Working on my conference paper

Dear Diary,

today, I slept in a bit and then watched the highlights of the first round of the Tournament of Champions that’s played in NYC at the moment. Then I checked the news and just kind of messed around for a while.

Eventually, I sat down and started working on my paper. I managed to focus on it for about four hours or so and was very productive during that time. I have already kind of thought about what I want to write, what needs to be in there, and (more importantly) what needs to be left out. It was good to have a burst of productivity and get some words on “paper”. The paper cannot be longer than 6 pages including all figures and references so there isn’t too much space.

I filled about three pages today but will make one of the figures a lot bigger so that it’ll take up about 2/3 of one page. I finished most of the Methods and when I get the rest of the data by the end of next week, I’ll have to re-run my scripts to compute the final numbers and insert them in the Results section. The text itself is written but the numbers are missing.

Now I need to focus on the Discussion. I wrote a bunch of ideas today. My idea was just to write a bit too much (there are various aspects that could be discussed but not all of them need to be in there) and then send it to my supervisors early next week and let them comment on which parts should stay in and which parts should be deleted. But I like the idea of writing a bit too much now while I am “in the zone’ because I’ll eventually write a longer version of this paper to submit to another journal and maybe I can re-use some of the stuff if there’s more space.

Anyways, it was a productive but relaxed day. I just got out of the shower and we’re going to meet with a couple of friends for a New Year Get-Together with Indian food. I was a bit too focused on work and forgot to eat anything since I had breakfast…

New Year’s Vacation in Harderwijk

Dear Diary,

it has become an annual tradition to spend a couple of days around New Year’s with a group of friends that I went to school with. This year, we rented a house near Harderwijk in the Netherlands, and spent four nights there. We were 9 people in total but the house only had 8 beds so I slept on the couch in the living room. The house was about 1000€ for the four nights and the food for all of us came out at something like 30€ per person. Adding some money for gas and the alcohol that everyone brought for themselves, it still ends up being a pretty vacation, especially considering that:

The house was pretty damn awesome. There was plenty of space with a huge room that was all-in-one: the kitchen, a dining area, and the living room. The front wall of the living room section of the room was made entirely of glass and looked out on a porch and a stream of water that was connected to the Vewulemeer (which would take you out to the IJsselmeer). The bedrooms and a big bathroom were upstairs and the bathroom included a (not so great) hot tub and a (pretty great) sauna. The sauna was running every day and we got more and more daring when it came to jumping into the water off our porch. Good fun that left your body shell-shocked and confused for several minutes afterwards. :D

We didn’t really do much during our stay there. We went for 2-3 hour hikes on two of the days that had nice weather, and did a half-day trip to Urk to check out the city center, walk along the shore, and have some kibbeling. Here are two pictures I snapped with my phone during a hike around the Harderbos.

The second picture is the view across the Veluwemeer. You could see that the area would be packed during the summer but it was relatively deserted and quiet during our stay.

It was great to hang out with old friends and catch up with what has happened in their lives. We’re still in touch more or less but rarely get the time to spend much time together so it was great to have the chance to do that.

I managed to work very little during that time which was nice. But there’s lots of interesting and exciting stuff waiting for me and I can’t wait to get back into my regular rhythm of work and sports – I’ve been sitting around eating for too long now…

Pitstop in Groningen

Dear Diary,

after a couple of nice days with various parts of the (extended) family, I went back to Groningen on Monday morning. I wanted to get some stuff done before going on the New Year’s trip with my friends. FD was with her family in Bremen as well and didn’t want to go back to Braunschweig between Christmas and the trip so I invited her to come to Groningen with me.

I was reasonably productive and was happy to hang out with her a bit and grab some drinks with her and BB. I finished some of the things for work that I didn’t have time to do before and was able to discuss some ideas with BB which I now have to implement. I might try and find some time in the coming days to write the necessary code.

Yesterday, we used some left-over veggies, some cocos milk, and a curry-mix my mum gave me to make quite a delicious meal. That curry-mix is pretty awesome and I’ll make sure it wasn’t the last time I’ve used it. I had the rest of the food as a late breakfast before we left for our New Year’s trip on Wednesday afternoon – good stuff.

Wrist is getting better

Dear Diary,

my wrist has been getting better in the last couple of days. It still hurts when I put weight on it but I’ve been using it quite a bit, pushing the pain-boundary further. It was painful while I used it but when the pain went away, it was actually better than before (or at least that’s what I think).

I did some yoga yesterday and today and it wasn’t too much of a problem with the wrist. The problem was more that I haven’t really done much yoga in the last two months. I forgot the exact order of the poses again and generally felt kind of heavy and not particularly gracious. I also gained about 5kg in the last 5 weeks or so. Not enough sport and way too much food – who’d have thought?

Anyways, I’ll get back to a more regular and less stressful lifestyle next week and will make sure to gain my strength back and hope that my wrist returns to normal shortly.

Short trip to London (incl. shorter trip to Canterbury)

Dear Diary,

last week, BB and I went to London to visit our friend GP. Another reason I didn’t mind crossing the Channel is that my brother is currently living/studying in Canterbury.

BB and I worked most of the day on Thursday and left Groningen at around 5:30. We dropped NB in Oldenburg and then made it to the airport. The bus from Stansted to Liverpool St Station took about two hours because of construction sites and traffic. GP picked us up at the station and we walked to his place. It was almost 2am by the time we settled in.

GP had to work the next day and we went to the office with him. It was interesting to see where he works and we just kind of all worked for a couple of hours. Eventually, BB and I left to check out the city a little bit. But by the time we got home to drop our stuff, it was raining and we didn’t really feel like doing much anyways. So we just hang out to play Call of Duty on GP’s new PlayStation 4. :D

Because it was Friday, people in the office started drinking at around 5. BB and I went back there around that time. GP still had a bit of work to finish so we played some table tennis in one of the rooms that they had there. We played with a beer in hand and then developed a version of the game were the main goal was to hit the other player’s beer can which was placed in front of them on the table. It was a lot of fun, haha.

Eventually, we moved out to get some food on the way to a bar. The burritos we got were ridiculously spicy. At the bar, we met two friends of GP’s. We had tickets to see Chad Valley who played in a backroom of the bar. It was a relatively small gig. There were some technical difficulties so the support band couldn’t play but Chad Valley was great.

The concert venue turned into a club afterwards. We moved in and out of the club to either get fresh air and talk or dance. We met some nice people from New Zealand and had an amazing night.

The next day, we took the train to GP’s parents’ place in Kent. We went for a walk after we arrived which was really nice since we were all still a bit down and leftover-intoxicated. My brother joined us there in the evening and we had a very relaxed night with good food and silly games.

The next day, we all slept way too long and then drove down to Canterbury. My brother showed us around a bit and we just walked the city for a while. It’s a cute little town with a nice “character”. In the end, we extended the trip a bit and went to the seaside for some fish and chips and a quick stroll along the sea. Then we took my brother home so I got a quick impression of where he lives which was nice.

We took the car back to the parents’ place in Kent and then took the train to London. We spent the rest of the night playing video games and doing nothing.

On Monday, GP went to work and BB and I slept way too long – again. Apparently, we really needed to catch up on sleep. Then we spent most of the day working. We played video games for another hour before GP came home and then we went to the bouldering gym The Arch. I haven’t really climbed since we went to Fontainebleau a couple of weeks ago but still really enjoyed myself. It was extremely busy when we arrived but the crowd thinned out during the last third of our stay.

After bouldering, we went to an Italian restaurant and got sour dough pizza. Which was amazing. It was pretty late by the time we got home. On our last day, GP had to work again during the day. BB and I worked a bit as well during the morning and then we took a 2-and-a-half hour walk along the Thames which was very nice. Then we picked up GP to get a late lunch together. We said good bye and walked to Liverpool St Station to catch the bus to the airport. We were about an hour early decided to already get on the bus. Which was good because the traffic was insane and we spent more than two hours on the bus. We got the airport in time (even had time to grab a pint before boarding) but it’d have been a lot more hectic if we had decided to grab a beer in London rather than at the station.

We landed in Bremen at 21:06 and we home at 23:09.

It was a great trip. It was good to see GP again. It was interesting to see his work environment and I really enjoyed catching up with him in person again. It was also nice to see my brother again and see where and how he lives. Looking forward to spending some more time with him around Christmas.

A long and nicely exhausting Monday

Dear Diary,

yesterday, I went to my early morning yoga session. My legs were kind of tired from the squash matches the day before but I still had a really good session. I worked on my headstand progression a little bit and was able to hold a headstand for about 20 seconds which was pretty cool. I find it quite hard to kind of judge whether I am properly “stacked” when I am upside down but I am slowly developing a feeling for it. Overall, the session was very heavy on my core muscles and I could feel them most of the day.

Then I had a big breakfast and went to work. At work, i wasn’t terribly productive but organized my ideas a bit and wrote down things I’ll have to do in the near future. It’s a long list.

At around 2, I went to a meeting that’d last the rest of the day. Our research school has a new director and there are some organizational changes. A “brainstorming meeting” was organized to get all the parties involved in the research school together and discuss what’s going well, what could be going better, and where the school is and should be heading. I was there as a representative of the PhD Council (together with two of my colleagues). It was a good meeting with a very open exchange of ideas. Now we’ll have to see how many of them are actually implemented. ;)

There were drinks afterwards and I talked with the new director and some other board members for a while. I left at around 7 to get some food at home. I didn’t really eat anything since breakfast because I tried to eat something at work but it was disgusting and kind of made me sick for about half an hour. :/ Then I was at the meeting all day and couldn’t get any other food. I got home and made some pasta with left-over Indian curry and ate a lot. Then I went to my weekly squash training at 9 and could still feel the food inside me. The first 45 minutes of the training were pretty bad – I was really slow and tired. During the last 10 minutes of the training, I started playing well and stayed for another half hour afterwards to play some more games with my team mates. By that time, I was nicely warmed up, the food didn’t slow me down anymore and I played quite well. Due to the deep lunges and the high speed of the games, I again needed a lot of core strength to stabilize myself.

I went home, took a shower and ate an apple and a banana. When I got up this morning (after 8 hours of glorious sleep), I could still feel my core muscles a little bit but the feeling went away as soon as I started moving around.

So I think yoga in the morning and squash in the evening is doable if I make sure to eat enough during the day and eat well in advance of the physical activity.

Overtrained? Or just not enough food?

Dear Diary,

in the last two weeks, I felt a bit “down”. Not really emotionally – I feel my normal level of “okay”. But my mind has been very slow and it’s been hard to motivate myself to do much. So I haven’t really done much. Which I find kind of annoying. Nothing really needs to be done right now so it’s not too much of a problem. But there are a couple of things I could have done in the last two weeks so that I don’t have to do them later (when I know I’ll be busy).

I am not quite sure why I feel so “down” at the moment. There are three hypotheses:

1. I am overtrained and putting too much strain on my body
2. I am not eating enough to sustain my current levels of activity
3. It’s just a normal, random fluctuation in my mood.

Or, of course, it could be something completely different. But lets stick to these. Number 3 is not unlikely since I always go through phases in which I am very motivated (which usually translates to productivity) and phases in which I just want to smoke weed and watch movies.

I am doing quite a lot of sports. And most training schedules have “de-load weeks” in them to give the body time to recover fully. I haven’t really “de-loaded” in quite a while. It might also not be realistic to do this many things: squash (twice a week), climbing (at least twice a week), and yoga (three to four times a week).

On the other hand, it should be possible. I mean, pro athletes have multiple training sessions per day. The problem might just be that I am not eating enough. I have the tendency to not eat enough when I am exhausted. Which seems silly. I don’t really pay much attention to how much I am eating (let alone what exactly) and just listen to my body. But my body might not be reliable enough. Maybe I need to start paying more attention to my eating habits and make sure that I eat enough, especially on days with high levels of activity (e.g., yoga in the morning, squash in the evening).

The more general problem is that it’s (practically) impossible to run decent experiments on yourself. It’s hard to isolate these factors and test them because a good experiment would require to keep all things constant and only manipulate one variable. A life that’d allow that is not worth living. So I guess I’ll have to live with that uncertainty.

Lead climbing and sunshine

Dear Diary,

on Sunday, we had breakfast and then went to Bjoeks at around 11:00. We warmed up inside and then took two ropes to climb the tower. BB used his climbing magic to devise a plan for all of us to end up on the tower. I got a quick refresher on lead climbing (I know how to do it, in theory, but haven’t done it in 5 or 6 years – and even then I only did it once or twice) and then lead-climbed the non-overhanging side of the tower. Which was pretty cool. I tied myself in on top and then GP and AR come up as well.

We hang out on top of the tower for a while, enjoying the view. It was nice and sunny but super windy up there. (Which is why I didn’t manage to get the horizon straight on this panorama. That and the tower is kind of swaying in the wind which doesn’t make it easier.)

Then we went back down and after a short break, we climbed the overhanging side of the tower. It was the first time lead climbing in an overhang. My goal was to finish the fist segment of the route (the first third of the tower), which is a 5c, without falling. I made it through that bit and two clips further (about 4-5 more meters) before I needed to rest. That’s the steepest part of the overhang. I then went a bit further and rested again and then tried one more time and made it about 2/3 up the tower before my arms were out of fuel. I was hanging right in front of the next clip but didn’t have the strength to let go of one hand, pull up the rope and clip it in. Which meant I’d have to let go and fall. Which is a tiny bit scary because you’ll fall quite a bit when lead climbing. I warned BB (who was belaying me) and let go. He’s a great belayer and “dynamically” softened my fall by jumping up at the right time. Which made my fall very soft but quite long. I must have been in free fall for about 5 or 6 meters. Good adrenaline rush!

I still did some mistakes with the lead climbing and definitely need to practice that more. I also got a chance to practice lead belaying a bit that day. Also very tricky business but good skills to learn.

After climbing, we went home and cooked a quick dinner (pasta with tomato sauce/pesto and some spinach). Then we took GP to the train station. It was a short but awesome visit!

Then BB took a power nap and I cleaned up a bit and then sat in the sun to read a bit more of the text book. At around 8, a couple of friends came by and made some waffles and we watched two more episodes of Game of Thrones. I went to bed around midnight, exhausted from an awesome weekend and looking forward to a busy week.

Winding down a little bit

Dear Diary,

on Saturday, we slept in a little bit and then had breakfast. GP went off to meet his family and BB went out to work in a café somewhere. I answered some e-mails and did some things I didn’t do on my free day on Friday. Then it was 3pm already. BB were planning to meet at around 4:30 again to have an early dinner before we had out to a friend’s place.

I was thinking about going to the climbing gym to boulder outside a bit and read a book there. But it was already getting late and I gave my bike to GP. So I just went outside and sat at the water to read a book. Then I went inside to do some stretching and exercises and practiced to juggle for about 10 minutes.

Then we had our early lunch (we both weren’t very hungry, yet, and just had some fruit with kwark). Then we met with two other friends and went to a friend/colleague’s house-warming party. From there, we eventually headed to the supermarket and had a quick dinner in the park.

Then the guys went to the Nacht van Kunst en Wetenschap, an annual art and science fair/festival in the city. I went the last three years and it’s always really cool. However, I decided to not join them and just hang out on my own for a change. I haven’t spent a night alone in over three weeks and looking at my agenda for the next three weeks, that won’t happen again any time soon either. I need some quiet and time for myself.

I read the introduction of the statistics textbook I ordered and started reading Chris Hadfield’s An Astronaut’s Guide to Living on Earth. Awesome book so far! I went to bed pretty early (around 23:00) and got a good night’s sleep which was great.

Exhausting but awesome day

Dear Diary,

today was a pretty exhausting day. After a long night of rapidball and squash last night (according to my Fitbit, I ran 17.7km), I was quite tired last night. I had to get up early, though, because I spent all day at a symposium today.

After the symposium, there were free drinks and I sat with some colleagues and celebrated the fact that I got a pretty substantial amount of money to work with for the next year. I also discussed my current data confusion with them and showed them my plots and explained the situation to them. SB said that the problem might be that the participants are too good. The idea is that there’s a ceiling effect that distorts the data and reduces the correlations. That’s something worth looking into, I think.

After that, I went home with RN to grab my climbing gear and then we went climbing. We were there at around 6:00 and climbed for about two hours. I felt quite exhausted and tired and didn’t expect to be able to climb very hard today. But it went better than I thought. I warmed up and then spent all my energy on an overhanging 6a+ route that seemed hard but doable. I am able to do all the individual moves but wasn’t able to do them all after each other. They all require quite a lot of strength so that I get tired faster than I can get up the wall.

In the end, I tried a 6a+ in the longest overhanging wall in the gym. I didn’t expect to get up as high as I did (about half way) and will keep trying it in the next weeks. My plan is to use those difficult, overhanging routes to build strength and then go back to the even more difficult 6b(+)’s I’ve been trying to see whether it makes them feel any easier. The limiting factor is still forearm strength and endurance. I can hang on to all the holds quite easily but my forearms get pumped with lactic acid quite quickly rendering them completely useless.

After climbing, RN and I went past the supermarket and then made dinner. A nice curry with some sweet potatoes (as vegetables in the curry). It was surprisingly good. Now it’s 10 pm and I am pretty tired. RN went out to meet a friend and my roommate is at a meeting for something. I’ll do the dishes now and then go to bed and read for a little bit.

I am still in a really good mood but also very tired and think it’s a good idea to get 8 hours of sleep tonight. Maybe even nine. I ate a lot tonight and hope that the rest and the food will give my body the tools it needs to recover so that I can have a productive day tomorrow.