Harvest time

This blog post is sadly way over due. Other things, like finishing my thesis, got in the way. And now this blog serves as a procrastination tactic so that I can avoid fixing the reviewers comments on a paper that was rejected.

With great intentions of feeding the house-hold, and possibly neighbours, with products from the garden, I bravely planted a collection of vegetable seeds early last spring. The sprouting went very well and even the self-sown cherry tomatoes promised a delivery of hundreds of juicy blobs.

The variability of rainfall meant that these poor germinants were subjected to either too little rain - I did my best to water them regularly - or too much - followed by some mildew-y type infection of all the squashes. A handful of really baby marrows and six marrow flowers were all that I could scavenge before the mildew took over. The rocket grew too fast to harvest at it's peppery, non-bitter best. The spinach went to seed in the blink of an eye. The carrots on the other hand took months to deliver tiny little snacks. I suspected, that tallied up my harvest would look something like this:



(By Andre Jordan via www.awaytogarden.com)

In many ways the harvest was barely enough for a dinner for two. And just when I thought the harvest was over, the pumpkins delivered! Hidden in among the mass of vines and decorative garden plants was the growing pumpkin harvest. At first it looked like three good sized squashes, but when the mass of vines started to dry out and look the worst for wear and the pumpkins weren't getting any bigger themselves, it was time to haul them out of the garden. What a bounty it was!



Now nearly everything has pumpkin in it. It started with cookies, gnocchi and a veggie side with dinner. Next is soup, fritters and maybe muffins. Growing pumpkins may just be as easy as shooting fish in a barrel. I'll grow them again come spring time.

Could this be me?

I always wondered if the safety-net of the postgrad life I remembered at Wits was part of the reason I came back to do my PhD. Now I see the symptoms in this recent Piled Higher & Deeper strip.



Some context: The good doctor has told Cecilia that she's allergic to her thesis and also to reality outside of her research manifest after seeing fellow students graduate. Use the 'previous' button on this link to see the 4 previous strips if you need more context. I ♥ PHD Comics :)

So if this thread is to be believed, when will I show symptoms of allergy to my work? Does avoidance of deadlines count?

Time travel

I love getting mail. More specifically I love getting snail mail: the kind that goes travels through that good (or not so) old network of post-offices and mailing centres and then lands in my mail box. There's something nostalgic about receiving 'post'.

In my post-box today was a postcard written by me, last November, when I was on a post-graduate workshop at Warwick University. It was one of our last tasks of the workshop; to write down some outcomes that we had planned to achieve within 3 months.

What was on the card is, for this audience, not relevant. What is significant is how I responded: an almost surreal feeling - it was my handwriting on the envelope (yes it came in an envelope) and on the card, but bizarrely it didn't feel like I had written those questions. And their relevance now was astounding, even just considering what I thought, back then, would be important now.

This little time-travel experience brought a smile to my face and giggle in my voice as I read the postcard. I recommend this experience as a reminder of what you've achieved by a certain time in the future. Write 3 questions to you-in-the-future, from you-as-you-are-now; seal it in a self-addressed stamped envelope and ask a friend to mail at a predetermined time in the future. A few months is enough. Then just wait for the future to happen, you needn't remember anything, except to check your post-box. I suspect it'll be a worthwhile experience for you too.

NSFT Awards follow-up quickie

This is an update on the NSTF awards mentioned in a post a few weeks ago.

One of the School's finalists won, and she just happens to be my research supervisor too. Congratulations Mary! She won in the category: Eskom Award for Research Capacity Development over the last 5-10 years. The award was in recognition for her contribution to the training of students and her own innovative work on grasslands and forests.

No word yet on whether Neville won in his category. He sent out the email about Mary's award. We hope to hear positive feedback soon.

I'll be watching the NSTF Awards page for the official list of 2009 winners.

No more conversions!

Who knew first principles of conversion could desert you! I used to rag the 2nd year engineering students I helped tutor at UJ about forgetting about converting between units and orders of magnitude. Now it's my turn to blush. I had to convert a concentration of base cations (mg/l) into a mass-based concentration (cmol/kg). This was not a trivial exercise. About 100 Google searches on concentrations and conversions and numerous Aardvark queries later, I finally got the solution put together. The results look realistic compared with another years set of results and they are an interesting contrast to the base cation concentrations of soils determined by another method. This is a good thing!

On with presenting this data in a meaningful way. Oh first the stats...

I *gasp* can't *gasp* stop

I've been working through another book by Cecile Badenhorst in order to get to my publications for my PhD write up (describing the process of writing an article for publication). One of the golden rules in her book is: Writing begets writing. I had a very real experience of this yesterday. I'm retyping here what I wrote in my writing journal[1].

19 May, 09:30
" All the thoughts running through my head now want their own 15 mins of fame and be idolised on paper. They need to get out! Release is what they crave! How do I sort? Filter? Settle my mind to focus on ideas that right now mean progress towards a goal? Can we get to channelling creative thoughts soon please, Cecile?

I love this state! I need to use fine sandpaper or something to refine it into avenues that are a little more distinct.

There's an underlying caution that I'll write down stuff buried so far beneath the layers of sedimentary knowledge and emotions and feelings and thoughts. We could have a volcanic-like eruption of words that could have serious repercussions. Is this an early warning system to save the inhabitants? Does it matter? Bury the emotions or live with them and work with them. Colonise the lava fields. Rich volcanic rock makes for fertile ground for further life, words, emotions and thoughts.

Carry on writing."

On the next page in the book: "How and what you write is a choice" (Badenhorst, 2007:9). I chose to write this one in more than just my note book. More insight to follow. Really loving writing and looking forward to directing it in more purposeful ways.

[1] Yes she advocates writing, not typing, for many reasons and advises that all writing should be on coloured paper, in felt-tip coloured pen and only ever in the landscape position - no lines allowed!

What relief!

The whole idea of this blog was to provide experience for writing up my PhD results. I had a crisis of intellectual property faith early on and realised that this may not be a useful or ethical purpose. My intention for this exercise then became one of keeping the 3 readers out there up to date with my progress and as a way of practising my writing skills hoping that this would spill over into writing up my PhD.

Officially, today is the first day of my write up. It's very early days yet. This week's focus means that I'll spending time thinking about my major findings so far, how they can be moulded into publishable papers and how to represent the data so that they tell the story appropriately. And then I get on to actually writing the stories.

I can 'see' two papers so far. There's still some work to be done and data to be untangled and models to buid and test. In spite of this, I feel good that I'm getting somewhere now. Really proud of myself today. Yay! I'm sure this feeling will pass soon enough but it's worth remembering now and for when frustration and confusion bear down their weight.

This is like my Comrades marathon. Right now I've been on the road about 7 hours and only 4 to go.