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    Can you believe it's the end of March already? It blows my mind how fast this month has gone by. During my time in Wales, it has been a strange mix of time crawling and flying but I have to say that this month has in no way crawled.

In the last week, I have become acutely aware of how little time is left in this semester. People have flights booked to go home permanently that are only 2 months away. That's enough on it's own to feel the pressure, but when 3 weeks of that time is Easter/spring break and then a couple other weeks of it are part of the exam period it starts to feel like we're on an express train headed straight to the end of the semester.

While that's kind of the upside of time speeding by, the "acutely aware of how little time is left" thing starts to lead to panic attacks when I think about all the stuff that is supposed to happen between now and mid May. There's a 4000 word assignment, completion of a project which has seemed to evolve into something much larger than expected, a final report on said project, a presentation on the project, and two final exams. For that project, we're somehow crazy enough to be attempting to conduct numerous interviews, up to 6 focus groups, a large-scale questionnaire, and I'm doing heat-mapping. And then we have to analyze it all. I'm not sure when we're going to do it all or why we thought this was a good idea. To throw in some positivity though, we have actually already conducted one focus group, so I guess we're on the right track.

Oh, and did I mention my thesis? Now that we're months behind our original prescription for our timeline of events (who didn't see that one happening?) we've finally got our experiment program working and our study active on the SONA participant panel as of Friday. Diego helped us out this weekend by acting as our guinea pig: he is the original participant. As of this evening, including Diego, we've already run 13 participants!!! It has definitely exceeded my expectations for how many people we could get to sign up or how quickly. Our goal is 120 people total, though we are anticipating having to settle for fewer. All things considered, two days into running our experiment we're 10% of the way there. That's pretty awesome. If we keep getting sign-ups at this rate, we should be set. The 3 week break and then heading into exams is going to make things tricky, but here's hoping!

So many sign-ups! (non-clickable so names aren't legible)

So things are cracking along for sure. Hopefully the next week and a half will be just as busy and productive before I come HOME! :)

Shaken, not stirred

Dear faithful blogees,

In the life and times of Elizabeth, things are usually pretty calm and stable. Nothing too crazy happens. Except when it does.

Yesterday (Tuesday/Blog Day), I was working on a paper due today (Wednesday), and I had enough done that I was convinced to go out last night. It was a fun night, good times were had, yadda yadda. When I came home (early, mind you) to get a good night's sleep before finishing up and turning in my paper today, what did I find but a crashed-ish computer. Of course. Our handy dandy Eric promptly got an international phone call asking "What do I doooooooooo?!?!?!?!" to which the response was basically "wait, try again in the morning, if it's still screwed, try this." Go to sleep when my lifeline to the entire world AND the paper due the next day might be kaput? You've got to be kidding.

Anywho, I did as I was told (what choice did I have?) and went to sleep. This morning, I woke and was wide awake wayy earlier than normal and I tested the waters - nope, computer still screwed. This is the part where I panic. It was still early to call anyone, and Dan, my trusty Bangor-located nerd, was going to have to help me with Eric's Plan B of burning and running the computer off of a OS cd which may or may not be able to recover my data from my own hard drive and thenImighthavetostartalloveronmypaperthatsdueTODAYOMGWHATAMIGONNADO

Lucky for me, I resorted to drastic measures. I shook the computer. And you know what? It worked.

So here's to all y'all geeks and nerds who use techy lingo and makes things all better when machines break, but you know what? The layman's way WORKS! So go ahead, smack your dashboard when something somewhere is rattling, kick the vending machine so it'll give you what you want, and when in doubt, shake your computer.

the Ides of March

Beware them (the Ides, that is).

In this week's installment of Elizabeth's Life, there's not a whole lot going on. Because of that, and the response to last week's pictures, here is another dose of springtime

Oh but there is big news in my life this week...... drumroll please...... as of a sudden decision this week, I will be coming home for a visit next month! You can blame (or thank) Miss Meaghan Toole/soon-to-be Kline, and the US Navy for that. That's right! My bffff/girlfriend is getting married next month. This is obviously very exciting and I couldn't stand the thought that I might miss it. Fortunately for me, Bangor has a 3-week break which just happens to fall around the date of the wedding. So I worked some magic (read: pulled out a credit card) and I'll officially be home this time next month for about 2 weeks!

I'm pretty excited about that. After Christmas, I had become accustomed to the idea that I wouldn't be home again until probably July, so honestly I'm having a hard time adjusting my mindset now that I will be at home in a month! I'm sure I'll get used to the idea pretty quickly though :) Between now and then though, there's a good bit of work to get done. I've got a project proposal, a paper which needs to be done early since it's due while I'll be in another country, as well as research-y stuff. Ready, set, work!

So beware those pesky Ides (of March), have a Caesar salad while you're at it, and I'll see you soon!

Blog Delay

Oopsies. Started writing the blog on time, then got distracted by "studying". Will finish and post promptly after my exam today :) Sorry!

Aaaaand here it is:

I thought I'd kick this week's post off with a picture. I haven't posted too many here lately. Turns out, you don't have to go far to see some beautiful things. The sunset over the mountains is a view straight out my window. I love the reflection in the windows

We're now in Week 7 of the second semester here.... time sure is a-flyin! While that is kind of cool and exciting, it also means that I have an exam on Wednesday this week. Not just any midterm exam either- an Advanced Statistics exam. Gross. Typically I hate stats with a passion. It's just no fun at all. However for this exam, we were given data a week ahead to run through the stats software SPSS and pull together our output. Then, we can take all that output with any notes, calculations, the textbook, whatever we want into the exam. We get an hour to answer the questions about our data using what we ran in SPSS. There's a chance that this could be okay, but there's also a chance that it'll be super confusing. [Note: since I'm not posting this til Wednesday, after my exam, I can inform you that it wasn't too painful].

Over the weekend, I definitely took advantage of the recently nice weather. Hung out with friends, met some people, spent time outside- all in all a good few days. Saturday I went shopping with Diego to help him get some new spring clothes. Though not as sunny, it was still nice to be outside for a couple hours. Friday, after doing some stats work, I met a friend for coffee which then turned into meeting up with a friend of his and wandering around high street for a bit. Wandering then turned into going up to Roman camp to watch the sunset. It's a beautiful spot wayy up a hill (I think I've mentioned it before) that looks over both the city of Bangor and much of the Menai Strait. I took this as a great opportunity to play with my new fancy camera.

On the way up to Roman camp, I got sidetracked by a patch of such brightly colored little flowers. Something about the vibrant colors of the petals is such a stark contrast against Wales with its often-grey skies, and abundant use of dark grey stone on buildings, walls, and roads. They were so pretty I just had to stop.

Finally, I stopped holding us up and we climbed the hill. As we stood up there, the views were (as always) impressive, and slowly the sun began to set and paint pink and orange across the sky

So I started and ended the post with sunsets. Clearly I didn't plan this well. Or maybe I did?

Come up with some sort of symbolism and we'll just say it was on purpose.

Wales Day

In like a lion? Not yet, March. Hopefully not at all. How about in like a lamb? This first day of the month though was beautiful- clear skies and sunny. In Wales??, you exclaim! Why yes, miracles DO happen. And it's only fitting because today, March 1st, is Saint David's Day. If you visited Google.com today, you might have noticed a little costume and flower on the second 'g' of the logo. Why is this relevant? Well, Saint David just happens to be the patron saint of Wales. Hence the daffodil on the logo (official flower of Wales). I'm not going to go on about it though, because I would only be spouting what I just read off of Wikipedia as I wrote, so instead I'll just throw you the link and save us all the trouble of my poor story-telling: Saint David's Day

In other news, I got crapped on by a seagull the other day. Personally, I don't find this particularly entertaining or blog-worthy but my dear Catrin thought otherwise. So here's the deal. One bright unassuming Thursday afternoon, Catrin, Dan and I set out to deal with some academic errands after a lecture. Having found Gareth (our trusty PhD consumer guru) busy, we decided to wait outside in the sunshine til he was free. I think I got too cocky about the sky being clear and bright in Wales, because it crapped on me. By it, I mean the seagull in the sky. And by on me, I mean on my nice new leather jacket which I love so dearly. Not cool, bird. Not cool. After a moment of shock and despair, we hustled inside so I could try to clean my poor jacket with the assistance of Cat handing me tissue while bravely managing her sensitive gag reflex to gross things. Fortunately it wasn't too messy so I got it off and later disinfected the bejeezus out of my jacket when I got home. I will never look at that jacket the same way again.

Following this "Elizabeth got crapped on" incident, there was some discussion of whether or not it is lucky to have a bird poo on you. I've always sort of felt that that's what you tell the person who got crapped on to make them feel better, meanwhile you're pleased as punch that it didn't happen to you. However, I might be coming around to the idea of lucky bird shit, because something amazing has happened.....(drumroll please).....

Ta-da! Much to our surprise and great pleasure, our ethics application has finally come through for our thesis project. This means that we can officially move on and begin testing, once we get our study description submitted on SONA (the university's participant panel) and people start signing up.

So far March is off to a good start. Sunshine and ethics approval. What more could you want from the first day of the month?