Rowing, again

It's that time of year again.  If you're Facebook friends with me, you'll have noticed that my cover photo has changed to the now-traditional THBC crest, as seen here in all its glory.  This can only mean that Lent Bumps is around the corner.

I've had an odd relationship with rowing this year.  In my first year, I was trying to learn and improve.  My second year, I was striving to become as good as most of the W1 rowers who remained, so I pushed myself really hard.  Last year, I poured a great deal of energy into trying to bring up my boat's power and skill from the disadvantage of having promoted four novices (out of eight total crew members).  This year, well...  I'm the lone old hand amongst a whole women's club that otherwise consists of first- and second-year undergrads.  The girls in W1 are lovely, and they're slowly realizing that I'm not an alien creature and that they can talk to me.  But for the first time, my purpose in rowing is a vaguely social experience and bit of exercise.  I'm not pushing myself as hard as I used to, and we have no chance of winning anything right now.  It's disappointing to a certain extent, but what with trying to finish the PhD and such, there's also a certain relief to having the pressure off.

Meanwhile, the weather has undeniably been creeping toward the springlike, with more sunny days and a definite moisture in the air, encouraging the earliest flowers to appear along the backs.  It makes it much easier to face each day of tinkering.  Also helpful are:

• having a good fourth-year review, confirming that my project as currently organized makes sense and will be a dissertation
• going shopping for a new dress and finding the perfect item
• a bunch of friends from my first year gathering for a reunion/birthday party just like old times

And so I enter a hectic week that begins the run-up to the end of term and what will be a truly manic spring break.  Would we have it any other way?

Flooding, metaphorical and literal

Okay, I have to admit it.  I'm starting to panic.  I cannot seem to get any work done, and so each day slips by in what would be a moderately pleasant manner except that OH-MY-GOD-I-WILL-NEVER-FINISH-AT-THIS-RATE.

I haven't so completely lost perspective that I think I've done nothing valuable.  However, I mostly seem to be scraping together some scraps of ideas to patch into some kind of whole.  At this point, I don't even care that much, I just want to give up and get it over with.  Unfortunately, there's a lot to do before I can even think about submitting, and I don't see how I'm going to do it.  One thing I've found very useful to remember is that, according to my friends, I've been saying "I didn't do any work this week" nearly every week of the three-and-a-half years I've been here.  Yet evidently things have gotten done somewhere along the way.

It also helps when people like Phil come back and visit for the day, as he did yesterday.  Everyone else can say encouraging things, but he understands The Fear better than most.  This year, most of the people who were my social ties have either left or are drifting away, or else they're in writing-up caves somewhere.  Consequently, I find it hard to get excited about much of anything.  It was really good to regain the old sense of vitality for a day.  And you simply have to listen to your very clever friends when they say you have a compelling argument.

In other news, the river has been incredibly swollen from some recent rain, though I swear there hasn't been enough of it to cause this kind of flooding.  We were already having to wade out in our bare feet or wellies to get the boat out, and over the weekend no one was allowed to row at all.  On Sunday, we had to pick our way to the boathouse from some backstreets, because the water had reached right up to the front of several other boathouses.  Here's what it looked like at ours: a couple feet shy of the staircase.  From the upstairs window, it looked like we were in an ark, but we consoled ourselves that at least we were in a building full of boats if worse came to worst.  Let's hope that's also the case for my metaphorical river of stress, which is also overflowing.  I must have a research scull around here somewhere...

A phlegmy birthday week

When I was a child, I wasn't thrilled with having a January birthday.  It wasn't warm enough to do anything nice outside, though I had a few ice-skating parties, and come high school the occasion usually coincided with first-semester finals (wow, those are hard to remember).  But as a general principle, I love my birthday.  I genuinely don't understand why people feel anything but delighted about them.

Sadly, this year I wasn't in a state to enjoy 'my' day, because I fell victim to a nasty cold (or flu?  How do you tell the difference?).  So my week looked something like this:

Sunday: Cox the men's outing for two hours in the freezing rain.  Immediately followed by rowing in the women's outing (thankfully no longer raining).
Monday: Everything's fine, la la la...  Go to bed.  Oh crap, that's a sore throat.  Try to sleep... mostly fail.
Tuesday: 6:30am alarm for morning outing.  Row.  Come back to note from neighbor implying that I let my alarm go on for too long and it disturbed her in the wee hours.  Rage.  That night: wake up repeatedly, paranoid that I've missed my alarm.
Wednesday (birthday): 6:30am alarm for morning outing.  Row.  Try to nap all afternoon.  Dinner/drinks with friends at the pub.  So nice to see them, even if I couldn't speak very much.  Sleep like the dead.

Since then, I've been resting assiduously and working my way through Doctor Who.  I'd only had a passing knowledge of the new series, catching the odd episode here and there, but they really did a stellar job with the actors they picked.  Thinking back to the original series doctors, I suddenly had a vivid flash of memory: leaning up against my dad on the living room floor as the swirling visuals flew by to that distinctive theme song.  Good times.  And with the last of the junk making its way out of my body, I should be back in good form in a day or two.  Thank goodness!