One week more...

Today was the deadline day for Michael’s PhD. After working almost solidly for 48 hours, he came to the conclusion this morning that there were three possible options:

(a) Hand in the thesis today with new data added and mistakes ironed out but not enough discussion which was a major flaw last time.
(b) Not hand it in at all to save wasting the examiners’ time and therefore walk away with nothing
(c) Ask for an extension until Friday.

Fortunately option (c) worked out and the final deadline is now Monday. Fingers crossed that this time he will finally finish!

Ode to Michael's PhD: One Day More

A shortened version inspired by “Les Miserables”

One day more
Another day wrestling with Chemistry
Tomorrow I’ll hand in my PhD
And then perhaps a little wait;
Examiners will seal my fate
One day more
I’ve hardly slept for several days
Red Bull and caffeine are my friends now
One day more!
Exhaustion’s left me in a daze
But at least I can see the end now!

Tomorrow is the judgement day
I pray that it will be okay
Please let me get this doctorate that I’ve worked so hard for
One more dawn!
One more day!
One day more!

Indian summer

Having Indian summer weather at the moment has led me wondering as to where the phrase originates. Unseasonably warm autumn weather in England, used to be called St Martin’s summer (it usually ended by St Martin’s day – 11th November) before the American phrase “Indian summer” gained popularity early in the 20th century. Suggested reasons for the origins of the phrase are:

• It was the period when Native Americans first harvested their crops
• The haziness during this time was caused by prairie fires in the autumn
• Raids on European colonies by Native American war parties tended to end in the autumn.

Church concerts

Every other month, we host concerts at church for local musicians and tonight’s concert featured a male voice choir. I was rushing around organising things so didn’t get to sit and listen much, but what I did hear sounded good. Michael usually controls sound and lighting at the concerts, but as he has been working frantically on his PhD, his dad stepped in (just as well really - it would have been quite basic if I’d had do it!) It’s nice to see the church so full on these occasions – now if we could just manage it on a Sunday…

Sleep pod

I spent some time today at a spa which offers treatments aimed at new mums and mums-to-be. One of the things I got to try out was called a sleep pod. Basically, it’s a vibrating massage chair enclosed in a pod. You can choose different types of relaxation music, choose aromatherapy and oxygen enhanced air if you wish and when the door of the pod closes, the chair tilts back and you spent 15 minutes relaxing in the pod. It was very relaxing, but unfortunately was followed by driving home in rush hour so the effects wore off very quickly!

Church unity

There are times when we spend lots of energy arguing about what we think God wants us to do, instead of taking the time to listen to what God actually wants us to do. For the last year, our local churches together group has felt like we spent so much time arguing amongst ourselves that we were becoming churches apart instead of together. Tonight we spent so much time praying and focusing on God instead of politics, that suddenly God’s presence became much more apparent and now it finally feels like being churches together is no longer an impossible dream.

New faces

Having attended a couple of church meetings in the last three years where concerns have been raised about aging congregations and dwindling membership; it is refreshing to be discussing the fact that there are quite a few new people coming to share worship with us. The challenge now is to be welcoming and friendly, without being off-putting! I have attended services at churches where I felt “pounced on” at the end of the service because I was a new face. Sometimes we are so glad to see new people that we can be a little too enthusiastic with our friendliness!

Reverting to childhood

Autumn is a time when I think it would be great to be able to revert to being a child again – just for a few moments. There’s something about piles of fallen leaves that makes me want to kick them about; and sometimes when it’s raining, I still have an urge to put on wellies and jump in the puddles. The trouble is, people give you very odd looks if you give into these urges as an adult (particularly if you don’t have any children with you to give you an excuse!) Sometimes it is very boring being a grown-up!

Renewed hope

It’s funny how much better things seem in the morning. After being in the depths of despair about his PhD last night, Michael has been much calmer today and has just focused on doing what he can before next Tuesday. Even though nothing has changed in terms of how much work he still has to do, somehow a good night’s sleep makes everything seem much better. Fingers crossed that Michael will manage to do enough work to get his PhD. Whilst neither of us are completely confident that he has managed to do enough, we’re still trying to be optimistic.

Impending deadlines

With nine days to go until Michael’s PhD deadline, things are getting very stressful. It’s been a series of delays and hiccups since he first submitted two years ago. It took nine months for him to actually get a viva, during which time he was busy trying to run a business and had completely got out of the mindset. In the months since then with deadline after deadline being extended, work problems have made it more and more difficult for him to spend time on his thesis. I feel that all I can do now is pray for a miracle.

Domestic Goddess - c. 600BC

A wife of good character, where can you find
such a virtuous woman – noble and kind?
Just before dawn, while the family’s in bed,
she’s down in the kitchen: baking the bread.
She’s planted a vineyard – see all that is growing!
She busies herself with weaving and sewing,
making clothes for her family, quilts for her bed,
Ensuring the poor and the needy are fed.
Her manner is gentle; her words always wise;
she’s blesséd and praised in her family’s eyes.
A wonderful woman who has earned her reward,
but her strength only comes through her love of the Lord

Sleepiness...

When I was in my teens, I always thought a Friday night indoors was a Friday night wasted. Now here I am, at 7pm on a Friday evening already in my pyjamas and falling asleep on the sofa. It’s not because I’m getting older (honestly!) – it’s just that attending lovely births in the wee hours and then trying to do a day of antenatal and postnatal visits has left me feeling somewhat exhausted and in need of sleep. Fingers crossed no-one else decides to go into labour tonight. Whilst attending a birth is lovely, sleep takes preference tonight. Night, night.

Focus on food

One of the biggest benefits of having a veggie box delivered is that I now eat a wider variety of foods, and try out a lot more new recipes. The BBC Food website is particularly useful for finding new recipes, and also allows you to search by ingredient (very useful when you have no idea what to do with what’s left in the cupboard). I’ve rediscovered a love of cooking as a result! I also eat a lot more vegetarian food (those extra veggies need to get used up somehow!) which is probably healthier, and better for the environment too!

University Challenge

I was watching University Challenge on BBC iplayer earlier and saw that Southampton (which was where I went to university) was one of the teams. One of the guys in our pub quiz team was commenting last week how people on University Challenge were probably all brainy nerds with no life or friends. He was a bit embarrassed when I pointed out to him that Michael had been on University Challenge back in 2000. I’m pretty certain that was the last time we managed to get a team on television. We didn’t get to the second round back then either.

Musings on chart music

I was reading on BBC News today that despite selling more CD singles than the rest of the top 75 put together, Cliff Richard still only managed to get to number three with his new single. It just goes to show how strong the download market is in deciding chart positions these days. What was also interesting was that 95% of his total were CD singles which also indicates that he doesn’t appeal to people who tend to download music. I can’t say I liked the song, but making the top 10 in six decades is an impressive achievement, nonetheless.

PhD

The next couple of weeks are likely to be fairly stressful as Michael is trying to finally finish his PhD. He has been “almost finished” for a couple of years now, and had submitted but discovered during his viva that he needed to do quite a lot more work on his thesis. The end of this month is the final deadline for him to submit his amended thesis and I am torn between wishing that September had 60 days so that he had a little more time, and wishing that I could wake up and find that it is October.

Cooking for 35

Sunday lunch for 35 people today went well – I had a team of volunteers from the local Catholic church, who were marvellous, plus Michael’s mum came to help out as well. Fortunately I had been pre-warned that everything takes about three times longer to cook than you would normally expect it to – without that particular piece of advice, nothing would have been ready on time! The shepherd’s pie seemed to go down well with everyone, much to my relief. I suddenly have a lot more admiration for those who work in the catering industry – doing it once was hard enough!

Genealogy online

The internet is such an amazing resource when it comes to researching family history. I can access huge numbers of records just with a click of the mouse – baptism records; census returns; birth, marriage and death registration details; wills etc. It makes tracing family trees relatively easy – at least for records from 1837 onwards (when registration began). It also means that it can be very easy to spend hours on the computer surfing genealogy sites! Once you’re into parish records though, the information on the internet becomes much more hit and miss and trips to the record office become necessary.

Cooking up a storm

On the second Sunday of every month at church, we do a meal for people living on their own. This month, I have volunteered to cook the lunch which I’m quite apprehensive about it as there will be about 35 people there on Sunday and the most I’ve ever cooked for is 8. I have spent most of today cooking shepherd’s pie ready for Sunday. I’m also on call on Sunday which is a little worrying, but Michael and his mum are willing to help, as are some other people from local churches so fingers crossed it all goes well!

Learning lines

Still feeling really excited about Oklahoma and have started looking through the script. Michael had a read-through of Act I with me this evening (my American accent needs a lot more work!). My friend Jenny recorded the read-through of the last show we did onto CD which really helped with learning the lines – I kept the CD in the car and listened to it when I was stuck in traffic jams which meant that by the time acting rehearsals started six weeks into rehearsals, I’d learnt most of Act I (clearly I spend a lot of time in traffic jams!!).

Leading lady!!!!

Today’s Bible reading focused on being thankful. This evening I found myself with a huge thing to be thankful for – I have been cast as Laurey in Oklahoma! Rehearsals started this evening working through the title song and then the director came up to me afterwards and told me she would like me to play the female lead. I was so thrilled, as part of me had been really wishing I could play that part, and another part of me was trying not to build my hopes up. We have a read-through next week and then rehearsals start in earnest!

Tap

It’s amazing how much information the brain stores without you being aware of it. This evening was the first tap class after a two month break and I couldn’t recall any of the steps before the class started. I was convinced that I’d forgotten them all, but as soon as the music started and we started practising the routines, my feet seemed to do most of the steps automatically. We’re still at the stage of learning short sections which then will become routines and it is hard to believe that we’ll ever know them well enough to do the exam.

First day at school

September means that it is back to school time, and today was the very first day of school for my twin sister’s oldest daughter. It really doesn’t seem that long ago that I was there watching her come into the world and now here we are, four and half years later and she has started school. She’s only doing mornings this week, but will be full time from next week. So far she seems to have enjoyed it and has made a new friend already. I think today has been harder for my sister than it has been for her!

Musings on midwifery

The way I work as a midwife involves having a caseload of women whom I get to know throughout the pregnancy, birth and postnatal period. I am on-call 24 hours a day, six days a week. On the whole, I enjoy working this way. Being on-call and in control of my own diary is great in some respects, as it means I have more control over my work-life balance. The down-side is not being able to visit friends when I am on call unless they live reasonably close by, and the level of sleep-deprivation that sometimes occurs during busy periods.

Family trees

I’ve been spending a little more time working on my family tree this evening. I received a copy of a marriage certificate through the post this morning which has also meant that I have managed to go back another generation on one branch of the family tree. I’ve got back to around 1700 on one branch of my dad’s family and 1689 on one branch of my mum’s family. So far I’ve not found any links to the nobility, but I have discovered French/Belgium ancestry on my mum’s side and a few unsavoury characters with interesting stories on both sides.

Musings on self-help books

One of the writers in my creative writing group published a book a couple of years ago on how to be happy, and I have found some of her tips quite useful. I’m not particularly into self-help books, although a quick glance around my bookshelves revealed a few more books in this genre than I’d realised – including titles like “When You Live With A Messie” (bought when I was a student sharing a house with someone who was very untidy) and “How To Make Anyone Like You” (still looking pristine which perhaps accounts for why I’m still not a people-magnet).

Thorts abowt langwidge

I’ve been reading an article on the BBC News website about grammar misuse. This seems to be a fairly popular topic for grumblers at the moment, and is something that I occasionally grumble about. However, some of the emails and MSN messages I receive from some of my teenage nephews and nieces distort the English language to the point of being almost indecipherable. Examples are “relli” (really), “yuii” (you), “yuir” (your or you’re), “beyye” (bye), “okeii” (okay), “newho” (anyhow) and “lo anti loiuse wubu2?” (Hello, Auntie Louise, what have you been up to?). Grammatical errors seem very minor in comparison…

Expensive "U"s

Journeyman’s recent post about the New Living Translation reminded me of various discussions at church over new pew bibles recently. The new bibles will probably be Today’s New International Version. The American versions are printed in a font which is much easier to read than the English version and are about a third of the cost. The main (albeit minor) irritation is with differing spellings. In all the bibles we have looked at, the American version is much cheaper – which begs the question: are all the extra “u”s in words like neighbour and Saviour really much more expensive to print…?

Blue... no, pink...

I’ve been at several births over the last few weeks, and the last few have been waterbirths which has been lovely. There was some confusion over the gender of the baby after one birth recently with the proud mum announcing: “It’s a boy!” before realising a few minutes later that she’d confused the umbilical cord with a certain part of the male anatomy and announcing that baby was actually a little girl “but we love you just as much either way!”. I’d always thought confusing the cord was a bit of an urban myth until I saw it actually happen.

Back to ballet

September means the return of dance classes and show rehearsals. Tonight, I was back at ballet classes for the first time since May and no doubt my leg muscles will remind me of how long it has been when I wake up tomorrow morning! We’ve started learning a new routine which is set to the music for Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy, which so far seems quite tricky and there are lots of little jumpy steps in the routine. Given that I am quite petite, why does it still sound like an elephant jumping when I practice the steps?