Since I haven't yet described exactly what I'm doing this summer, I think I'll do it now. I'm subletting from one of my friends in my math classes, and living with four male friends who are all in engineering or physics in a house in a nice residential neighborhood of Halifax. I'm working as a clerk in a non-computerized post office (meaning I have to weigh and measure parcels, calculate the volumetric weight and then quote a price out of a binder! Now I know what my physics skills are useful for!). I vowed to never work retail again after my horrible experience in the smoke shop last year, but the post office is a better job. My customers are nicer - polite senior citizens and people from the medical offices upstairs rather than people addicted to pull-tab lottery tickets or who have lost their teeth from chewing tobacco. I'm getting paid a dollar more per hour than the smoke shop, and when it's slow, which it quite frequently is, I'm allowed to sit in a little office and read. Most of my co-workers are also university students.
But that job's nothing really to brag about.
Rutenberg, the prof I've been doing volunteer research for for the past year, told me yesterday that he will pay me to work for him this summer. This is despite not quite having the grades to get a summer research scholarship, and Rutenberg told me from the start that he probably wouldn't be able to pay me. But I guess my hard work has paid off, and he's managed to find the funds to pay me.
He's assigned me to the project of programming a computer visualization of peptidoglycan exteriors in bacteria. I'll be working with my friend and roommate Bobo, who was a co-author on my carbon nanotube paper.
So yeah. That's what my summer looks like. Hanging out in Halifax with friends, working two jobs, one of which is a fun/nerdy computer programming one, cooking my own food and waiting for school to start up again.
In a previous e-mail my mother expressed concern that my diet was not very nutritionally rich. Here's a list of the stuff I've cooked so far in order to dispel that idea:
... and of course everything is accompanied by a salad or a side of vegetables.
Posted by Cathy at June 4, 2008 11:11 AM