Anne's post in a place where you cam comment with out paying ramsom.

Sunday = time to ramble on (2008-05-11 - 2:26 p.m.)

So the weather is incredible this week in North Wales! Just thought I should make note of this fact. Blistering sunshine every day except yesterday. Unlike the Scots, however, the Welsh don't seem to be taking the opportunity to strip off and expose their white underbellies. In Edinburgh, the first sunny day would bring the sight of acres of white flesh as far as the eye could see. By the second sunny day, it would all have turned bright red. Here, however, everyone just seems to be keeping on with the same short skirts and hotpants they wore all winter - but minus the 3/4-length leggings.

Lectures have now officially ended and exams start soon. I have two, Advanced Statistics and Cognition and Brain. These will be my first finals in six years. Yuck. On the plus side, however, I've finished pilot-testing for my thesis and have started running subjects in earnest. I'm doing nothing but testing next week and if my luck holds, may have enough subjects by the end of the month to start analysis. (They are technically never called "subjects" any more - they are "participants" - but nobody ever remembers to go with the PC terminology). The pilot data was pretty noisy and inconclusive, so it's hard to tell yet if there will be an effect. Either way I get my Masters, but it will sadly only be publishable if there is in fact an effect.

Starting to get really sad about leaving Bangor. There's a pretty good chance (it would seem) that I could scrounge funding here, but the department has messed me around so many times that it seems foolish to set myself up for them to try it again. I can just see getting halfway through a PhD and then getting a letter saying, "Our policies on funding have changed...." I just don't want to risk it. But I REALLY don't want to leave. The fencers are making plans for a Women's BUSA (British Universities Sports Association) team next year, and I'm pretty sure I could get on it (if only because of lack of any other female fencers!)

Speaking of fencing, I'm half-dead today due to Reid's little torture session yesterday. (He's the club captain). I almost didn't turn up, but dragged myself over. He had us "jog gently" around the gym as a warm-up, and I joked, "Yeah, I WILL jog gently - if he thinks I'm sprinting he has another think coming!"

And then he set up for the bleep test. I'm not sure if I have described this, but it is a gym teacher-designed torture like nothing ever seen in Canada. It's a CD that beeps twice for each level, and you have to run across the gym each time. So Level 1, runs 1 through 10, you have quite a while to get from one side to the other, but by Level 8 you're sprinting because the beeps are really close together. I made it to Level 9.6, which is way better than I did last time. But my chest was burning by the end.

So everyone collapsed in exhaustion after that, at which point Reid hauled us up for a footwork session (slowly for 3min, medium for 3min, fast for 3min, repeat). THEN we had a lesson, and when I couldn't hold my arm up any more we had an hour of fencing. And I did foil, which has the benefit of being nice and light to hold, yet is a massive pain because there are complicated rules about who has right-of-way that I can never work out. Sigh.

On the plus side, it's Sunday, it's sunny and I have nothing much to do all day but putter around the house, marking essays and doing laundry in my Hockey Night in Canada t-shirt.