Yawn....

It's hot here. Really hot. Laramie only does 2 seasons: freeze off your appendages quickly or gradually cook them off in layers. At least that is a good thing about my job- I have a nice cool lab to work in. The job isn't going so great mainly because I'm trying to use some software that apparently only people in Israel know how to use. I didn't make that up, that's what tec support finally admitted after two weeks of unhelpfulness. So, since I don't want to apply for Isralie citizenship, I have to sit in my air conditioned lab moaning and getting better aquainted with my iTunes library. But at least I'm working insde, unlike the guy on our street who is renovating his house. He is currently leavering planks of wood off his house, which is confusing me because surely since the house is made of wood he'll eventually run out of planks to leaver off and be left standing in a rather large pile of dry kindling?

I'm writing my thesis in pretty much any free moments. I managed to escape occasionally to train for some ill-advised races I've signed up for or, even rarer, to play my poor neglected guitar. It's summer, I should be out exploring with Andy not sat at home pondering the extensional geometry of small ocean basins. Unfortunately, I've got to the point of having done enough work to not want my efforts to go to waste, but not enough to actually submit the bloody thing. If it wasn't for Andy I'd not have had any cooked food or clean pants for quite some time now. If he ever leaves me I'll be skanky and hungry within days.

I've just had 2 days of induction as a new employee, which mostly involved filling out forms and listening to presentations of various shades of dull. The most entertaining for me was the IT specialist who was unable to advance a slide in her Powerpoint presentation. You can stop throwing things like VPN and DSL into the talk now love, you have no credibility. The first challenge was getting there, it was like being in an Indiana Jones film. First hazard are the car drivers, who are courteous to a fault. If you even think about crossing the road they will pull up, even in the middle of a busy road, leaving you unsure if they have stopped for you or the cars waiting to pull out, and the drivers behind them wondering if they should overtake this odd guy who has stopped for no apparent reason. So they are courteous but lacking in common sense. Next hazard are the sprinklers. The uni ones are particularly lethal; they start without warning and suddenly increse power or change direction. One set were programmed to soak the pavement in a carefully correographed sequence, so to get past them relatively dry involved splitsecond timing, like some unfortunate about to be soggy sprite in a platform adventure game. And don't get me started on the dogs. Why does every bugger here own big noisy dogs that are free to roam and scare sensitive types like me? One even tried to heard me by nipping the back of my leg. Ok so no of this is on par with being chased by rolling boulders or thrusting spikes, but I do find humming the Raiders of the Lost Arc helps me get through. On the plus side, now I've done all the paperwork, at least if my morning walk in becomes so fraught with danger I get hurt, I am now insured to be put back together again.

Anyway, why is this post called yawn? Well, I'm doing that rather annoying thing of feeling ill and tired all the time. It means I'm basically either asleep, working, or writing my thesis without the energy to do much else. Although I obviously have sufficient time and energy to write this madness, so maybe I can't complain too much. xxx