2012...
...what a year. Whan an amazing, rotten year. I loved some of what happened, but I surely don't want to go through everything the last year brought ever again.
February 2012... my first month of unemployedness. I am glad I was able to enjoy it as much as I did, with lots of skiing trips and whatnot.
Early march 2012... the probability and statistics days in Mainz. An exhaustive, but great week spent in the city at the Rhine. We had a lot of fun, and I won't ever forget this one evening the guys and I went to the "star club" and had such a great night. Admittedly, I did not get much of what all the heady stuff the speakers presented at the conference was about, but... I somehow develeoped a certain "coolness" in admitting in front of colleagues that I am not familiar with this or that theoretical concept. I remember I always felt insecure about such things, until I came to the institute for paper sciences I worked for these last four years. They showed me that there's no shame in admitting you don't know everything. I guess this is one thing I learned from them, besides others...
March 2012... Mass Effect 3! The Alenko-fangirl inside my head is still squeeing with joy. Obviously, my selective memory is in perfect working order, allowing me to forget certain... not-so-brilliant moments of the game.
Friday, April 13th 2012... WHAT A DAY. The day I took my doctoral viva. There's so much to say about this day, and at the same time so little. What really made this day so perfect was that real life Kaidan as well as most of my best friends were with me, through the entire exam. I'm sure if they hadn't been there, I wouldn't have had as much fun as I had. Yes, you heard correctly. I did have quite a bit of fun at my own viva. Hey, it's the single one hour everyone present has to listen to the shit you say. :-) Or something like that. What in hindsight dampened the day was that RL!Kaidan said he didn't fully understand my presentation. In contrast to our friend's viva we attended later in the year. On PDEs! *shudder*
Amazingly enough, the days leading up to my viva I experienced a constructive high concerning my fanfictions. Everything's better than studying for an exam, obviously.
The fortnight after my viva I mostly spent in bed, sleeping like the dead. I never believed an exam could exhaust me that much.
Late April... Went to London with a friend of mine to see Eve Myles and Zach Braff in All New People.
May 2012... Spent a week on Tenerife with a(nother) friend. It was a lovely week and a nice holiday. What certainly stands out is the day we spent on the Teide, the volcano that basically *is* the island. I have a weakness for empty, barren landscapes, and the trip up into the volcano's caldera was breathtaking. We even took the cable car up under the top of the higest peak of the mountain, letting us out on 3500 metres above sea level. That high up - and with the lovely clear sky we had that day - I was able to make ou the earth's curvature.
Early summer 2012... went on some photographing trips. Grüner See, Bärenschützklamm,... I believe I got some nice pictures what with the many rain that had fallen in june - mushrooms, waterfalls, greenery.
Summer 2012... what a rotten summer. No holidays with RL!Kaidan, no job, and many, many negative replys on my applications. Not such a good time. I can clearly remember august 1st, the day I went to a job interview and realized that the only ones wanting me were some shady financial consultants that didn't even require an academic degree from their applicants.
Autumn 2012... passed 10 weeks in re-education. Definitely the anticlimax of my professional carreer. Some program to get academics back into the job-market, focussing on business assistancy. I never before spent such a boring, unchallenging 10 weeks. The only plus side? I met some extremely nice people and together, we made the best of the time we had to endure. What I learned about myself in these weeks? Now that it's over, I frighten myself at how I went to pieces back then. I stopped doing any housework at all - no shopping, no cooking, no nothing. I had lost my interest in everything I usually enjoyed to do. The only thing that still kept me occupied enough was working two or three things on the computer at the same time - browsing the various fandoms, writing and editing the scientific paper, and watching some TV series. Apart from that, I didn't do anything at all. Looking back now, it's somehow alarming.
Late october 2012... job interviews in Dornbirn and Heidelberg, Germany. While the interviews in themselves were great, the prospect of leaving everything behind was... discouraging, to say the least.
Late november 2012... Finally! A positive reply to one of my applications! A small company, located here in Graz, is willing to employ me. I can't tell you what a relief that was. After 10 months of unemployedness, I finally had found a job! And a job that perfectly fit my cv, too.
November 21st, 2012... I was awarded a research award. That is to say, the team I have been working with these last few years was granted this price, to be precise. So now I've got some nice little allowance to spend. And I'm determined to spent it on geek shit. First item: a Kindle that should be here by monday.
December 2012... my first month at work. Sit me down in front of Matlab with an intriguing and challenging problem and I'm absolutely satisfied. I'm doing surface analysis on hot steel and it's everything I wanted. A statistician's job focussed on an application in the real world. The new colleagues are nice enough, I raised the women's quota of the technical staff by 100% (which I prefer over a female-only group), and my first salary arrived on my bank account earlier this week.
Advent was busy as every year. I went to the christmas markets in town a few times, to meet with friends and have some mulled wine - certainly one of my favourite activities each december. The first half of the month was so very cold the hot wine did taste especially good (you don't want to have mulled wine when it's not even freezing).
Plus, I re-found my creativity. I spent one sunday afternoon drawing sketches again - something I haven't done for years. And I managed to write some more drabbles. They're only fanfictions, but I'm quite satisfied with what I've come up. All of them are Skyrim-centered, and I finally found enough courage to publish the first of the ten to twelfe drabbles I have on ffn. It even got me 5(!) nice reviews from readers within the first 48 hours. Something I'm proud of, as this is already above the average Skyrim ff review rate. (Trust me, I'm a statistician. *g*)
Anyhow, I am greatful for the support RL!Kaidan and my friends gave me all over the year, as I'm perfectly aware that there were times when I wasn't... good company.
Love you, you're the best!
February 2012... my first month of unemployedness. I am glad I was able to enjoy it as much as I did, with lots of skiing trips and whatnot.
Early march 2012... the probability and statistics days in Mainz. An exhaustive, but great week spent in the city at the Rhine. We had a lot of fun, and I won't ever forget this one evening the guys and I went to the "star club" and had such a great night. Admittedly, I did not get much of what all the heady stuff the speakers presented at the conference was about, but... I somehow develeoped a certain "coolness" in admitting in front of colleagues that I am not familiar with this or that theoretical concept. I remember I always felt insecure about such things, until I came to the institute for paper sciences I worked for these last four years. They showed me that there's no shame in admitting you don't know everything. I guess this is one thing I learned from them, besides others...
March 2012... Mass Effect 3! The Alenko-fangirl inside my head is still squeeing with joy. Obviously, my selective memory is in perfect working order, allowing me to forget certain... not-so-brilliant moments of the game.
Friday, April 13th 2012... WHAT A DAY. The day I took my doctoral viva. There's so much to say about this day, and at the same time so little. What really made this day so perfect was that real life Kaidan as well as most of my best friends were with me, through the entire exam. I'm sure if they hadn't been there, I wouldn't have had as much fun as I had. Yes, you heard correctly. I did have quite a bit of fun at my own viva. Hey, it's the single one hour everyone present has to listen to the shit you say. :-) Or something like that. What in hindsight dampened the day was that RL!Kaidan said he didn't fully understand my presentation. In contrast to our friend's viva we attended later in the year. On PDEs! *shudder*
Amazingly enough, the days leading up to my viva I experienced a constructive high concerning my fanfictions. Everything's better than studying for an exam, obviously.
The fortnight after my viva I mostly spent in bed, sleeping like the dead. I never believed an exam could exhaust me that much.
Late April... Went to London with a friend of mine to see Eve Myles and Zach Braff in All New People.
May 2012... Spent a week on Tenerife with a(nother) friend. It was a lovely week and a nice holiday. What certainly stands out is the day we spent on the Teide, the volcano that basically *is* the island. I have a weakness for empty, barren landscapes, and the trip up into the volcano's caldera was breathtaking. We even took the cable car up under the top of the higest peak of the mountain, letting us out on 3500 metres above sea level. That high up - and with the lovely clear sky we had that day - I was able to make ou the earth's curvature.
Early summer 2012... went on some photographing trips. Grüner See, Bärenschützklamm,... I believe I got some nice pictures what with the many rain that had fallen in june - mushrooms, waterfalls, greenery.
Summer 2012... what a rotten summer. No holidays with RL!Kaidan, no job, and many, many negative replys on my applications. Not such a good time. I can clearly remember august 1st, the day I went to a job interview and realized that the only ones wanting me were some shady financial consultants that didn't even require an academic degree from their applicants.
Autumn 2012... passed 10 weeks in re-education. Definitely the anticlimax of my professional carreer. Some program to get academics back into the job-market, focussing on business assistancy. I never before spent such a boring, unchallenging 10 weeks. The only plus side? I met some extremely nice people and together, we made the best of the time we had to endure. What I learned about myself in these weeks? Now that it's over, I frighten myself at how I went to pieces back then. I stopped doing any housework at all - no shopping, no cooking, no nothing. I had lost my interest in everything I usually enjoyed to do. The only thing that still kept me occupied enough was working two or three things on the computer at the same time - browsing the various fandoms, writing and editing the scientific paper, and watching some TV series. Apart from that, I didn't do anything at all. Looking back now, it's somehow alarming.
Late october 2012... job interviews in Dornbirn and Heidelberg, Germany. While the interviews in themselves were great, the prospect of leaving everything behind was... discouraging, to say the least.
Late november 2012... Finally! A positive reply to one of my applications! A small company, located here in Graz, is willing to employ me. I can't tell you what a relief that was. After 10 months of unemployedness, I finally had found a job! And a job that perfectly fit my cv, too.
November 21st, 2012... I was awarded a research award. That is to say, the team I have been working with these last few years was granted this price, to be precise. So now I've got some nice little allowance to spend. And I'm determined to spent it on geek shit. First item: a Kindle that should be here by monday.
December 2012... my first month at work. Sit me down in front of Matlab with an intriguing and challenging problem and I'm absolutely satisfied. I'm doing surface analysis on hot steel and it's everything I wanted. A statistician's job focussed on an application in the real world. The new colleagues are nice enough, I raised the women's quota of the technical staff by 100% (which I prefer over a female-only group), and my first salary arrived on my bank account earlier this week.
Advent was busy as every year. I went to the christmas markets in town a few times, to meet with friends and have some mulled wine - certainly one of my favourite activities each december. The first half of the month was so very cold the hot wine did taste especially good (you don't want to have mulled wine when it's not even freezing).
Plus, I re-found my creativity. I spent one sunday afternoon drawing sketches again - something I haven't done for years. And I managed to write some more drabbles. They're only fanfictions, but I'm quite satisfied with what I've come up. All of them are Skyrim-centered, and I finally found enough courage to publish the first of the ten to twelfe drabbles I have on ffn. It even got me 5(!) nice reviews from readers within the first 48 hours. Something I'm proud of, as this is already above the average Skyrim ff review rate. (Trust me, I'm a statistician. *g*)
Anyhow, I am greatful for the support RL!Kaidan and my friends gave me all over the year, as I'm perfectly aware that there were times when I wasn't... good company.
Love you, you're the best!