I’ve made the trip to Melbourne successfully, at least by current assessments. Most of my life is still in boxes, but I’ve got my desk operational now so I’m back in business. I’ll be back to PhD work in a couple of hours.

I’m missing Canberra a little bit - it’s a nice town, and I’ll miss my friends there until we bump into each other again. Most people don’t seem to stay in Canberra for very long though, especially for research students, so my friends in my research lab will most likely scatter across the globe. I’ll have to keep tabs on the area to figure out where everyone ends up. But I grew up in Melbourne, so it’s nice to be back for a while. I’ll most likely stay in Melbourne for the short term, but I’ve got no idea where I’ll head eventually.

I’ve still got a bit more setting up to do, then I can get back to work.

It’s 658 kilometres to Melbourne, we got a full tank of gas, half a pack of chewing gum, it’s early morning, and depending on glare conditions we’re wearing sunglasses.

I’m not heading south until Saturday, but I’ll be spending all of Friday packing and thus probably won’t be on the computer. It’s time to pack up the accumulated belongings I’ve collected over since I’ve been here in Canberra and move back to my home town of Melbourne and see what’s changed over the last four years.

There’s not actually going to be much change in what I’ve been doing as I haven’t finished my thesis write-up. I’d still factor two more weeks of work, but it will be one week of heavy work and one week of sipping tea while casually making small corrections. So the stress doesn’t have long to go. Then I’ll post this baby back to Canberra and can sit back and relax for a fortnight or so before starting the next chapter of my life.

I’m looking forward to it.

After a week of further work, it looks like I won’t be completely finished with my thesis by the time I have to move back to Melbourne. My supervisor and I agreed that while I’ll most likely have all the content included in the dissertation by next week, it might be a good idea to ensure the document is written in English rather than the crazy grammarless moon language it currently appears to be written in. Since editing will require time when I’m not quite so stressed we think it’s best to dedicate another week or two after I move cities to polish up the dissertation so it goes down well with the examiners.

This means I’ll have to delay everything by another week, but in practice it probably just means I’ll lose a bit of the watching-movies-and-eating-popcorn time I had budgeted in my thesis writeup recovery time. It’s no big loss if I don’t see some of the films I’ve missed over the last two years.

Only a fortnight left to go before my deadline. I’ve upgraded from “crunch mode” to “death march”. For the next week I’ll still be around on forums and the internet so I’ve got some contact with the outside world, but expect any posts from me to get madder and madder as the week progresses. I’m not sure if I’ll be on-line much in the final week as I’ll probably go completely flat out, 18 hours plus a day, but I’ll probably need a little bit of downtime here and there. Don’t expect coherence; the last time I went that level I pushed my brain so hard I forgot how to read English (this isn’t an exaggeration; I spend fifteen seconds trying to figure why I’d written a page of my paper in French, before a more sensible part of my brain chimed in that this didn’t make sense as I don’t know French. Yeah, that was a weird experience. That was the same week I must have been acting so weird that I inadvertently got attacked in the face by a duck. Good times.)

I’ll have to have at least a week to recover from this schedule, plus I’ll probably go cold turkey on the caffeine (which given my current level of consumption is going to really hurt for an entire week). But I’ll be back and posting much more frequently, as I plan on getting stuck in on a number of projects that are extremely post-worthy. I’ll post more then as I don’t want to get too distracted.