Wow, I’m glad to see some other Dopers giving the cold shoulder to the Sandman!
We’ve been doing a plethora of all-nighters ‘round the Dvl household the past couple months—in fact, this past week I was up Saturday to Sunday, then Tuesday to Wednesday, though there were a couple three-hour naps here and there. I’d thought about checking in before—now wish I did sooner.
Oh, this isn’t exactly our hundred pages of gobbledygook. It’s a report written by an international technical team. Think about it for a second… international = non-native English speakers… technical = not exactly trained to write—I can’t tell you how many paragraph-long, rambling, parenthetical after parenthetical Gordian Knot sentences I’ve had to slog through… and team = this thing was written by a committee. One that apparently didn’t like each other (or me, I guess). Topping it off, I need to put this thing in some bastardized form of American and British English (custom style manual). It’s not always this bad, but we’re in for the long haul tonight. But lest I examine equine dentures, all hail rush charges!
Tonight’s an interesting night—one of two landmarks.
First, I just looked up and noticed that I just hit 2,000 posts! I’d lurked for several months then finally joined in October of ’99 (right before the Stormfront invasion) thinking I was late to the Boards (knew ‘bout Cecil from reading the books in the eighties). Wow, two grand. I remember many folks hitting their first thousand years ago, Handy’s crawl toward the then-seeming mighty 10K, and then seeing five-digit post counts become the norm. Well, here I am at two thousand, somewhere between lurker and regular. Kind of like I’m in my tweens, no?
Second, despite a few stumbles here and there (and a lot of misplaced anger and general crankyness that’s thankfully long behind us), the Dvl household has gone from a fifteen-year, little over a pack-a-day habit to one full year of non-smoking! Wooooooooooohhhhhhhhhhhoooooooooo let the balloons drop, the trumpets trump, and the Marlboro Man marl!
For the past few weeks of unemployment, I have allowed my body’s natural sleep cycle to dictate my day. My day lasts for 26 hours, but all the clocks still tick away on a 24 hour schedule, so I go to sleep 2 hours later each night. After 2 weeks, my sleep cycle had done a complete flip. I will probably go to bed at sunrise today.
Fun fact: during a recent illness I went four and a half days straight without sleep. By the end I was even suffering from bizarre hallucination-like effects.
Go make those coconut thingamagigs–we call them Pizdet, since they’re somewhat like bizet, but that good. The pronunciations probably not coming across, but the Piz- prefix is a bit of Russian profanity (Mrs. Dvls started off as a child in Russia).
Our household is on a rather odd schedule right now.
My wife is in the final throes of putting together her PhD dissertation, and is working on it day and (sometimes all) night. She’s never in bed before 3.30 a.m. at the moment, and sometimes when she goes to bed she can’t sleep for long because she’s a bit stressed out, so she gets up and keeps working. She’s also pulled a couple of all-nighters over the past couple of weeks to get chapters to her adviser so he can read them. When she gets too tired to work, she takes a nap.
I’ve also been staying up late on the project. Her dissertation has a lot of images, and i’ve been helping her out by editing and resizing them in Photoshop so they are ready for printing. I’ve also been working with EndNote to get her bibliography and footnotes in shape. I do the technical busywork so she can focus on the content.
That’s awesome, mhendo. You have plans for after she’s done? I’ll pay you as handsomely as a grad student can - as much beer as I can brew and all the pears you want (provided you don’t want more than the tree in my yard produces).
I moved out here from Baltimore - it’s a nice change.
She has a tenure-track job waiting in California (hence the haste to get finished), and once she’s earning a proper income i’ll hopefully stop procrastinating, sit down, and finally get my own fucking dissertation finished.
Well now you’ve all probably gone to bed, or work, or whatever you do in the daytime, it’s time for me to start my own all-nighter over here by myself. I’m already too cold and too tired. WAH!
[Homer]Mmmmm… fish shaped-palettes… ahhhthhallllalalllll[/Homer]
Not by yourself just yet … I’m putting on a fresh pot, hunkering down, and still ploughing through. I didn’t have time to bake, so you’ll have to settle for a store-bought doughnut.
Yay! I feel better now. I’ll take that doughnut, I’m so hungry. I’m also craving some curry, or a baked potato. Basically anything hot and very filling.
Hahahaha. I wish, bbs2k! I’m sitting here with feet turning blue, rain pattering against the window and howling winds outside. We’re meant to be getting a (relatively) cold winter here.
I just poked some holes in a potato and put in the the microwave. It looks like a baked potato, still too hot to eat.
It’s winter down there, isn’t it? (Or is that down under? I get my idioms confused.) 'Waving potatoes is great–though not if you forget to poke holes in it. If you have any sort of conventional oven, throw it in there for a short spell to get the outside nice n crispy (if you eat the skin, that is). (Er, the skin of the potato. Not the oven. That would be silly.)
