Too many passports, too many options

I have a problem.
I'm having too much fun here.

I didn't expect to enjoy myself so much here in Israel. I thought I would miss Sydney. But I don't. I miss the weather, but on gorgeous sunny days like today I don't even miss that.

My work here is 10 times more interesting. The people are genuinely friendly and warm. I'm surrounded by family and my son has all his cousins to play with and his four grandparents to spoil him. I have as much fun hanging out with my girlfriends as we did in high-school. Life is good.

Hubby is going back in a few days, and then I'll have 2 weeks here without him. I'm stressing about that already, and when I think of leaving and going back to Sydney I get all depressed.

I didn't expect this.

Add to this quite a few job offers that we both have already got at several universities here, and it all becomes too confusing.

I think it will take me a while to think things over and come to some sort of conclusion.

Kangaroo Paws and a Butterfly

From the Quad gates

The things we get used to.

A conversation I had with a PhD student as I was helping her out with some equipment:

MW: Let's first remove this sample so we can put your sample in.
PS: What is that?
MW: I think it's a rat's inner ear.
PS: Ewwwww!
MW: What? You've got a snail proboscis in a test tube.
PS: (thinks about this for a while). Yeah, you're right.

The oval

This is used to roll the grass flat in the centre of the oval for cricket games.

From the graffiti tunnel

Quad Gargoyle

A Uni intersection

Where are all the students? Studying?
My bet is they're all at the pub...

Parallel Universe

I share my office with several other post-docs. One of them is a woman I totally admire. She's my age, married but no kids. I was talking to her when I suddenly got this bizarre feeling that I was talking to myself in some parallel universe.

Here is a woman who has had a similar education to mine, some industry experience like I have, has been in a relationship for about a decade like I have. And yet our careers are totally different.

She does great research. She's published a gazillion papers in the last year. I'm still writing the draft of my first one at this job. She is involved in committees ranging from simple university tasks to multi-million dollar government funding schemes. She does so much and gets lots of deserved praise for her hard work. And she works hard, long hours and weekends and business trips all over the place.

She was telling me about one of her committees, and then she asked me, "aren't you involved in anything like that?". No, I said. I don't have time.

I have to leave at 4:30 every day to pick up my son from day care before I get slapped with a $1 a minute fine. I can't work weekends and nights. I chose a completely different life, and I am a mother first and foremost.

But still, sometimes I think to myself: that could have been me achieving all that.

It would have been nice, but I'm not jealous and I don't regret a thing.

I just have to keep reminding myself that I will have quite a few decades left to invest in my career after the kids (yes, there will be more than one...) grow up enough to allow me the time to work as much as I need to. I guess this is a dilemma lots of working mums have...

PM&D

Sounds like some "women's thing" doesn't it?

Well no, it's the uni's annual staff performance review.
Seeing as I just wrapped up my first year here, I have the honour of going through this task. What it amounts to is a small mountain of paperwork, several meetings with various bosses, and such general jumping through bureaucratic hoops. Just the thing I need to squeeze in between sick leave and annual leave! Very convenient.

Actually, it's not bad to have an oppurtunity to reflect on what I've done in the last year. You tend to forgot a lot of the stuff and when you are forced to think about it, and write it down, you suddenly realize how much you have done. And it feels good.

(By the way, I am still listing 3 good things that I have done each day before I go to sleep. It's such a simple thing and yet really fun and surprisingly addictive.)

The problem is that I will have to also list my goals for the next year and spell out how they mesh with the university's goals. And all I really want to do next year is get pregnant and have another baby!
I haven't found the section in the form that deals with that yet.
Oh well, I guess it'll just have to be a surprise.

Post-war and uni politics

My stress levels have gone down considerably since the cease fire. I'm not so naive as to think that this is the end of the war; indeed it was just one battle. But still.
Last week I met with a new PhD student who just came here from Israel. We talked about his research and the software he's using. Then he told me how his best friend from uni had died in Lebanon. He was the last soldier to be killed before the cease fire came into effect. He left a wife and 10-month old daughter. Then we talked about his scholarship, and a conference he wants to attend.
Later that day I just couldn't handle the whole surreal situation any more. I had to go out for a walk and a bit of a cry.
Here everything is going on as usual of course, the sun is shining and we're getting beautiful weather after a cold winter. Even the Swedish exchange student was complaining about the cold. Now we have a nice, early spring (thank goodness for global warming!) and flowers are blooming.
Things at the uni are also going on as usual. There are lots of "activists" handing out brochures and putting up posters all over campus. Most are by the Socialist Alliance and usually feature rather histrionic vitriol against Israel, the US, and capitalism. Apparently some Jewish students were harassed, spat on and yelled at. This morning we got an email from the Vice Chancellor warning that offensive behaviour agains Jews will not be tolerated. Not surprisingly, there has been no anti-Muslim behaviour.
I must admit that I sometimes feel scared when confronted with these crazy Marxists and their friends in some of the other student groups. I've heard that some Jewish students choose to wear hats over their kippas so they won't be harassed. I don't "look Jewish" so I don't have that problem, and I don't walk around campus all that much either. But it's sad to think that this is the situation here.

Making life easy for academics

I'm writing a paper: a process that is long, stressfull, and fun. Paper-writing also reminds me why I love linux so much, and specifically Latex and Bibtex and all that good stuff that makes life easy for academics. Of course, they work on Windows and Mac too, but Linux is the ultimate enviornment.
I share my office with several coleagues and I constantly hear them grating their teeth, pulling their hair, and complaining loudly about MS Word and such. They spend so much time editing, formating, losing images, changing font sizes, and typing out bibliographies by hand. What a waste of time!
I'm not a Linux evangelist. I don't hide it, but I don't try to push it on people either (mostly for selfish reasons; I don't want them coming to me to solve all their problems if they do decide to try it). But I'm working on another paper that's mostly written by one of our PhD students, and I asked him if he would be willing to write it in Latex. Apparently several other students started looking into it and got hooked. Now if I could only get him to actually sit down and write!
Latex and Bibtex work best with a good frontend. I started out using Lyx, which is nice, but then I switched to Kile which I've been working with for years and really like. (I'm an avid KDE fan so Kile is a natural.) For bibliography management I use Jabref which is a Java Bibtex frontend. It's awesome!! It integrates well with Kile too (ctrl+L pushes a citation to Kile). It can do all sorts of neat tricks, like direct Medline search and import, journal abbreviations, automatic local PDF searches, custom Bibtex key automatic generation, and other cool stuff.
Having the right tools for the job makes life easy. But at the end of the day you still have to write the paper yourself!

Project Jerusalem

Opportunities are there if you look for them....
I signed up for a bunch of uni newsletters: events, talks, grants, stuff like that. Usually I skim and toss them. But a few weeks ago an item caught my eye -- an exchange program between my uni and the Hebrew U in Jerusalem. It's open for students and staff. At first I ignored it. But then I saw it again; the deadline had been extended. I assumed there weren't too many people lining up to go to Jerusalem.
So I applied.
I made contact with some people there and we thought of some interesting, short-term projects we could work on together.
The grant pays for airfare, which is much more expensive than I thought, and accommodation there.
It will be a few weeks yet before I find out if I got it or not.
It would be great if I get it. We haven't been back home in over 2 years, and if someone can pay for my ticket, and I can get a paper published as well, it would be awesome.
And if I don't get it, that's fine too. It would cost quite a lot for the three of us to fly there, and the thought of a 24-hour flight each way with a toddler, who will then be jet-lagged in freezing Jerusalem, is enough to make me want to stay home and enjoy the summer break here.
I'm also really excited about the opportunity to see what it's like to work at an Israel university.
Hubby and I left Israel before we really had a chance to work much and be "grown ups" there, so we don't really have a clue what it's like. And while we're perfectly happy here in Oz at the moment, there is always that nagging thought: are we going to move back?
This would be a research project on more than one level!

Uni

The new school year has started and the uni is swarming with students. The halls are awash in bewildered first-years, clutching campus maps and asking for directions.
So when I was fed up with work yesterday (programming! I hate programming! Dammit Jim, I'm a mechanical engineer, not a programmer!) I took so time off and went wandering around campus.
I had to walk on the roads because there was no room on the sidewalks, what with all the students. I finally found a place of peace and quiet: one of the university's museums (there are several). I had a wonderfully relaxing time browsing the exhibit; all sorts of Australian animals and birds, some extinct. Old scientific instruments like microscopes, and even part of the first Australian computer, Silliac, that was built here. Photos and artifacts of the local people on the mainland and in the Torres Straits. In the gallery there was an exhibition of jewelry made by Sydney artists, inspired by the items in the museum. It was all very civilized and relaxing.
I love working at uni. Even when the work itself gets boring, there's always something to see and learn, and the atmosphere is buzzing with learning.

Results are IN

Oh my! My PhD thesis examiners' reports have just come back!!
This is the moment I've been fearing, dreading, and waiting for for so long.
My heart was thumping as I read them.
But other than a few rather minor corrections everything looks good!!
I expect I'll have about a week or two of work to fix things and then it's off to the review committee, and that's it.
Years of work are nearly done and now it's time to reap the reward: to be able to put those three letters after my name...

Surprise -- VSU!

How long has it been since everyone started talking about VSU? Quite some time! But now Australian Unis are saying that it's too quick, too surprising, they didn't have enough time to prepare! Oh well, they'll just have to force the students to pay fees even if it's against the law.

Career, kids, and life in general

One of the things I love most about working at a university is the opportunity to attend courses, seminars and training programs. Last week I attended a 2-day seminar that was meant to encourage women to seek executive positions at the university. While there are more women than men in the undergraduate, graduate, and lower level academic staff levels, when it comes to the top jobs women are still under-represented, and the university is actively trying to change that.
Well, seeing as I only started my career here a couple of months ago, I'm still rather far from any executive job, however the seminar was very useful in several ways. First, it got me thinking about my career in the long-term, rather than focusing on the next few years like I had been doing. Second, it gave me the opportunity to meet and listen and talk to women who are older than me and more advanced in their careers, and to learn from their experiences. Finally, it was great to meet other women academics and network. And the food was good too.
I was quite stressed specifically about the next couple of years. Now I'm a bit less stressed, but still. It's the same old dilemma that so many other women face: how do you raise kids and also advance your career at the same time? We really want to have another child. I really want to succeed in my new job because I see it at the base of my future career, and also because it's so interesting and I'd love to spend time doing this research. The problem is, there aren't enough hours in the day! As it is, my son is in day care full time, and I spend less than full time at work because I have to drop him off and pick him up, so I'm left in the middle, feeling guilty that I don't spend enough time with my son and that I don't put enough time and effort into my job.
The seminar helped me to think about these things a bit differently and put some things in perspective. I saw that some women took time off, either completely or part-time, to raise their kids when they were very young, and then went on to develop their careers later on. And some women put their kids in day care 50 hours a week, or hired a full time nanny, cleaner, and cook and paid them their entire salary so they could get on with their careers. I decided that I would rather have kids now, enjoy this stage of life of being a parent to very young children, and take time off from my full time job. I think part-time would be the best option. After a few years, when the kids are older and don't need so much attention, I will still be left with three whole decades to advance my career before I retire. I reckon I can achieve quite a lot in that time!

It's Election Time at the Uni

The whole campus is plastered with campaign posters and people are out in their T-shirts handing out flyers. I was assailed by them on the way to my office and I told the Liberals that I wish I was a student so I could vote for them, but that I am with them in spirit. It's good to know I'm not the only pro-VSU person on campus. After I talked to them, one of the people from a lefty party asked me if I knew that I was talking to pro-VSU Liberals, as if I had been conversing with a toad or something.
Most of the parties are trying to show that they are more lefty than all the rest.
"Keep Left" promise that if elected, they will stop war, stop racism, and stop VSU.


That's quite an election promise to keep!
They don't discuss what they will do, on the other hand.

They also have posters warning people not to vote for "Choice" (The pro-VSU Liberal party) because they are "pro war, pro VSU, anti refugees, and they love Howard!!". There's a crossed out picture of John Howard.



Many trees were sacrificed for these posters, and it's odd that even the greenies are out there handing out stacks of flyers. But some of them are rather funny.

Book Fairs

Today is the kind of day that makes me love living in Sydney, that perfect sunshine that's just warm enough without causing sunburn, when all the flowers are blooming and you feel like bounding through the fields barefoot.
So I left me subterranean corner and went out for a walk. I stopped by the Great Hall where this week there is a used book fair. I spent quite some time perusing and bought a few books for Junior and one for me, for a grand total of $2. But I couldn't stop thinking about the last used book fair I went to. It was much bigger, spread over 2 floors, and I spent hours happily browsing. I eventually bought a boxfull of books, everything from toddler behaviour to children's books, Walking Trails in the Hunter Valley, a few novels, and even Jonathan Livingston Seagull. I was so happy, I couldn't wait to get home and start reading. I went to pick up Junior from day care, put the box on his pram as I went in to fetch him, and when I came out 3 minutes later... the box was gone.
I was angry not just about the money, it was less than $20 worth of old books. But the time that I spent finding them... Who could possibly be interested in that pile of books except for me? And to think that it was someone from the day care centre too.
Ah well, life goes on, at least we have gorgeous weather.

A sign I saw at the library check out today

Please do not put your library card in your mouth.

We cannot help you if your library card has been in your mouth.