Tumbleweeds

We haven’t seen a new top level post in a couple of months.  What has everyone been up to?  For those of you in school, how is the beginning of the school year gearing up?  How was everyone’s summer?

8 Responses to “Tumbleweeds”

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Thanks for posting a topic, styopa! There are little guilt tendrils leading from this website to me, and I’ve been letting them accumulate for far too long.

Charitably, life has been busy. Grad school remains a slog for me– the research is neat, and I like being paid to learn, but I often feel that every time my head is just about above water, another obligation /complication/ deadline pushes it back down and I’m in a perpetual last-minute dash. It’s taught me a lot, but I’ll still be glad to be done, looking fondly back. My goal for myself is graduation before August 2010 (it could be as early as December 2009).

Outside of grad school, things have been great! duv and I occasionally remember to work on wedding planning, we’ve been watching fun anime with friends, getting back into hiking, I’m GMing Unknown Armies again (yay), and soon duv and I will be taking Japanese I to prepare us for our honeymoon.

How about for you? You can’t expect random updates from others without sharing yourself. 😛

Here: Random pictures of duv’s 25th birthday! https://old.paradoxdruid.com/wpg2?g2_itemId=8959

Paradoxdruid - September 15th, 2008 at 10:47 pm

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Okay.
It’s been a very good summer. Tried climbing several mountains, Mt Antero, Greys and Torreys, Longs Peak and Rainier. Lounged on the beach in Wilmington, NC for a weekend, spent a week in Manhattan, a weekend in Montreal and a weekend in Seattle. Been backpacking, hiking, biking to work, and joined a pool league team that took our division for this past session. I joined the Obama campaign, canvased last week and plan on canvasing and doing other volunteer work as I can.

Pictures!
New York
Montreal
Failed attempt at Longs Peak. I was breaking in new boots and the broke me in instead.
My Mt. Rainier pictures and pictures from Joe of the Rainier trip, who joined my brother and a former roommate of mine on the Rainier trip. We didn’t summit, but it was still an awesome trip.

styopa - September 16th, 2008 at 3:26 pm

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You were down in Wilmington? I’m in Durham these days. If you (or, really, anybody from CU) heads out NC-ways again, let me know.

Owen - September 18th, 2008 at 6:36 am

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Your cousin Arthur looks so much like Nathan in one of those pictures!

Mallorn - September 18th, 2008 at 7:44 am

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I can sympathsize with the feelings about grad school. Last year with teaching and classes it was tough to get much done, and I’ve spent most of the summer enjoying not having that extra work, but not not doing much with the extra free time. Now I probably should start getting things together for my general exam, but I’m still at the stage where I’m feeling like if I don’t think about it maybe they’ll forget about the whole thing (in previous years that seems to have been a valid strategy but the program is trying to become better organized now).

I do have some cool projects to work on, with some work getting published a little while back. The biggest problem with my research is I picked up a side project that’s looking like it will probably be just as significant as what I was originally working on, but the two are basically moving in opposite directions. That makes thing a little hard to focus and I seem to work on one a lot for a while till I hit a block and then switch to the other.

Outside of research I’ve gotten involved with a group here at UW, the Forum on Science Ethics and Policy, which has been real cool. I’ve actually been meaning to write something up to post here since our set of talks back in May, still should get that done before things start up again now that summer’s over. Mostly I’ve been involved bringing speakers to the university for our academic seminars, and with some of our leadeship graduating I’ve gotten recruited to be in charge of that now. I’ve gotten to meet some really interesting people through that, plus I got to be part of the group we sent to the AAAS conference last February which was a lot of fun.

Away from school I’ve gotten reasonably settled in here in Seattle, though Styopa is making me feel like a slacker since I haven’t gotten out hiking and camping nearly as much this summer as I would have liked. Still get out to concerts pretty frequently. Since PD’s a fan he might be a bit jealous that I saw Bad Religion last week at a little tiny club. I was in the back and still probably only maybe 50 feet from the stage. I had started swing dancing just before I graduated at CU and kept it up the first year here. My 2nd year I had classes in the morning that made it tough to go out at night, so I’ve been trying to get back in the habit since I didn’t have that distraction over the summer. Also one of my friends has found square dancing at one of the places we go for concerts, so we’ve started doing that a bit too. Definitely a bit different from the swing scene, people take it a lot less seriously so it’s easier to just fool around.

mcmillan - September 20th, 2008 at 2:08 pm

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It’s been pretty status quo around here. Except for our vast amount of pain killers! Two weeks before classes started, I sprained my ankle. I’m not sure how I managed to walk home, since I couldn’t walk the rest of the day until I got crutches. Then the pain killers. And the week after that Gilvoro had hernia surgery. So I was limping around and taking care of him. At least I was done with the nasty Vicodin, but he was on really nasty Percocet. I’m still hobbling about, but at least work is going well. 🙂

ShortSpeedFreak - September 20th, 2008 at 6:38 pm

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“Nasty Vicodin”? You’ll never live up to the glory of Doctor House with an attitude like that!

Owen - September 22nd, 2008 at 11:42 am

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Owen, I hate to admit this to you, but I’ve never even seen an episode of House. ::look sheepishly about:: Suffice it to say that the way those drugs made me feel probably isn’t the way they make real addicts feel. I’ll stick to the Sims, thank you. And baking stuff.

How are your kitties, by the way? Our critters are getting all clingy since it’s getting cold around here at night. And since Atlas is naked all the time, he’s REALLY getting friendly. Even with the dog a little big. Maybe I’ll try to take some photos . . .

ShortSpeedFreak - September 24th, 2008 at 6:07 pm

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