My blog is 2 years old! Speaking of fantastic Christmas presents

What a great Christmas this was! All of Russ’s family together, the children were great, the presents were fantastic (it’s like they read my mind and bought me all I wanted), and the food was awesome!
Still wondering why I want to marry this family?

Russ named a star (not for real) after me (my nick name)!

It’s a K0 (orange Hypergiant) in the constelation of Virgo!

The most romantic bestest free gift ever!!!

You can do it here.

When using a fitness ball, please remember you are clumsy and a hazard to yourself and don’t try anything stupid.

My head hurts…

I am sure that one of the techniques big companies have to filter applicants to their jobs is their endless application forms.

Applying for jobs is a full time job!

I…am…loosing…the…will…

So after the fantastic Secret Santa party, I got rid of the elf costume and run home fir a telephone interview. I am applying for a graduate program at a huge company and there are various selection steps. I passes the application, the psychometric test and now was the phone interview. If I passed I would go for an assessment day with 4 more interviews.

This country is very competitive and that are rules and norms for everything. You have to be excellent to get the job you want and not only have the skills but also be exellent at selling yourself. There are things you cannot say at an interview and things you have to say and lots of other things. Scary!

So I have been preparing for the interview, reading book, making lists of skills, researching about the company, etc, etc, etc. I have been quite stressed with it because there are a LOT of RULES.

At 12 I received the phone call and had ‘The interview from hell!!!‘

Not because I wasn’t prepared (oh I was prepared!) Not because the questions were unexpected or difficult, but because I didn’t understand A WORD of what she said! She was foreign and had a very difficult accent and the connection was quite bad! So I spent the interview having to ask her to repeat the question and I am sure she wasn’t happy with it. She became quite rude at some point. Not good!

I would say that is a job I can forget…

Today was the Secret Santa party in the office that both Jemma and I organised (with help from Baby Ben). We went through a lot of work ordering and altering elves costumes, buying decorations, food, etc. with a small budget.

I am proud to say, it was a success! We decorated the room with a tree and balloons and various Christmas decorations, we had photo-shopped pictures of the academics (hilarious) from a secret Elf helper, cakes, coffee, biscuits, crackers, music, and Jemma even put up a power point presentation with Christmas pictures. Of course the main attraction (besides the presents) were the Santa himself (we convinced someone to take this role) and the two sexy Elves- Jemma and I.

I think people really enjoyed it and had a good time. Some presents were better than others but in the end it was all good fun and we received thanks from a lot of people. There were a lot of pictures taken and I will post few when I get them.

So that set me up for a happy day! Or so I thought…

It wasn’t the getting up very early and going home very late. It wasn’t the almost 2 hours bus drive each way. It wasn’t hitting stuff around the lab with my legs and getting lots of bruises.

It was the waiting for the always late bus in the freezing cold that killed me!

Haven’t been writing here because I have been very busy with work and trying to find a job. I also spent the first 3 days of this week in Oxford, trying to use their FT-IR as a desperate attempt to get some data for my PhD (gave up on the microspectrophotometer already).
It seems like I have a curse because on Monday the FT-IR decided it was tired of working and started giving errors of all kinds. Even the vacuum pumps wasn’t working properly. So I wasted a day but they finally managed to fix it. God bless physicists! So now I am back with lots of data to analyse so I’m going to be busy again. I do miss writing here though so I’ll do that as much as I can

I decided some time ago to alternate my reading between Portuguese and English (written in English) books. After reading The Gospel According to Jesus Christ by Jose Saramago I was very impressed (it did win a Noble prize) and wanted to read more from him. So I brought one from Portugal: Ensaio sobre a Cegueira which is published in English with the name Blindness. So it stood on the shelf waiting for it’s turn.

In the mean time, my good friend Vanda, told me there was a movie coming out about the book. She was reading the book at the time, so she could then see the film, and so I quickly finished my English one and started Blindness (in Portuguese, of course).

What can I say? It is probably the best book I have ever read! It’s not for weak stomachs, though. It is very cruel and grotesque, but…

The author has a very particular way of writting his books with his own punctuation rules, which makes the reading quite difficult. But it’s all worth it and part of the charm of his books is that unique writing style.

EVERY sentence in that book has a meaning and a reason to be there. And there is so much meaning! If you read between the lines you read three books, not just one.

I can’t wait to see the film, but it will be difficult as I don’t think it’s out around here, even though it is in English and stars Julianne Moore.