The Man with No Time

Hmmm, when did I last do an update on this challenge *looks at date on previous post* - April! Sheesh. So much for my 'monthly update plan' that I had at the start of this! I'm going to play the 'real-life' card here. Although I've got a reasonable amount done since my last update, August was pretty much a washout with flathunting for my new job. Then I had to start said job, move (twice), attend a conference, defend my PhD thesis, and deal with some personal issues in September and the start of October. I'm only just resettling into some vague resemblance of a routine, and my new flat is finally looking like someone lives there rather than a squatter's residence! So I haven't forgotten about Venethrax and his dragon slaying posse. Before the upheaval I got the Mechanithrall unit quite far along, and the Lich Lord himself isn't looking too bad either. I just haven't been able to work on them over the last couple of months. ...

Just a quick Astronomy related update today. This morning saw a notable achievement in the field of exoplanetary science - when the preprint ArXiv updated with new submissions, there were three papers from the WASP project (which I'm part of). Between them they detail the discovery of 13 new hot Jupiter planets, taking the total number of WASP planets up to 100 (although not all have been published yet, and there are many more in the pipeline as well). But more significantly, they took the total number of known exoplanets past the 1000 planets milestone! This is a fantastic achievement for a field that's not even twenty years old. The Kepler mission, now sadly departed, has of course greatly contributed to this total. Particularly in the regime of smaller planets, multiple planet systems, and more unusual systems. But the contribution of WASP cannot be underestimated; to date it still holds the greatest number of confirmed discoveries by a single project, and the amoun...

I really, really hope that this is the last part of this post series. At least for this particular house move. Because I'm fed up, and I'm not sure what else can go wrong. 

It is complete! My PhD is over, and I can finally relax for a couple of days. I've been in St Andrews all week, and have just got on the train back to Coventry after staying at my Granny's last night. My viva voce was on Tuesday afternoon, and I spent Wednesday to Friday making the corrections that my examiners asked for. It was a pretty intense week, and I'm glad it's over. For so many reasons. (Credit: Figure-of-L on deviantart.com)

Well, moving still sucks. This whole process is really starting to take the mickey; I naively thought that it would be relatively simple, but I'm starting to realise how lucky I was with all of my previous moves. Each time I had people to help me, and I was moving in with other people so there were bodies around. This time it's a completely different story, and I'm starting to get a bit fed up. Admittedly it's only been a week since I got they keys, and a busy week at that. It's also been stressful.

This weekend I took a trip up to Glasgow for my first competition of the new season, the Scottish National Lifesaving Championships. I say a new season, but I suppose that's my university-lifesaving bias showing through; really it's part of the 2013 season according to the RLSS. In any case, it was the first competition I'd participated in since the St Andrews event back in February! Spoiler alert - it didn't go too well.

Moving still sucks. But at least I now have the keys to my flat! It's taken long enough for me to become immensely frustrated though - it's not like I moved down here over two weeks ago, or applied for my flat almost a month ago or anything... There's been a lot of waiting around for people to do things over the last two weeks.