Hem, Hem

I have an announcement to make.

My thesis has been submitted to the Grad studies office :D. Now they just have to tell me that the format is good and I can print. Wahoo!

I was planning on going to the gym tonight, but I don't feel like it. Perhaps I will go for a run or a bike when I get home. Or perhaps I will do both. We shall see.

Yay!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Stuff

I'm busy these days sorry for my lack of updates.

Last weeks HAZWOPER training went well. It was pretty interesting since for years it has been drilled into my head that the most dangerous pathway to the receptor is often Water. Apparently that really isn't the case for most scenarios. Often the most dangerous is inhalation which I guess makes sense, but when you are talking about Joe public, they won't be exposed to the free phase contamination so inhalation comes secondary (unless they have soil gas vapour intrusion into their basement). For workers at a site though, proper respitory protection is apparently really important ;). I got to dress up like this one day (that isn't me inside, but I was wearing a similar suit. It was kind of cool.

On the weekend I did the missisauga half marathon (as you might have gathered from reading Burgers blog yesterday. Got another half marathon personal best, took > 1 minute off of my Chilly time and finally broke the 2 hr barrier. Crossed the finish line in 1:59:29.6 (the .6 matters ;)) even with requiring an emergency potty break after clenching my butt cheeks for 7 kms. Without the break, I probably would have taken around 3 minutes off of my time from March which makes me even happier.

This week it is back to stressing about my thesis. It is due for submission at the end of the day on Friday and I have yet to get my edits from one of my readers. The other one got me his edits today and the changes will probably take an hour or so. I will do those tonight. I have thursday and Friday off this week to ensure that I graduate this spring. I'll be mighty pissed off if I'm done and just don't have my thesis approved by GSO in time which everyones favourite graduate secretary is trying to scare me into believing will happen. I intend on hand delivering my signoff sheet between the offices to make sure it gets handled well.

So that is it. Hopefully things go smoothly on Thursday and Friday!

Edit (12:20) - Silly me, forgot to post about the other exciting thing from this weekend - Dad and Nora tied the knot! The reception isn't until July 7th, but the actual civil ceremony was Saturday afternoon. The difference in the day has to do with Chinese luck stuff. They had their "numbers" read and decided on July 7th, but found out afterwards, they had to have close family and friends numbers read too. The 7th is apparently an unlucky day for me (but isn't bad since I don't believe this stuff), but it was also an unlucky day for Nora's Sister in Law who has lots of friends who believe this stuff, so hence the day change.

Hi ho, hi ho, it's off to work I go...

Two things quickly first.

1) printed off my thesis and had it bound for my readers yesterday which means I have no thesis related work that i have to do today :)

2) I have OSHA HAZWOPER training this week so today is the only day of the week that I have to drive to london. Woohoo! rest of the week will be in waterloo at training :)

It's 10:30, where are you?

Me, I'm at school. I was up at 6 am. Out of the house by 7:15. At work by 8:20 - worked all day. Lunch was spent working on my thesis. Left work at 5:10. Got to school at 6:30 and have been here ever since. Yipee. I have an exciting life.

My figures and tables are all fixed up, now I just have to worry about some specific things in the text. I might be here for a while though :(

Edited at 11:40 pm: just got home. So far this week I have:
- spent 10 hours driving back and forth to london and UW
- Worked 30 hours
- spent another 14.5 hours working on my thesis.

I've gotten < 7 hours sleep every night. My minimum will be tonight at 6 hours, my maximum was last night at 6.75.

Need to wind down now before going to bed. Worst part about driving at night. I wind myself up so that I don't fall asleep while driving, just makes it hard to fall asleep once I get home. I am VERY happy that tomorrow is Friday.

First day of work

My first day of work was sucessful! yipee :) 1:05 drive, so long, but not horrible. It looks like woodstock would be almost perfectly 30 minutes for both of us, so that will be perfect.

I was tired all day today. I couldn't stop yawning. I think I'll need to add caffeine back into my daily diet... at least until I get used to the commute.

Not going to post much since I need to get cracking on my thesis for the night. Need to get chapter 4 submitted to Neil again tonight, so I need to make sure that the second half of it is good (about 10 pages but will likely take me the full 3 hours before I go to bed!

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

The Good
I submitted my thesis to the Deans Office this moring

The Bad
It isn't actually done yet. My readers agreed to only have one week to review it rather than the three they are supposed to have - they signed off saying they got it today. in reality, they will have it by the end of next week.

The Ugly
I will have to do some last minute editing next week while I'm working 37.5 hours/week plus commuting another 10+ :.(. Meh, I'll get through it.

As much as I say I've wanted to hurry up and finish for the last year or so, I think I'm really going to miss UW when I'm done here. I keep on having these moments where something happens and I get all teary-eyed and nostalgic. Like last friday I went to the C&D at lunch time and there was a big sign out front "C&D will be be closed April 20th-May 1st." Yes. My last trip to the C&D. So sad. Then yesterday I was swimming at the PAC and halfway through my swim I realized that it would be the last time I will likely swim in that pool. (I know some of you hate it, but I very much prefer it to the Rec centre).

Then finally, the toughest one was this morning. I went to my very last waterloo goodlife spinning class. All the other clubs have stupid RPM classes which I hate (so not good for training) so I'll miss that, but more so, over the last 6 years, I've become friends with this instructor, going to her classes every week as the rule. She was fun and cheerful and made the classes go by quickly. I'll miss her. It kind of feels like the end of undergrad when we all got teary eyed that we wouldn't be together anymore, but at least we knew that we would see each other again, just not the same way or as frequently.

But... time for new beginnings. I start work on Monday, and my new life as Laura Jones, MASC, Junior Engineer is about to start!

LJs Revelation - April 17th

I love the word being.

The contaminant mass is being removed from the aquifer material.

Why the heck do I need being in there? I think I've deleted "being" from over 20 sentences over the last hour. Jeepers!

Wanna hear something crazy?

I was playing around on facebook the other day, and found out that someone from Engineering '04 is seeking the nomination to be the candidate for the provincial liberals (kitchener-waterloo) for this fall's election. He went on to become the FEDS VPEd... twice. Initals JH. Don't want to actually write his name down here, but isn't that crazy.

After all his rants in the Ironwarrior, I was sure that he was a conservative. Like 100% positive. I asked him once what his political leanings were but he didn't answer.

I passed?

Seriously, not much to say about it.

I went up to thunder bay this weekend though to visit Kate though which was nice. She had a friends daughter who is interested in Environmental engineering so we went over to talk to her for a bit which was kind of cool :)

Now I'm just trying to finish up my thesis. One chapter that really needs some serious work. I'm rewritting it as we speak (same content, just completly rewriting) and running some extra simulations on my laptop at the same time - Just things I know for sure, but the captain wants solid numbers backing it up, but they should be done in a few hours and I can just put the numbers in then. Pretty fun times.

Feels good to have the seminar out of the way so that now I just have to focus on getting this in and done.

Signed, unsealed, undelivered

My job offer that is. I am going to be starting work on April 30th, all I have to do is scan the offer and e-mail it to the office manager and HR person when I get home from school today. It feels kind of weird to be entering a new stage of my life and very uncharacteristically laissez faire about it. I didn't really actively search for a job, only doing things that fell into my lap and it seems to have worked out for me. I only applied to companies at the career fair last year and when Burger told me to send her my resume.

I'm so lazy.

My seminar is booked for tomorrow afternoon. EEEE! I'm sure it will be fine, but I'm starting to get a little nervous for it and am deligently putting together my presentation and practicing. In fact, unlike my normal self, I'm hardly procrastinating at all!

In other news, not sure if I posted before, but I have a draft of my thesis completely done and am working on my edits for the supervisor. Hopefully it won't take that many rounds for chapter 4, but I forsee myself being very busy next week!