Over the biggest hill....

The lake in Fælledparken, frozen after the snow last week. You have to feel sorry for the ducks - how would you like it if your home froze over suddenly in the night? 

Well, both Dorthe and I are over the biggest of the hills when it comes to our theses. Now we just have to finish off the little nitpicking details.....

First over the hill was Dorthe: on Thursday, she handed in her completed thesis. All that is left now is for her defense on the 9th December, and then she has her Masters. She did a pretty tremendous job of getting it done, I have to say - she could have handed it in on Wednesday lunch time, she was that organised - as far as I'm concerned, being a day early is absolutely unprecedented! Still, the two of us ended up pulling an all-nighter getting the last touches on it ready - lots more spell checking and proof reading, and fixing up all those little mistakes where I had tried to improve a sentence and ended up changing it's meaning (whoops!). And then printing 10 copies, at 105 pages each, takes a while. But we got it done. And then we both went home and slept from 1pm until 6pm, when Dorthe's parents woke us up - they were supposed to be having dinner with us, but, um, we slept in! D'oh!

Then on Friday night I crossed my big thesis hurdle - I finished the last three chapters, and sent them off to my boss - three chapters in one email: as AJ said, "Clay is going to shit himself!". I can't wait to see his reply. I now have all six chapters of my thesis at "first draft" stage - my advisors have them, and are editing and correcting them at the moment. They will then send the corrections back, I'll make them, and then they go back to the advisors again. We go around that loop a few times (the lab record is 11 times!) and then once they're happy, it goes out to my outside member. In theory, it can go around that loop a few times too, but generally it doesn't. Then all I have to do is print it, and hand it in, and you can call me Dr Payne!

So, with two major milestones passed, we are both pretty happy with how things are going, and we spent the weekend doing nuffing much. On Saturday, we had "Julefrokost" ("christmas lunch") with the people we live with in with our kitchen. It was not so much lunch though as an epic dinner, involving ridiculous amounts of aquavit (danish schnapps), ryebread, with pickled (or curried) herring, liver pate, ris a la maned, and all things Danish, including bawdy xmas songs which were quite shocking (at least the parts that I could understand were!). Damn it was good. And for the first time, I managed to survive a danish party without getting horribly ill. I'm getting better!!!