Friday 10 July 2015

Week in Review: 6th July

Hmmm... I need to come up with some snazzier headings for these week in review posts. But not yet. Right now, I'm just pleased to have a working week to review.

So, I've survived my second week of phased return (now up to a whopping three hours a day!) and it has to be said: it's tougher than I had expected. On Monday afternoon, I was feeling quite pleased that I'd managed three hours work without feeling as shattered as I did after an hour and a half on Friday: I was obviously getting back into the swing of things! By Wednesday, dragging my exhausted limbs home, I had changed my tune. Still, here we are on Friday, and I've managed to do my allotted work - I'm happy to tick off as an achievement. I got in every day, I did my work - and that's more work than I've done in the previous 11 weeks. Of course, I won't be able to play that card again next week, so I'll make the most of it while I can!

And writing down what you've managed of a week is a good discipline - you often find out it's more than you thought. If nothing else, this episode has been a salutary reminder that just turning up and working is an achievement, and not to be taken for granted. Anyway - apart from that, I've managed to get another draft of my Fellowship application finished. That was hard work. Getting started was awful: I really had the sense of rusty gears grinding together as I tried to get my head around how to write again. By Wednesday afternoon, I was feeling quite down about it - but actually, things unjammed a bit on Thursday, and today I got it polished off and sent to others to take a look at, so that's big one off the To Do list. Also, I had a very productive meeting with Sarah Astill, Will Shaw and Romulo de Souza Martins (a student who will be studying with us over the summer as part of his Science without Borders Scholarship). It was good to be talking FATKAT again - and digging into metrics and feature recognition, and make some key decisions about what parameters we prioritise. Good stuff.

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