lot of pop, jazz and dancing. I’ve started practicing seriously, which amounts to 3-4 hours a week, plus rehearsal
• I’m going to visit my brother and his wife in middle England next week
• I’ve been lazing around the dorm for about a week, and done a lot of fun stuff. I’ve cooked some interesting things (chicken hearts, not kidding) and helped people who were learning for first-year exams.
• I’m planning on drawing a painting for the hallway of my parents’ house. I have a 70×50 cm canvas lying around, and the planned motive is a conglomerate of important pieces of architecture from places my parents have travelled to. This will most likely take at least three weeks until it’s done
• I’ve been to Ikea and gotten a little shelf to store stuff in. It’s helped keep the disaster in my room down.
• I’ve made some experiments with burning sheets of newspaper that should supposedly form a balloon and float. It failed
• I’ve gathered all the disposable paper notes from my exam preparation, and burned them. In an old pot outside the dorm on a stone. Bye bye!
• I borrowed a recorder flute from my parents, because I thought it might be fun to mess around with. It’s hard to get good sound from those things, and breathing has to be excellently timed.
• I’ve gotten myself some excellent cask strength whiskey as a reward for the good exam. 60% are a little intense, but it’s very very nice.
• We’ve had carneval here in the meantime. I’ve watched the parade and was out one evening, but other than that, carneval left me completely cold.
• I’ve watchd some excellent movies in the past weeks. Hoodwinked, Pulp Fiction, Silence of the Lambs. In return, I’ve educated my nieghbors about the virtues of Dr.Strangelove and Blade Runner

Hm, that’s about it, I think. I’ll try to post more often here, but more than once a week is most likely not going to happen.