The countdown begins

The subject line for this post comes from a quote by my PhD supervisor when I told him that my exit seminar is scheduled for the 10th of August. Yikes! That's only a week and a half away!

It's exciting though, because it's one more sign that this long, long job of writing a PhD thesis is almost done. The seminar is a basically a half-hour long speech that I give in front of members of my school and other people important to my research. Then everyone gets to grill me about my methods, results and conclusions. It's supposed to show that I've done a good job, and that my thesis has a reasonable expectation of passing.

Fingers crossed, but I feel pretty secure that everything has gone ok. I just need to explain 4 years of work, in a half hour. Hmmm, hope I'm good at summing up!

I just realized that if when I finish off my thesis at the end of August, that my birthday will be in a few days after that. What a good way to celebrate a birthday!

OK, no more procrastination on my part, back to it.

Oh, I meant to mention how supportive Dave and the kids are being down this home-stretch. I actually got kicked out of the kitchen the other morning. Dave said "Why are you doing the dishes, get back to work on the thesis!"

Where does the time go

In looking back at my last posting I realize its been almost a month since I put anything up. Bad me, I've been really, really busy finishing up the writing on my PhD.

My time to complete the thesis runs out at the end of August, so I've been writing frantically. My supervisors have been great and have been giving me lots of time at odd little moments.

For Chloe's work experience, the business that she worked at were very impressed with her drive, and said that they'd happily offer her an apprenticeship when she graduated from high school. She is planning to go to uni, but it was a great compliment anyway. They said that she was the best teen worker they'd ever had!

The kids had a busy holiday during the two weeks off they had at the end of the term. They went  to visit family up north for a week, and then flew south to NSW for another week. During the southern trip they were treated to DreamWorld (like DisneyLand) not once, but twice.

And Dave and I were treated to an empty house!

Now they are back and stuck into the new term, so we're all noisy and happy again.

So, all is well here and I'll try and post more as I get closer to my PhD deadline. I'm off to hit the soft drink and caffeine. Wish me happy writing!

Woodman spare that tree

Shortly after we moved into this house in January, a man from the electric company came by and said that one of our trees needed to be taken down, because in the case of a big storm it might fall and take down some power lines.

During cyclone Yasi, January 2011

Well it seemed no later than he made that pronouncement, and painted a big "R" on the side of the tree on the palm on the right (R meaning remove, we imagined), in came a BIG cyclone, the biggest our town had seen in a century.

If it had hit us, as was projected, it would have been a category 5 (very, very bad), but it passed north of us, and was only (ONLY) a cat 3-4 when it got to our place. Our palm swayed and groaned and dropped palm fronds, but restrained itself from falling on the powerlines.

Other trees around town were not so lucky.

Finally, the tree man came today to take down the unlucky palm.

Bryn says "what can we do with all this stuff, we could make a fort!"