2016 in words and pictures
2016 was an interesting year. For me it was of course dominated by my thesis – I basically spent the whole year in hibernation, working 50+ hour, 6-day weeks juggling a full-time job and part-time study. Of course, I did take a month off for Greece and Italy, which was pretty cool (and I promise I will finish uploading my travel journal one day, honestly!). Then there was the health scare, and more earthquakes, and so many cool people dying (Helen Kelly, Carrie Fisher, David Bowie, Prince, John Glenn…), and we won’t even mention the whole American election thing. Yes, definitely an “interesting” year!
2016 in first lines (for a given value of “first”)
january: random pie picture
The internet is fixed, but I didn’t end up having time to go through my pictures to pick out representatives for the year, because Mum got an unexpected visitor, the son of old friends of hers. I haven’t seen him since we were about 12, so we spent a long afternoon catching up on each others’ news and sharing old memories.
February: So much news
I have a thesis topic! For a while there this was not the case, when it looked like my proto-topic was going to be completely unviable, but one of my lovely supervisors (in related news, I have supervisors!) came to the rescue and pointed out how my ailing proto-topic could in fact be resurrected into an actual topic.
March: Emerging blinking into the sunshine
Major thesis milestone passed: I finished writing my research proposal this afternoon! A week late, though considering the interruptions of earthquakes (and earthquake anniversaries, which is a busy time for us at work), I think I’m doing pretty well to only be a week behind.
April: Two happy things
I had to go into town for a meeting on Thursday (it still amazes me that I have the sort of job now where I get to have meetings – and not the sort where I’m only there to take minutes!), and on the way back to work I passed a sign for Scorpios’ newly reopened shop.
May: Home
Got home this afternoon after 30-odd hours spent on planes and in airports. I’m incredibly tired, but attempting to stay awake at least until dark, to ward off the worst of the jet lag.
June: NZEENZ and other excuses
Yeah, my good intentions to get my travel journal posted didn’t come to much, did they? Usual excuse – I’ve been too busy to sit down and write … My busyness has been of an exciting (to me, anyway) kind – on Thursday I gave a paper at a Linguistics conference!!!
July: Creativity and problem-solving
As usual, I’ve failed at keeping up with my blog (and my promise to upload the rest of my Athens journal), and as usual the excuse is being too busy with thesis stuff. I’m kind of buried under an avalanche of data at the moment, and it’s taking much longer than I anticipated to dig my way through it, with the result that every time I have a spare moment I feel like I should be doing a bit more work on it.
August: Still alive
They kept me in the hospital last night (mainly because I was last in the queue for day surgery, so didn’t get out until about 6 pm, by which time it was easier to transfer me to a ward than wait round until I was awake enough to go home), so I’ve only just got home.
September: The gory details
Wow, time has sped by again, and it’s already two weeks since my operation (and already September, and spring!). I did mean to come back and write something more substantial than my brief post-op note of stillalivitude, but for the first week or so sitting at the computer was painful and not conducive to writing blog posts, and then I’ve been back at work and trying to catch up with everything I didn’t get done while being distracted by bodily malfunctions, so just super-busy.
October: Bright lights, pretty colours
Only three months to go until my thesis submission deadline, so it’s very much nose to the grindstone around here. I’m making exciting progress though – one of my data sets is complete and I’ve almost managed to construct a statistical model to describe it, and the other data set is almost ready (“almost” being a relative term – there’s probably another week or two’s work to do on it) to be added to the model, so very soon I should have something resembling results.
November: Shaky Isles
Well, it’s been an … interesting… couple of weeks since I last posted. First there was the American elections. We were watching the results come in in our office (it was early afternoon here), and, like the rest of the world, couldn’t quite believe what we were seeing as the map turned redder and redder.
December: Still modelling…
Actually, I thought I’d finally finished my modelling a few days ago, but I met with my supervisors today, and they’ve recommended I run a few more, so it’s back to sitting waiting for models to run.
Hmm, there’s a bit of a theme there, isn’t there? 🙂 I’m just impressed that there was at least one post in every month – I was sure I would have had longer gaps than that!
2016 in photos
(A few more gaps here…)
January:
February: –
March:
April:
May: – (actually, I have loads of photos from Italy, it’s just I haven’t sorted them out yet!)
June:
(There is actually a photo of me giving my conference presentation somewhere on Facebook, but I couldn’t find it, so this will have to do instead)
July:
August: –
September:
October:
November:
December:
