Nine days! then I shallbe driving up to the airport and flying across the Atlantic... I'm nervous and excited.

I spent the morning shopping for little Cornish things to take over for Jana and her family. The inevitable weight allowance limits what I can take, but I was pleasantly surprised by how many little things I was able to find!

As soon as we get back from the States, after easter we will be arranging to see lawyers about the possibility of visas, now I'm free of uni pressures we can start to get this ship under way!

Ends tied up and chapter closed.

Everyone liked the cakes, carrot with orange frosting, and ginger and cinnamon with caramel fudge frosting. The theses have been delivered along with all images and films of snails, so that's it...I'm done.

It feels ... strange....

The trees in my garden have been pruned and look soooo bare, but they will be better in the summer, and we won;t get nasty letters from the council about the hedge needing trimming! The gardeners did the bulk of the tidying so I can get out there and do the fine stuff ...The weather forecast is good for the weekend so looks like a couple of days in the garden :D

Tying up loose ends

The last of my ties to the University are being stretched, and today I have to bake a couple of cakes as a final farewell to everyone. The bound copies of the thesis should be ready for collection either today or tomorrow and I promised Sam that I would bring in cakes when I deliver copies to Simon and John as well as the main office for the library. At the same time I will have all the images and film 'inch-age' in files for Simon to download to his computer, and that will be it.

I cleared out my desk and area a couple of weeks ago, Sam is taking over my little corner, it's kind of nice knowing who's going to be working there.

I need to try and get the description chapters in a form to be forwarded for publication, but that's going to involve a lot of editing of the images, and there's really no huge urgency.

So tomorrow I will take in the cakes, and the computer file and say goodbye.... it feels very strange.

Time for change

I have been very bad at keeping diaries and blogs, and reading other peoples too I might add, much to my shame. However I'm going to try again, and even though I will get stick from some people who would ratehr I use LiveJournal, I'm going to try and keep this Blog. Why? you may ask, because I don;t like the adverts that appear in my Lj! and I didn;t even realise until very recently when I was thinking of making an entry, it put me right off! and to be honest, I didn't feel inclined to pay even the paltry sum of $24 a year.

So I'm going to try and keep this blog, at least fairly regularly if not frequently.

This week I collect the bound edition of my thesis, and hand a copy to the main office for the library, as well as a copy of the title page and the abstract to go to the British Library for all eternity... wow! Both John and Simon want a copy, and I have had two bound for me. All copies except on are black with gold text. I know this may seem very conservative for me! but I like the classic sleekness of that look, it gives the work gravitas. The final copy however, is bound in peacock blue ! Hey! this is me, and one really should have a back up copy of ones serious work.

It's the middle of March and in three weeks time I will be visiting Jana in NY State. it's sort of scary and exciting all at once since I shall be going alone and Chris and the rest of the family are skiing at Whistler in Canada. As always at times like this I wish I'd been able to loose some weight, I feel pathetic about this bane of my life! But it is as it is, I shall be working on it for D*C in September, I just hope that now I don;t have to sit in front of a computer writing a thesis I will manage to get somewhere!