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.
A list of the planning and scheduling resources I use intermittently or all the time. I’ll update this periodically. Currently I use a mix of Google Calendar, a Weekly Planner, and a Daily Planner/large notebook.
Google Calendar
Nothing new here! I have several calendars that I’m subscribed to and use. The top three that I pay attention to are:
my lab calendar (x2). We update our extended out of office dates, shift dates, group meeting times, and events that may be of interest to others here. I usually use this to check when the next group meeting is, if I’m on the hook for anything to share at a meeting, and if anyone is out of town/busy
my personal calendar. I schedule things like game nights, personal meetings, and events I’d like to attend here
my personal work calendar. This is shared with my supervisors. When I need to get a lot of work done in a short amount of time, or I have huge swaths of work hours I can leverage, I plan out detailed tasks that help me accomplish larger goals with “Target” dates in which I send completed writing tasks to my supervisors/labmates/coauthors for review. I also put in major timeline checkmarks here
Weekly Planner
For those who have been subject to my love of the Hobonichi Weeks, let it be known that I moved into a Midori because their cat covers (and the price jump on the Weeks) convinced me. The weekly planner is a slim, vertical layout, with 2 pages per week. On the left side is M-S broken up vertically throughout the page, and on the right side is a blank graph page. I tend to carry this around all the time to mark in
3-5 tasks I want to complete for the day, and
any scheduled appointments/meetings I have that day.
The graph side is for notes, impromptu ideas, tracking granular details, etc. There are overflow pages at the end, but this isn’t suitable for taking many notes.
Daily Planner
This is where I log meeting notes, plan things in detail, and use as an adhoc planner for whatever it is I need at the moment. (Previously I did this in the Hobonichi Weeks, but I found that the slim format was actually a detriment and I needed more horizontal space). I’ve used everything from a blank notebook, gridded notebook, sticky notes, and tip-ins from scrap paper for this. This year I’m using a Hobonichi Cousin because there is a lot I want to get done and its nicely formatted for me. I use this to
set monthly goals/tasks on one page per month
take meeting minutes
use as scratch paper! Currently it’s arranged so that it’s one day a page. If I overflow the date, I just flip back to the last empty page and jot down the “date/page” I continue on. I often write down equations in these pages when I’m trying to do unit analysis and I need to get away from my code for a moment, scribble out plots and graphs that I think should appear and compare to what I see on a computer screen, or outline things such as my weekly plan, my thesis structure, jot down who I want to reach out to for whatever topic, write down short summaries of papers I’ve read, etc. This is also where those extra random stickers I accumulate throughout the year often end up…
My goal with this format is to actually develop an index this year. If there are key writings that I want to go back to, I don’t want them lost. Last year I just stuck in book marks, but it eventually got overwhelming. This year I want to take advantage of the “year at a glance” page and write down a brief header in those spots so I know where to go looking for when I want to check on the contents of a meeting I had.
This could easily be replicated in something likeOneNote or any other note taking software, but I’ve found I never really used those, and spending the extra few minutes to write down important things from a paper I want to remember works better than trying to dig up my highlights in my reference manager!
Bonus: Google Forms
Sometimes it’s just too much work to trawl through your calendar and fill out a tracker. To track things that take up my time, I use Google Forms! I write out a 3-4 question form for something I want to keep track of all in one place, and I know that I won’t want to do on paper/keep flipping to. The major use of this one is my Teaching Assistant duties. I keep track of my hours in 15-30 minute chunks and classify my tasks. This has come in helpful when discussing expectations and remaining hours in my contract. Its also useful for profs to know how to better assign hours to their TAs for the following year! I create one of these forms each year, and sometimes a more detailed one for certain courses I’m assigned to. I have my phone out all the time, so I might as well use it when I’m feeling guilty that I’m not doing work!
Questions in the form are:
What course is this for?
What tasks did you do? (eg. marking, proctoring, communications, prep work)
How many hours did it take?
Notes (more details, for example, noting that it was Assignment 1 that I was working on, or if it was an unexpected conversation that was course relevant)
Bonus: Check-ins
All of these tools are useless if you don’t use them. I typically review my calendar 2-3 times a day (and have noticed I’ve missed meetings because it’s muted, so I’m workig on a solution to that!), my weekly planner once in the morning and once at the end of work + whenever I need to jot down an appointment, and my daily planner daily-ish if I want to use all that extra space.
I’ve been prompted to discuss some of the recent issues I’ve been having. There’s been a slight delay on some issues popping up, but as projects rise and fall, changes to my computer set up are required. Also I just moved. Again. We’re now counting 9 moves since I’ve started graduate studies. Let’s chat.
Projects and Pathing
What feels like a common silly thing to wrestle with which each new code package is the installation of specific dependencies and setting up folders and paths in a particular fashion to allow the use of said new fancy code package. Without going into detail, I’m astonished that I was able to follow some specific set of instructions to install GDAL (notorious for being tricky to set up since a number of dependencies need to be upgraded and downgraded at various steps in the installation). However, I’m at a loss when it comes to the more cryptic error messages (Figs. 1 and 2).
Usually what I do is Google and check various forums for days on end, find some workaround and install something completely different instead. This time it’s looking like I really might have to figure out the issue. On a related note, speaking with my labmates did help out for another software problem I was having. Thank you!
Figure 1. A screenshot of Anaconda. I cracked open my “clusters” environment and got a series of messages that I have no recollection of setting up. Here I was just trying to reproduce the weird error that I get when I try to import a python package! More to solve I suppose. I should start documenting what I do to set up my environments.Figure 2. The actual issue. The log has nothing useful in it by the way.
Housing
Wow, what a problem. This is a nation-wide issue of course. There’s the actual cost of housing that means I get to spend something like 80% of my income and have 20% leftover for groceries and any sort of enjoyment in life outside of work, then there’s bad housing. Let’s document my housing experiences briefly.
Location zero: never even moved in. I got a last minute notification that the place I had originally planned was not going to work out.
Location one: Landlord insisted on meeting up in a different city. Played games with the offer (stating there was another tenant they preferred). Entered premises without notice. Did not resolve issues. Gave me keys to everyone’s bedroom and asked me to keep it a secret (I refused) because they didn’t have a property manager and didn’t want to drive in to unlock the doors for people. Refused to address the issue of a surprise pet someone had been hiding in their room (and causing allergic reactions) despite this being a condo with no pet rules. Failing to notify the condo association of the tenants and associated vehicle licenses. Gaslighting and yelling. It goes on.
Location two: Landlord lived in the house. When viewing the place, they indicated that kitchen and pool were for common use. Linens were provided. Moved in. Got yelled at for cooking and having “food scents”. Insisted that people in the past just ate take out every day. Threatened to call the police on me. Put something questionable in my room that caused it to smell. Lied about the passcode for the entrance. I didn’t even last the two weeks I had paid for.
Location three: Just a crash pad at a friend’s place while avoiding Location two and figuring out where to go.
Location four: Perfectly fine! The place was a little small and out of the way. This was a non-issue until the pandemic rolled around and I was stuck indoors all the time due to a wasp problem in the backyard.
Location five: Pretty great. Minus the extreme heat (no AC) and roommates that had weird sleeping hours that resulted in a lot of stomping overhead. The folks were great, but the random footsteps overhead really got to me after a while. I was all set for the rest of my degree. Until I wasn’t.
Location six: Turns out it’s really hard to find housing when the university suddenly declares in person classes again. After 60+ calls and messages, and several in person visits where people were making offers on the spot, I finally found a place reasonably priced and close enough to bus. Only issue is that the landlord hated onions. Okay. I could deal with that for a bit.
It turns out that it was a lot more than that. There was a lot of random sudden sniffs outside my door, and loud music being played all the time from upstairs, and a lot of guests (guess what we weren’t allowed to have?). The heat would also get randomly turned off and she demanded our windows be opened for hours to air out. Eventually me and my law school roommate decided to look into the legality of our living conditions and decided that we were indeed protected by the Residential Tenancies Act and our lease was nonsense. Over the holidays our landlord someone developed some terrible illness wherein her doctor insisted that no scented things were allowed in the house. Of course, they felt welcome to inspect our quarters. Somehow my roommate spilled an entire bottle of perfume that the landlord didn’t notice, but my diffuser that had water in it for over a month was a problem. No wonder I didn’t submit my thesis in time to work from home the next term.
Location seven: Great! Lovely roommate, reasonably nice location. Wasps in the house and mice in the walls. Can’t win ’em all. Those issues never got resolved properly. There was also incredibly poor heat distribution in the house and a gap in our entry door, so we often had a space heater on. Oh, and the house down the street was regularly broken into and we had a couple fires in the five months I was there. I wouldn’t have enjoyed living there much longer.
Location eight (skipping over living from home and living at a remote campsite for three weeks): Okay. Housing in Toronto is rough. A family friend let me stay for a bit while I was waiting on residence to let me in. It was a lot of being treated like a surrogate daughter though. Not the most comfortable, but alright.
Location nine: Finally! I have arrived! I applied way back when I received my original acceptance and followed up after the response date had passed. I was on the wait list. Cool. Then I got in and picked a date. Great! I emailed closer to the move in date asking where the lease was. I was informed it was in the works. It showed up in my inbox a week before move-in with some additional information. For example, there was a link that informed me I would receive a move-in time via email and I should confirm this worked for me. The email never arrived despite reaching out several times and getting a response for elevator booking on the Friday before move-in. No one seems to work on the weekends.
Move-in day. I waited until around 10 that morning, calling in several times to see if I could get a hold of someone. I even got transferred once. To no avail. Anyhow, I show up and it’s all good. Then I get into the apartment. Fairly quickly, I notice it is not all good. There are several issues with the apartment, most of which are cleanliness and electrical related. I have a quick chat with the office that gave me keys, and they assure me that I can submit a maintenance request and most issues will be addressed between 24 and 48 hours.
Surprise! I am unable to fill out the maintenance form. To that point, I am also unable to complete the arrival inventory (where I can state the condition of things where I found them). I email IT and someone fixes this a day later citing a mysterious issue and I have now have access. Alright then. I fill out the form and make 3 specific maintenance requests, and within a day, I see notice that my requests have been updated and are in various stages of progress. I come back after going to a workshop out of town and see a notice indicating that one request is a non-issue, and another has been confirmed as an issue. A nice little notice informs me that they will be coming back. Cleanliness issues have not been addressed.
A week passes, and I check with the front desk how to escalate. They are surprised to hear that my issue is ongoing. I follow the information I was given to reach out to another group to figure out what has been going on. Another 48+ hours passes, and I hear nothing. I email again, requesting an update. 48+ hours go by. Nothing.
This morning, I ask the front desk to escalate. They are surprised to see me again, and apologize once more, this time promising to reach out to the custodial staff directly. I come back mid-day to address my rumbling stomach, and find my door open and people inside my apartment. Weird. Someone just emailed me confirming they would come by tomorrow morning to take photos. After extensive discussion and several phone calls (from the staff in my apartment), I am assured that their superiors have contracted someone to come by tomorrow. We shall see if this happens. It is evident that there are some communication issues within the Maintenance group themselves. At first, no one was addressing my issue. Now there are at least 4 other people involved. Apparently people had been trying to knock on my door for the last 2 days instead of simply emailing me back.
Lessons (RE)Learned
Being a student with limited financial resources can be rough. No doubt about it. I spoke with a few others who had been living in residence and they made it clear that they had ongoing issues that had never been resolved or required escalating several times and external intervention to address. I have absolutely paid my way out of bad housing situations in the past, but this isn’t a viable solution for everyone all the time. Being persistent in resolving issues is the only way they move forward, and it takes more time than I would like to spend. It would be wonderful if the people I had to interact with were competent, especially when I am reliant on them or pay for a service. To quote roughly the individual I spoke with the first time around regarding cleanliness, “It’s because they’re part-timers. I don’t get it. They should work hard until they’re full-time, then they can slack off on the job.” Admittedly, I bit my tongue when I heard that from what appeared to be one of the full-time staff. I think I may have responded with, “Right, so 24-48 hours?”
Pile of Projects, Solutions?
I’d love to be able to compartmentalize my life so that I can focus on one thing at a time. Research, TA duties, housing, a semblance of financial security, and my personal life. It doesn’t quite work out that way though. So instead, I write myself a small to-do list for each “project” in my life and see how much bandwidth I have that day or week. This doesn’t always work out (I still have what is hopefully an hour long task to wrap up a short project), but it seems to help. I will eventually find some time to work on my pet projects, such as in Figure 3. Electroforming and shampoo making, here I come!
Figure 3. Not all is bad. I finally picked up an LED lamp that mimics part of the spectrum necessary for happy plant growth. It also provides a warm light instead of the fluorescents everywhere else in the apartment!
Abstract ED 