angharad_gam

 ...when a combination of hayfever and the increased light in the mornings means I reliably wake up around 5:30am, regardless of when I actually went to sleep the night before. You would think that I would compensate by going to bed earlier, but that would be too much like common sense. So, sleep deprivation is the order of the day. On the plus side, the garden is awesome at the moment. Also, daylight savings came in this morning, which may help with at least one part of the problem. 

I have also been rather busy lately, but I am hoping that the period of busyness will more or less wrap up after I give my cooking class tomorrow, and to help that along  I am taking some time off work in the second week of the school holidays. 

I spent half last week at a Women in Maths conference. I was a bit nervous going into it, for some reason, but it turned out really well. There was a surprisingly large number of people there, the talks were interesting, and I met some really interesting people. Normally I only get to go to statistics conferences, so it was good to see what people are doing in other fields of maths and maths related subjects. I even went to a physics (well, technically astronomy) talk and was pleased I hadn't completely forgotten everything. 

I finished Mass Effect: Andromeda. That game has gotten a lot of flak and negative criticism, but on the whole I thought it was a perfectly fine and enjoyable game. I can see how it compares unfavourably to some of the other Bioware games - it didn't grab me anywhere near as much as the Dragon Age games have (then again I have always preferred fantasy to sci-fi) - but taken on its own merits it was ok (if not amazing). It kept me engaged through a fairly thorough and complete playthrough,  but I am in no hurry to play it again. So I am back playing Dragon Age: Inquisition again. Since I have now played the first two games I have been wanting to do a run through with the characters and choices I made in those games, rather than the defaults. It's weirdly satisfying being able to do this. 

I am really rather looking forward to having some time off. In the same week we shall be having my parents visit, celebrating our 20th wedding anniversary, and heading to the biannual plant fair with dirtygreatknife . It's going to be a good week.

...although I hope none of you are silly enough to actually watch it in the first place.

But here is more cause, namely that they are contributing to the denigration of my profession and that old saw 'Lies, damned lies, and statistics'.

...but I am starting another course this week.

It's only four weeks long, with two programming assignments, so I figure it won't be too much of a drag on my time. It's a course on the software/language R, which is becoming big news among statistical software, and although we primarily use SAS at work I have been using R a lot more lately (it is cheap and has a lot of fancy new methods included) and it makes my brain hurt. This is in part because it is an object oriented language, with which I have very little experience, and in part because it is an open source entity, and support/manuals etc leave somewhat to be desired. I am hoping a more systematic approach to learning it will make it all a bit clearer.

It's good timing in some ways because I am taking this coming week off. I have been meaning to take some time off lately, but since I keep getting sick it has never seemed to be a good time. But since my current supervisor usually takes time off in the school holidays I figured he wouldn't complain too much about me doing so. We're actually going to Victor Harbour for a couple of nights, from Monday, and I'm guessing we'll all be offline for that time.

We're also thinking about moving house. Not soon, but soonish. Andy's elderly relatives were very kind to us in their wills, and we are shortly (any time now, it's been more than twelve months, but it's really very close now we keep being told) going to come into rather a lot of money. After briefly considering various wild schemes, we've decided to keep it simple and just buy a new house. This place seemed pretty large when we moved here, from living in townhouses/units, and having only a small Erin and a toddler Liam. Now we are five, and I am only a few years off being the shortest person in the house (the perils of procreating with someone eight inches taller than you) this house is beginning to seem a trifle crowded.

It also seems a good chance to move into a catchment of a slightly nicer public high school than the ones in this area. The trouble is this means moving out of our established suburb into a newer development, where the ratio of house to garden is rather smaller, and when you look out over the landscape you see not trees but roofs. And, of course, giving up this garden with so many mature fruit trees, and ready-made vegetable garden, compost heap, and so on. Which is a shame. But it would certainly be nice to live in a house with a proper linen cupboard. And enough storage space for all the board games, costumes, books, computers and other geekery that is spilling out all over the place here (or mouldering away in the Shed of Mildew). And as several people have pointed out, this house is rather damp and may be contributing to the spells of ill-health we (but mostly me) have had in the last few years.

So we're in a bit of a wierd place at the moment. It's Spring, and planting season, and everytime I plant something I think 'I may not be making use of this'. I'm planting a lot of things in pots at the moment. I look at the cherry tree and see that there are going to be masses of cherries this year (assuming we can keep the bloody parrots off them) and I wonder if we'll still be here to pick them. We might well, of course. Buying and selling a house is not a speedy process by any stretch of the imagination. But it's wierd.