Things are so crazy right now that I can’t even write a real post, but I’ll tide you all over with some pictures from Ewan’s graduation. This is Ewan amongst the other doctoral candidates. There are a couple more pictures on our photo site (the link is on the left), and I’ll post more once we get back from Seattle. Cheers!

Ewan passed his dissertation defense on Thursday afternoon, and we have been celebrating ever since. He did a fantastic job with his public talk, and although the defense part with his committee was very tough he did an excellent job and passed with some corrections. Ewan’s parents were here for the big event, and somehow or other we squeezed about thirty people into our apartment that night for the party. It was so nice to get everyone together but we felt a bit like we did at our wedding – there wasn’t nearly enough time to get to talk to everyone. Ewan’s Dad left Friday morning because he has a business trip to China, and Ewan’s Mom is in Spokane visiting her brother for the weekend. It’s a good thing they’re coming back for graduation in May, so we’ll get to spend some more time with them. I am leaving Monday morning for Wisconsin, and Ewan will follow me on Thursday. The tour of Madison’s vet school is on Friday, so presumably we will have made our decision on where we will be going sometime next weekend. For those of you who missed the talk and would like to see it, email me and I’ll send you a copy of his presentation on dvd. I am also printing out copies of the poster on nice archival paper for anyone who is interested.

Here is the poster we put up for Ewan’s defense talk yesterday. He had wanted to give the department a Victorian picture for them to print up the standard departmental posters, and I asked him if we could just make a Victorian style poster and print it ourselves. It turned out that we could, so I did some research and found a bunch of antique fairgrounds announcements and other advertisements. Ewan wrote the language based things in the ads and I edited and designed the final poster.

For those of you who haven’t yet heard, here are the new vet school standings:

Badgers – accepted!

Gophers – accepted!

Jumbos – accepted!

Ewan will be making his final decision once he visits Madison in a few weeks, so stay tuned!

My PEO chapter is busy gearing up for the state convention in June. We’re one of the hosting chapters, so a lot of the grunt work falls to us and boy is there a lot of it. I just finished a design to be used for the 50 year member luncheon, and my chapter liked it so much that they decided to use it for the BIL dinner as well. The theme made it difficult to come up with a good design, but I did my best. My other big task is that now I have to come up with a fundraiser for my chapter, since the convention committee decided to allow chapters to have booths showcasing their different fundraisers at the back of the convention hall. Apparently no goods will actually be sold at convention, but people can sign up if they are interested. Since goods won’t be sold there, our bean fundraiser won’t work. We’d have to charge more than twice as much as we usually do to cover the shipping costs. The new plan is for me to come up with a design to put on dishcloths and other items, but cafepress is out since you can’t sell through another vendor and it wouldn’t be economical for us to order the stuff ourselves and then ship it out. That means I will either be using a wax paper screen printing technique or making some sort of stamping device to fill the orders myself. It looks like it will have to wait at least a few more days… The new graphics tablet we bought has sped up my progress on Ewan’s figures tremendously and I’m almost done, but we still have to format the whole paper and finish the data tables. Onwards and Upwards.

Wow, a lot of stuff has happened in the past week. Ewan got accepted into vet school at Dublin, wait listed at Edinburgh (after being rejected, go figure), and now finally accepted at Madison. Wahoo! He’s currently interviewing at Prince Edward Island and is not all that impressed, and he’s planning on canceling his interview at UC Davis since it’s not as good of a school as UW and he’s busy finishing his dissertation, and now that he knows he can stay in the states he’ll turn down his position in Dublin. That leaves Minnesota, which he liked very much, and Tufts, which he also liked. Madison, however, liked him so much that they called him a week before they even sent out acceptances to tell him they’d like to fly him in for their open house. WAHOO!!! Now if only they’ll give him in-state tuition or a nice big fat scholarship.

SO – the final score is:

Badgers – Accepted!

Gophers – Waiting

Jumbos – Waiting

Also on the good news front, Ewan has turned in the first draft of his entire dissertation to several of his committee members! Yay! That means just corrections and the defense to go. Let’s have a party!

The MSU Bookstore just called to tell me that the order has been placed for Ewan’s robes! Yes, they can get the eight sided tam, and yes, they can get the tam in blue, and no, it’s no extra charge. Yay! He picked out the Sussex robes (the cheapest at a low-low price of $350 plus all kinds of extra fees) with traditional doctoral blue for the velvet panels and gold piping for the sciences, which also happens to be MSU’s school colors. The hood at MSU is blue and gold as well. Strangely enough, that combination is featured on the Josten’s website, so it should look just like this picture. Being a PhD candidate not only gets you spiffy robes, you also get to wear a spiffy tam instead of the ugly mortarboard. His will look like this:

We’re trying not to get too far ahead of ourselves, since he hasn’t even turned in his dissertation to his committee yet, but at this point it’s nice to start to think about him being done.

Meanwhile, I’m still embroiled in photo editing… In case you’re wondering exactly what it is I’m up to, here’s a brief demo:

First, I select one of the several hundred photos waiting for me in the folder Ewan has put aside for figures called “MER EDITING.”

The photos generally look something like this to start with.

The first step is to adjust the levels and contrast so that the colors are more true and the lighting is better.

Next, I black out everything around the skull with a large diameter paintbrush, and then zoom in and outline the entire skull in black. As you can see, there are often holes in the skull that have to be filled in as well.

Once the whole skull is outlined in black, I open up the original file, rotate the image so that the scale bar is horizontal and draw a white line the desired length over the scale bar on a separate level. Then I paste that level onto the edited photo and label it. Provided the image size hasn’t changed, this is a perfectly good way of getting an exact measurement.

Hey Presto! A finished figure for publication. Once this image has been placed in the text, I will resize the image itself as well as the scale bar and text label. This ensures that the text and scale bar are consistent throughout the entire dissertation. The final step is converting the image from photoshop to jpg format.

It’s really exciting, isn’t it? Let me tell you, the hours just FLY by. When I get really bored, I can play the “Where’s the pathology?” game. Seriously though, it’s not so bad if you take lots of eye breaks and listen to good music. Besides, it’s a blizzard outside right now. What else am I going to do?

Here is absolute proof that we did in fact roll in the snow at the hot springs with Yury and Erin when they visited us about a week ago. It was a great way to celebrate Yury’s recently acquired green card. There are more fun pictures from the hot springs on our photo page, if you care for that sort of thing.

Okay, on with the post. This week has been crazy busy due to Ewan’s dissertation deadlines and upcoming oral comprehensive exams. Apparently I have far less time than I thought in which to edit all of Ewan’s hundreds of figures, and had better get cracking. I also have to finish constructing the new hedgehog cage during off hours at the frame shop (the wall cutter there is miraculously helpful with building the trays out of corrugated plastic). They’ve had the bottom level of the cage for several weeks now, and since the other sheet of plastic arrived I really should build the rest of it. I will post pictures of it when it’s finished, of course.

As for fun stuff, we spent last night initiating two of our pizza night gang members into the Invader Zim cult. For those of you unfamiliar with the pizza night gang, several people from the museum organized a weekly gathering after work of people who may or may not be associated with the museum (which originally was Tuesdays at Columbo’s – hence pizza night, and is now anywhere on Thursdays). Gang members include: Spiff Covington (a.k.a. Michael Holland), Kirsten the bird woman extraordinaire, Molly and her wonderdog Ella, Shannon of the nonsensical Japanese shirts, Emily with the unparalleled butt-shake, sometimes Khalid whose English is fast better getting than mine, and Ewan and myself. Last night’s pizza night was at Spiff & Kirsten’s, where we ate wonderful burgers and yam fries with corn and subjected Emily and Shannon to their first dose of Invader Zim. What can one say about the Zimmening other than SILENCE! IT IS GENIUS!

Tonight we will be having Jing and Dave over for mah jong and general sesame candy consumption. With any luck I will learn a few more words in Chinese and not lose my shirt to Jing, who is quite the shark (Don’t worry, we don’t bet real money. If we did, Ewan and I would have been out on the streets months ago). But, for now I should be cleaning the apartment in preparation for their arrival, working on Ewan’s figures and practicing my Chers and Pungs. Till later.