The Blog

 Why you should hire me...

I am interested in moving into <type x> simulations and in looking at <field of research>, I speak a tiny amount of German, have been there once and I think I would be perfect for this job.

Also, my face is kinda greenish-yellow.

Yours,
Catherine

Labels: drowning in the sea of apathy that is your kindness, jobs, sickly-Cat

 My teeth hurt...

One of these days I'm going to pick up a "fabulously witty" romance novel, about a woman whose been in a relationship with the man she loves and has been with for five years, and it's not going to be about how she "comes of age" / "comes to terms" / "comes to grief" / "comes to realise that she never needed him and is much better off with this fling who has wandered into her life and has a giant schlong". Some of those "going nowhere" relationships work out just fine, I'm sure.

Also, I'm going to pick up a book in which the author isn't the best friend / housemate character who helps our leading lady through. Because not everyone has a best friend /housemate who just happens to be a writer / poet / famous female comedian with a taste for being crude (really, Wendy Harmer? Did you think that was subtle or something?). Some of us have childcare workers and personal assistants and students for best mates, and we get along fine.

I think a week off work may be too much. I'm going insane here.

Labels: books, desperation in action, sending our love down the well, sickly-Cat

 And now to bed...

Home again, with four more teeth in a jar and a tongue that tingles on one side like pins and needles.

Labels: hungry, sickly-Cat, teeth, tired

 Joy... Rapture...

Spent much of today seeing dentists and x-ray peoples and all the rest. Haven't got the specialist's opinion yet, but it's very likely that I'm to have my wisdom teeth out as soon as I can get an appointment. Because they're so nestled, I'll need to get a general anaesthetic, which terrifies me to pieces. The only good thing is it can all be done in my Mum's building, so she'll be able to look after me when it's over. Naturally I'll try and see if I can keep them as a souvenir.

This will bring my total of professionally removed teeth to 20.

Labels: InaDWriMo, sickly-Cat, teeth, thesis ftl, writing

*sobs*...

I have a cold and it's making me miserable. I walked home (via the chemist for some paracetamol and cough lollies) feeling that I would never be warm again (and very sorry for myself) and as I walk in the door Jane hands me a package:

and now I miss my mummy very much.

Labels: cambridge, I want to go home now, knitting, sickly-Cat, trip09

400 posts later...

I guess I'm doing okay with this blogging thing. Well, sorta. It has been what, nearly 7 years since I started, so I guess I'm averaging about one post a week or something. I'm very slack, but I muddle through.

Anyway, there's so much to talk about, to bring you up to speed on all I've done these last few weeks. So let's stop feeling nostalgic and get on with stuff. I have a feeling that it might spill over into a second post, because life is kinda like that and I'd rather just post something instead of leaving it in draft mode forever.

Friday 30/1/9 — The Nuclear Reactor Trip

As promised, the other Friday I got to visit ANSTO at Lucas Heights (the only suburb in Sydney that does not contain any residential areas). The entirety of the newly rebranded Faculty of Science at the University was invited, and there was nothing on the application form that said postgrad students weren't allowed along, so I put my name down and they deigned to let me tag along (I guess there was nothing exciting in my ASIO file after all). As it turns out, I was the only PhD student from physics who wanted to go, which was a huge disappointment to me (guys, it's a nuclear reactor!), but the boss was there to keep me company, and he's good fun.

Friday morning at the crack of 9, a miscellaneous bunch of academics, postdocs, and the odd postgrad student (hey, at least I'm honest) piled onto a bus, and most of them started doing paperwork. The latest round of research grant applications were due that afternoon, and the Dean was sitting behind us talking about the restructure and passing notes with one of his administrators, I think, while at least one postdoc was writing his latest paper. Some of the retired members of faculty were backseat driving (I almost agree with them that taking the bus through the city was the wrong way to go, but there wasn't any traffic and I wasn't paying for using the toll roads, so who knows), and the boss only brought a water bottle with him, so he mostly stared out the window as we travelled South, breaking his stare occasionally to gossip with me, and plot a little about out .

We got to the visitor's centre, where they checked all of our identification against a check list to make sure that we had been cleared by the anti-terrorist hotline, then they told us that we weren't allowed to take anything with us. No phones, no cameras (hence the lack of photos), no handbags, no keychains that could possibly be used as a weapon or device for sawing through network cables (as they once let in someone with a baby keychain Swiss Army Knife and they did that, crazy bastard), although you may have one small notepad and a pen (so long as it's not mighter than a sword). You could keep your wallet if it fit in your pockets (ie you were a boy).

We were escorted back to the bus, and we met our hosts for the day: one wacky mostly-retired physicist, and an educator clearly more used to dealing with the general public than a pack of curious scientists. One was a better guide than the other, simply because he didn't have the physics knowledge to answer our basic questions and so he fetched the experts to chat to us about it all. The other tried to answer our questions as he would those of the general public, and thus he kinda missed the point in most situations. When a scientist asks something complicated, explaining what a neutron is won't help.

Anyway, our first destination (after a boring introduction to how universities and the reactor people can get along fabulously if they try) was the reactor itself. To get there the bus had to stop at a security checkpoint where the road was blocked by a heavy sliding gate, at which a solid-looking and well-armed member of the Australian Federal Police boarded us and barked questions about whether or not we were carrying knives or explosives. No one dared to answer incorrectly, though one person worried enough to get their keyring checked out (it was acceptable).

When he was pleased with our responses he jumped down again and the gate slowly moved out of the way to let the bus through. Then we ran up the hill and down many roads labelled for famous scientists and along to this building. The curved building is the visitor/tour centre, the big hall is the main instrument building, and the one that's topped by the metal crosshatching (known to the locals as the "Cessna Shredder") houses OPAL itself. It's a rather attractive piece of architecture, and I'm told that while it was designed in early 2001 before anyone seriously considered throwing large jets at buildings, it will likely also destroy the fuselage of any jumbo jet as well as the entirely of a Cessna.

My group got to visit the instrument hall first, which was full of boxes for the guiding of neutrons from the reactor into various neutron scattering experiments. I won't go into the gory details, but suffice to say one can study the inner details of atomic structures by bombarding them with neutrons. Among other things they can test the propellor blades of aircraft for defect, testing new softer plastics for contact lenses and some odd stuff involve the surfaces of liquids that I didn't quite follow but I want to learn more about.

We were allowed to venture outside of the little viewing room into the upper level of the hall itself, where one could hear the whirr of machinery and we could properly see the large light with the words "reactor is *on*" on it. This was much more fun, as we got to walk around further, and see that downstairs near the neutron guides there were signs saying "no loitering, high radiation in this area" and designated 'safe' walkways for staff members to use. The reactor runs 340 days of the year, so it's important not to stray off the paths more than strictly necessary, I imagine.

Curiously, in one of the brochures I picked up it said that staff at the reactor over the last 50 years had lower than average death rates in all the major categories (which includes cancer, presumably). But still, high radiation doses are to be avoided, kids!

All of the detectors within the hall were named for Australian animals, rather than acronyms that indicate their purpose. The boss of that part of the place told us it was because all of the acronyms proposed by staff ended up indication rather too much about their feelings for management, and weren't exactly safe for work. *grins*

After this, we went to visit OPAL itself. Sadly we were told that the group we had brought was too large, and we wouldn't get to visit the top of the reactor pool after all (not that we would have made it onto the bridge, but a viewing platform up there). This was a great disappointment, and even worse was the realisation that we were going to be stuck in the visitor's centre, where the most exciting thing to see was a scale model with lots of LEDs to indicate the different aspects of the building (like the backup power supplies). Thrilling stuff, but not a nuclear reactor.

In the far corner there was a display with a sample fuel rod (obviously not with real uranium in it), which was kinda cool. One of the reasons the reactor's so safe (and I wasn't worried being there) was that in case of emergency or blackout, the motors holding the rods in the pool will fail and they will drop under the influence of gravity into a shielded hole, causing all the reactions to stop. I haven't explained it very well, but it's really rather clever.

And as a sad consolation, there was a webcam pointed at the reactor. Our tour guide didn't really do a good job of showing us around the image, but it was glowing blue with Cherenkov radiation, which meant it was operational. I wished to know more about it, what it was working on (was it making radioisotopes for medicine or just producing neutrons for the devices out back?) and things like that, but the guide couldn't answer our questions. Most interestingly, one of the main reasons for having a reactor so close to Sydney is that they can make radioisotopes with a half life of 6 hours (in six hours, half of the radioactive material will have decayed, so it's out of your system quickly), but other places in Australia have to settle for lesser isotopes with longer half-lives because it takes more than 6 hours to ship them there, as in the case of Perth. I still don't really like nuclear power plants on principle, but sadly, I think they've won me over, because it is rather useful in the right places, like science. But no one really wants to hear my greeny politics now.

We piled back onto the bus, and were taken back outside the gates to the main cafeteria for lunch, which certainly didn't taste radioactive. It was somewhat weird to sit with the academics for lunch, to hear the professors gossiping like schoolgirls. It turns out that one of them was recently at his apartment in New York, on the banks of the Hudson River, and just recently he had had difficulty sleeping a night because a police boat all bedecked in lights was parked directly above a sunken aeroplane engine. Aside from that, they mostly spoke of university politicking.

Back onto the bus after lunch, and through the security gauntlet once more, we went to visit the particle accelerators. The first one was really interesting, a particular device that they use for things like carbon dating, where with only 5 micro grams of a sample they can work out the Carbon-14 content. They're using it for a lot of atmospheric studies, looking at the methane and carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere over the last many thousands of years using ice cores from Antarctica. The long and short of it is that the methane levels in our atmosphere currently are the highest of anything they've studied, and it's a much worse source of global warming than carbon dioxide.

At this point all the earth science people were really excited, I think they'd like to use the accelerator for dating their samples too, especially as you don't need to send very much off to get a good result. That particular type of accelerator destroys the sample, as they ionise it and then send it all whooshing around at high speed to sort the particles by atomic weight.

The one we went to see next didn't destroy the sample, but it was more used like the neutron scattering experiments, only using beams of rapidly moving charged particles to probe crystal structures and the like. It can't probe as closely because the nuclear charge repels the ions, but it's cheaper and easier to get time on it, I suspect, and it has other strengths, I'm sure. The problem was we were back with the old physicist who didn't know how to answer our questions. The other thing in that hall was a decommissioned old nuclear reactor that was gradually going to be demolished, but again, no questions were answered. *pouts*

Gradually the group dispersed throughout the hall to read the posters scattered on the walls, as the guide was so mind-numbingly boring that no one cared enough to be polite, save for a few postgrad students who weren't me. Eventually we were rescued by someone who announced that we were running late and it was time to leave, so we all piled onto the bus again, stopped to pick up some bookmarks as souvenirs and all of our bags and then we left the ANSTO facility.

Nothing exciting happened on the way back save that we drove through Bankstown and some awesome soul (not me) convinced the driver to do a dropoff there. Funnily enough I approved of that, and made my way home in a surprisingly short period of time.

So, that was my day at the nuclear reactor. I'm sorry the storytelling took so long to write up, but I promise I'll do some more blogging soon.

Oh, one more thing

I can confirm the whole I have whooping cough thing now. Joy. I'm on antibiotics that need to be taken every six hours without fail, and I usually sleep for eight hours... *sighs* Oh, and now, after a month, my mum has decided not to let me use the family phone anymore.

Labels: club mac, linking all over the place, nuclear physics, Radioactive-Cat, science, sickly-Cat, stupid blogs, whooping cough

An oft-delayed blog...

So I'm still a little sick, but the antibiotics are kicking in and all of a sudden I'm very sleepy. Fortunately on Wednesday I worked a full work day and thus was not on the train that derailed. I did get to see the train as my late-running train made it's slow way past, but I didn't have my camera out because I thought it would have been cleared up by then. Two carriages were off the tracks, as far as I could tell, and I can only imagine it was rather scary. I don't know how it could have happened, given that the train would have just stopped (or been about to stop) at the station and no one goes fast through there. I wouldn't be surprised to find out it was foul play.

Another link: On the whole 11th doctor casting news fiasco

And one more, from my new favourite blog, Fuck You, Penguin: A snake and a hamster that are friends.

This is what I'd want for my birthday, if my birthday were in March and not January: The greatest Doctor Who toys ever. (If anyone is after ideas, Kinokuniya has the first Gunnerkrigg Court book in stock. Also Absolute Sandman volumes 3 and 4, but they're out of most people's price range.)

More yuletide stories!

• Addams Family: Because We're Addamses by calliopes_pen - a story told from Wednesday's point of view, more or less set around the Movie. Deliciously in character.
• Fairy Tales: Once Upon a Dream by bookesque - a reworking of Sleeping Beauty, told from the point of view of both the prince and the princess, in which both are aware of their places in the story, and both don't necessarily want any part of it. Lovely.
• Merlin: Know Thine Enemy by Isabeau - Mordred's story, so sad and poignant and tragic. I love him here, and the way she's written this.
• Nethack: Another Sad Death Written In The Book Of Tyr by kastaka - Reads like a really fun session of the game.
• Tokyo Babylon: Memory -- A Save Tokyo City Story by Psyienna - This is Tokyo as I remember it, and the characters as I wish I had been able to write them. Beautiful.

Labels: fairy tales, nethack, public transport, sickly-Cat, Tokyo Babylon, toys, trains, yuletide

Some Good News...

After all those doctors appointments, and being poked and prodded all over, they've concluded that:

• I don't get enough Vitamin D
• I'm stressed
• Everything else is normal (at least in 20% of women).

So that's all good and I am not actually dying.

Working on a big web project at uni (what PhD?) so have little time to blog, but will try to catch everyone up soon.

Labels: phd, sickly-Cat, university politics have got me down, vitamins, web stuff

Dear Mum...

Next time, keep your cold to yourself.

Labels: sickly-Cat

   This is why I have no faith in the medical profession...

1. Sunday I woke up with a blocked ear. Decided to live with it and got on with life.
2. Wednesday I said "bugger that" and went to the medical centre. Doctor #1 said that I had a build up of wax (I thought "really? okay") and that I should buy these expensive ear drops, put them in my ears each night then come back on Friday to get my ears syringed.
3. Did not sleep Wednesday and Thursday nights due to sloshing in ear (and pain last night).
4. Went to medical centre again this morning. Doctor #2 said that I had a middle ear infection, no sign of ever having any wax in my ears at all and that he was disappointed in the other doctor for the misdiagnose. Now I have a nasal spray (and a prescription for antibiotics if the bacteria don't drain when the congestion does).

I just want to go home.

Labels: losing sleep, sickly-Cat

   Summary of my week...

I've had a migraine, and a tummy bug (which may have been self-diagnosed as an allergy to goat's cheese, but I'm not sure I want to test that). I've done bugger all at work.

But I did fix my family's broken ps2, and I've almost finished FFX, so maybe I don't completely suck after all.

Labels: cait sith, never going to graduate, playstation, sickly-Cat

   Headaches and throat infections and trying desperately to recover before heading out to England oh my...

So I'm feeling decidedly crappy, and have been unable to keep my brain focussed on a single thing for more than ten seconds for the last two days, but the doctor thinks that the headaches belong to the throat infection, which is mild and should be gone within a few days. I just have to survive until then.

In the meantime this story has made my week.

Labels: losing sleep, Neil is our god, sickly-Cat

   Jedi Tim-Tam's Sekrit Hot Lemon Drink Recipe...

Actually, it was my great grandmother's (the more I hear about her, the more I regret that I never really had a chance to know her: she was apparently something of a monty python fan among other awesomenesses). Anyway:

Put the juice of one lemon (or as much as you can manage to get in the mug), less than a teaspoon of honey and a slurp of rum in a mug. Then add about 150mL of warm water (not hot, you don't want to cause evaporation of the good stuff).

Then drink.

PS. You don't have to be sick to enjoy this.

Labels: family, recipes, sickly-Cat, yay vodka

   blargh...

Finally felt I was human again after all those conferences, and my immune system promptly declared that it was shutting down to recover from all my stresses too. Which means I now have the flu, and am completely unable to function (though for some reason I decided a half-day at work would make me feel better... why?).

The only good thing about all of this is that I finally looked at the ingredients list for those hot lemon drinks and realised that the reason I feel worse after my mum foists one on me is that they contain phenylalanine (try typing that three times fast while under the influence of a cold), which always makes me feel headachey and bleh.

Minako has gone in for service, and we can only hope that she will come out of it okay. The ASA has very nicely given me $200 towards the repairs, which is about the nicest and most generous thing I've ever encountered from such a big organisation.

So anyway, if I'm not online much at the moment, that's why. Sickly, and without my nice computer.

Labels: conferences, iCatherine, sickly-Cat

   Now in pain...

I think I may have broken a toe. *sighs*

Last night after the conference dinner there was observing of the moon and jupiter through the patchy clouds (okay, they were less than patchy after a bit, hence the fact that we didn't try for anything else). Anna didn't make it to the observing, because her jet lag had hit and she was very, very tired.

The point of that digression is that when I got back to the room, it was dark and I didn't want to wake Anna with a light. So naturally I smashed my foot into a cupboard, and now many hours later it still hurts. My toe is swollen, and a little bit bruised. This is very unfun.

The good news is the talks are really interesting, and I'm having a lot of fun. Most of the speakers have embraced the theme of "tell us about your scientific process", which is great because they're all giving such different talks. It's lots of fun.

Labels: conferences, pain, sickly-Cat

   I have a cold and am in no state to blog...

so here's a photo my mum put up on flickr:
I think that is her on the left, with my grandmother Eileen, Aunty Cathy, and then my great grandparents, of whom Granny Ruth is the only one I knew.

Labels: family, history, old photographs, sickly-Cat