Abstract ED

Grad Life: Start of Term 2025

September has been…a month. Conference! Travel! 15 meetings in a week! TA squabbles! Getting towed home for the first time! and wrapping it up with a good dose of houseplants and paper and proposal submissions.

We’ve been using the following format on a shared Google Slides document in the PVL group meetings for the past few months, and it’s been working quite well! It goes: list one accomplishment and one challenge you’ve experience since the last group meeting, and put down your goal to complete by next meeting. Most folks end up putting more than one item, and it functions as a quick status update for everyone. Occasionally we linger longer on certain slides to discuss a figure someone has chosen to represent their week, or we chime in to help out with the challenge or offer support for the goal. My list is rather long since it’s been a while.

Accomplishment(s):

  • finished putting together animated slides for a presentation I gave at EPSC-DPS! I think the audience enjoyed it
  • Met a potential postdoc supervisor or two (networking things)
  • conducted two health and safety inspections (and described 150+ photos as part of the recommendations)
  • Convinced people to help me with 3 separate Global Climate Models! Yay data!
  • Stayed a few extra days to get to know Finland a little better, meet some friends, and trek around the country! Figures 1 and 2 highlight a couple of easily accessible landscapes
Figure 1. A photo of the southern side of Suomenlinna, the Fortress Island a 15 minute ferry ride south of a Helsinki port. This island has seen three different sets of wartime preparations. The southern coast has numerous cannons, a King’s Gate, and really slippery rocks! Towards the north it looks more like a park.
Figure 2. Slightly more inland photo of Suomenlinna. Here you can see the smoothed out rocky features that likely experienced glaciers moving over them. You can also see how different the weather was! Finnish clouds move fast, though we were told this year was abnormally humid at this time of year.

Challenge(s):

  • Time. It’s always time. I managed to schedule 3 weeks worth of meetings into one week on my return. Ouch.
  • I might also be feeling a little bit sick!

Goal(s):

  • Clean up my inbox. There are at least 10 emails I should really get around to responding!
  • Send in three papery things. A revised manuscript (done!), a fellowship application, and a travel grant. Maybe another fellowship application if time permits
  • Upload my code already. Xml the pidgeon has thoughts (Fig. 3)
Figure 3. Xml! The judgey pidgeon from the PDS looking at you for not formatting to standard.

Normally I’d be all like, I need to take the weekend and do more work! Squeeze in some extra hours! When I’ve done this in the past, what it really means is I lounge about and feel guilty about not typing away. This time around, I had a few scheduled social events already in my calendar and I simply didn’t have the time to do too much weekend work because I was busy sleeping to have energy to do social things!

Looking Forward into October

Things have relaxed a bit since the hectic go go go upon my immediate return. I’ve pushed back my optimistic (and slightly unrealistic) goal of defending my dissertation super early since all the postdoc positions I’m applying to have a tentative start date in September 2026. Sleep has been caught up on. And I’ve received some excellent feedback on the structure and delivery of some of the proposals and statements I was working on. I did commit to several boardgame and table top RPG sessions this month, so we’ll see if packing in social events bites me in the butt in October.

Personal Updates

Accomplishment(s):

  • plants are growing! Here’s a list of highlights on blooms
    • Hoya linearis – these peduncles have been around for months. Will they ever expand? Only time will tell
    • Hoya decipulae – I bought this plant for the blooms, and it looks like I might have two soon! (Fig. 4)
    • Oncidium cheirophorum- already in bloom, I caught these opening up right before I left the country, so the first stalk has been around for just under a month and the blossoms are starting to dry up. These smell… for lack of better words, clean floral. There’s a faint herbaceousness to it, and damp, but that could be the terrarium it lives in. Figure 5 shows the blooms on the day I got back!
  • 90% unpacked from the previous trip
  • successfully purchased things at the african violet show for a remote friend! Example in Figure 6 of a plant we’re going to split
Figure 4. Hoya decipulae peduncle and flowers on the way! They’re supposed to look like eggbeaters…
Figure 5. Oncidium cheirophorum. I bought this in bloom last year as a gift, took a small setion as a backup, and here we are today! It lives in a terrarium mounted in dried sphagnum moss next to a NoID bromeliad, philodendron micans trying to craw over everything, and a philodendron florida ghost casually flopped over it.
Figure 6. LE Erika! We’re both excited for this one. It’s a trailing type african violet that seems to be difficult to grow. The white variegation blushes pink with enough light, and it should self-propagate given enough horizontal space to grow into.

Challenge(s):

  • anthuriums are starting to rot and look uphappy left and right!
  • Froggy still hasn’t received her upgraded tank
  • getting towed home was a thing, but this was a surprisingly quick situation to deal with. The major consequence is my wallet being $250 lighter (tire change and then some) and getting bruised on my knee for hauling aroud my previously oversized tires. See Figure 7 for the culprit.
  • ruined two pairs of pants! I dropped candle wax all over my favourite sweat pants, and had a ballpoint explode on another pair of pants (this one is partially addressed, but still hanging on a rack for me to deal with)
  • Time, of course
Figure 7. Check out the thickness of that tire post deflation.

Goal(s):

  • build or find a stand for the custom tank (Figure 8 is an image of the future resident!)
    • This leads to finally clearing my floor of all the plant propagations I have stacked in bins meant to fill said tank
  • fully unpack from last trip
  • finish writing the draft for an RPG module that I wanted to use as an outreach tool (and fun times) that I was hoping to get done in Summer!
  • take a look at all the moss photos I took in Finland and distribute them as need be!
Figure 8. Frogfoot Meteor awaits her upgrade patiently and not at all threateningly.

Truthfully, my personal life usually is about this chaotic, if not more so. Things are always in motion and mechanical items have limited lifespans. Having hobbies that involve living things also means that sometimes things happen outside of my control. One thing that’s been weighing on my mind is how to pass along all my plants if I move out of the country. Or what to do with my geckos if I move to a place where they aren’t allowed pets. A problem for a future me I suppose.

Figure 9. A realistic representation of me in my daily life.

elisa

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