Long Time No Blog
It has been quite a long time but I have been much to busy to blog. Having finished a wonderful holiday though and now being a little too tired to sleep I decided it was time to try to catch up some.
In November mom and Ed came to visit for some wonderful time. They stayed in our little apartment which was nice because Viola and I where both quite busy so we where able to see them more every night than we would have otherwise. I still need to process the photos from their visit but it was great to see them.
Since then, my life has continued to be very full of work. The PhD is going pretty well over all I think. I have finished a first small project now and am working on a paper about it. I don't think it will be a top paper or anything, but hopefully I can get it published. I am told it is not particularly common to publish something your first year so I am happy to have something already though I still feel like I am looking for exactly the right question in some ways.
I have also been invited to revise my masters thesis a bit and to publish it in a social science journal by the editor, so I am excited about that. This opportunity just came about this week! I did my masters on the use of smart phones for disaster management. Recently, the VU hired a new professor working in the area of disaster management and we had a meeting with him on Monday to discuss our ideas and see if they where realistic. He was actually very excited and invited me to publish in his "Journal of Contingency and Crisis Management". It is too new to have a huge impact but it is still a publication and for work that I did not expect to get a publication. It will be odd to have my first publication in a non-technical journal but my thesis was partly non-technical as I was really looking for an area of actual utility to focus on. Anyway, this week we are working on revising a grant proposal based on the ideas to try to get more money for more people to work in this area. It is also helping me to search for the right question to answer and so is helpful in that respect.
On the holiday front Viola and I spent a lovely two weeks in Italy. We spent time in Milan hosting her friends for dinner twice which was quite enjoyable. I made "pasta fresca" with gorgonzola and walnuts that I was quite proud of and got rave reviews. We then went to her grandmothers house to celebrate Christmas which was lovely of course. The food in Italy is really amazing and I really enjoyed seeing all the people again. Then on to Esio where her parents live, where we spent some very nice days with them and Viola's friends in the mountains. We even managed to go skiing which was just fantastic. It has been years and I was sore as hell afterwards but I really enjoyed it a lot.
For New Years we took the train down to Napels to stay with a very good friend of Viola's there. He cooked the most incredible dinner with about 8 or 9 courses including a wonderful desert with sour cherries, pistachios, chocolate and marscapone. I really enjoyed the evening which included setting fireworks off out the window of the apartment. Naples is apparently the fireworks capital of Italy and it showed. In some ways it resembled a war zone with big window rattling blasts on a regular basis. In the morning we went for coffee and pastries and passed several dumpsters that where warped and smoking from people putting essentially small bombs inside. It was pretty crazy.
Unfortunately, the next night Viola's purse was stolen. We where standing behind a cop car for a minute while our host was looking for a place to eat when a scooter with two guys on it drove by and the guy on the back snatched her purse. We spent several hours making a report at the police station and Viola lost a day in Milan to getting all her documents back but she handled it very well. Better than me in fact. She was happy she wasn't hurt, and of course I was thankful for that, but it really shook my faith in humanity a bit. I think this was in part because of another unfortunate event on this trip.
When we came down from the mountains I immediately payed the rent because I suspected we wouldn't have internet in Naples and then I checked my email only to discover that the landlady had sent me email. In this email she informed me that she had gone into the apartment and removed some furniture and replaced some other furniture. She said something to the effect of "I am coming over tomorrow to do this, if I don't hear from you I will assume it is okay." What kind of crap is that? It was extremely upsetting and we are still discussing what we are going to do about it. She took the couch, the desk, the table, a bureau, the chairs, the coffee table, the oven, the iron, the ironing board, the blender, the juicer, the house plants and more. She replaced some of these with super cheap crap! We where paying as much as we where paying in part because we where renting a furnished apartment. It was very upsetting to come home to a messy house with crap furniture. She agreed to give us half of this months rent back and we are discussing what else we are going to do about the issue. She even moved our Christmas tree. You just don't come into somebody's house at Christmas while they are on holiday and move their tree! I am still upset about it and think I will be until we move so we are considering it. We are debating between trying to rent something else for a year or trying to buy something now.
I am sure there is a lot more I could write about but I have already taken far too much of your time. ;) Happy New Year to all of you!
In November mom and Ed came to visit for some wonderful time. They stayed in our little apartment which was nice because Viola and I where both quite busy so we where able to see them more every night than we would have otherwise. I still need to process the photos from their visit but it was great to see them.
Since then, my life has continued to be very full of work. The PhD is going pretty well over all I think. I have finished a first small project now and am working on a paper about it. I don't think it will be a top paper or anything, but hopefully I can get it published. I am told it is not particularly common to publish something your first year so I am happy to have something already though I still feel like I am looking for exactly the right question in some ways.
I have also been invited to revise my masters thesis a bit and to publish it in a social science journal by the editor, so I am excited about that. This opportunity just came about this week! I did my masters on the use of smart phones for disaster management. Recently, the VU hired a new professor working in the area of disaster management and we had a meeting with him on Monday to discuss our ideas and see if they where realistic. He was actually very excited and invited me to publish in his "Journal of Contingency and Crisis Management". It is too new to have a huge impact but it is still a publication and for work that I did not expect to get a publication. It will be odd to have my first publication in a non-technical journal but my thesis was partly non-technical as I was really looking for an area of actual utility to focus on. Anyway, this week we are working on revising a grant proposal based on the ideas to try to get more money for more people to work in this area. It is also helping me to search for the right question to answer and so is helpful in that respect.
On the holiday front Viola and I spent a lovely two weeks in Italy. We spent time in Milan hosting her friends for dinner twice which was quite enjoyable. I made "pasta fresca" with gorgonzola and walnuts that I was quite proud of and got rave reviews. We then went to her grandmothers house to celebrate Christmas which was lovely of course. The food in Italy is really amazing and I really enjoyed seeing all the people again. Then on to Esio where her parents live, where we spent some very nice days with them and Viola's friends in the mountains. We even managed to go skiing which was just fantastic. It has been years and I was sore as hell afterwards but I really enjoyed it a lot.
For New Years we took the train down to Napels to stay with a very good friend of Viola's there. He cooked the most incredible dinner with about 8 or 9 courses including a wonderful desert with sour cherries, pistachios, chocolate and marscapone. I really enjoyed the evening which included setting fireworks off out the window of the apartment. Naples is apparently the fireworks capital of Italy and it showed. In some ways it resembled a war zone with big window rattling blasts on a regular basis. In the morning we went for coffee and pastries and passed several dumpsters that where warped and smoking from people putting essentially small bombs inside. It was pretty crazy.
Unfortunately, the next night Viola's purse was stolen. We where standing behind a cop car for a minute while our host was looking for a place to eat when a scooter with two guys on it drove by and the guy on the back snatched her purse. We spent several hours making a report at the police station and Viola lost a day in Milan to getting all her documents back but she handled it very well. Better than me in fact. She was happy she wasn't hurt, and of course I was thankful for that, but it really shook my faith in humanity a bit. I think this was in part because of another unfortunate event on this trip.
When we came down from the mountains I immediately payed the rent because I suspected we wouldn't have internet in Naples and then I checked my email only to discover that the landlady had sent me email. In this email she informed me that she had gone into the apartment and removed some furniture and replaced some other furniture. She said something to the effect of "I am coming over tomorrow to do this, if I don't hear from you I will assume it is okay." What kind of crap is that? It was extremely upsetting and we are still discussing what we are going to do about it. She took the couch, the desk, the table, a bureau, the chairs, the coffee table, the oven, the iron, the ironing board, the blender, the juicer, the house plants and more. She replaced some of these with super cheap crap! We where paying as much as we where paying in part because we where renting a furnished apartment. It was very upsetting to come home to a messy house with crap furniture. She agreed to give us half of this months rent back and we are discussing what else we are going to do about the issue. She even moved our Christmas tree. You just don't come into somebody's house at Christmas while they are on holiday and move their tree! I am still upset about it and think I will be until we move so we are considering it. We are debating between trying to rent something else for a year or trying to buy something now.
I am sure there is a lot more I could write about but I have already taken far too much of your time. ;) Happy New Year to all of you!