mine's asleep on the sofa now - she's got in the habit of picking apples off the bottom of trees (actually pulling them from branches with her teeth) for us to throw - we should have called her scrumpy!

My head is killing :-(

Must....write....discussion

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wow my dog loves walks! She has a frisby and a ball which make her even more excited. Have you thought about taking the dog somewhere different, like a river or lake - my dog loves getting covered in river weed :p Or maybe go outside and just sit somewhere, so its not constant walking, then he may prefer it after a while and want to go out?

ETA: has he been checked for any underlying problems?

I've been doing my favourite hobby - eating a massive spagetti bolognase covered with cheese whilst watching Americas next top model :p

I need to now turn off the tv and finish the limitations section of the discussion.

I ditched the overarching one in the end - it was annoying me, because I wanted to say how each research question was addressed and I couldn't really say it specifically, just 'well, so errrm, the thesis kind of addresses the overarching one'.

So ditched it and had a sentence about the overall aim of the thesis instead.

I am sure this will all be ripped apart by sup anyway

I like to challenge myself ;-) I think I also managed to have a half decent convo in french before signing off. I suppose its good to keep up the languages :-)

well done! you have motivated me!

Unfortunately I logged onto facebook for 30 second and then had someone message me - my friend from france, so then had to spend the last 10 mins trying to remember the french for 'feck off I'm writing' which turned out as 'il faut ecrire - au revoir' :$

I've done the summaries for the studies in my discussion and a horrible 'contribution of this thesis' section - I hate those!

I'm going to try and get the strengths and limitations bit done before I take the dog out in an hour.

I like it :$ but then I am fairly anti-social. I do have a dog though, so I get out twice a day and meet lots of other dog walkers for 10 min conversations.

Thanks for the advice, I just wish Job 3 would hurry up with their decision - I haven't told sup I've applied for it, so I'd really like to know if I've got it before she goes ahead and makes loads of effort to get me a job (which she has started doing already). HUbs has also applied for a job at the same place, so we'd be really sorted if we both worked there!

I'm actually in a very odd position at the mo. I have at least 3 job offers, but I'm playing a waiting game (read: spinning plates).

I have..

Job 1: supervisor offered 12 months research work. Pros = get great publications from this, have time to publish my own work Cons = I live 2 hours away, so would have to commute a lot, but she'd let me work from home 4 days a week I reckon.

Job 2: Teaching in another uni - offered about 10 hours a week, but its really what I'd expect a 1st year PhD to be doing. BUT its a 20 min walk!

Job 3: Applied for a job at the same uni as Job 2 - waiting to hear. This would be ideal as I would propose to sup that I carry on researching with her, while teaching at the other uni (i.e. do collaborative research across the unis). But not sure if I'll even get an interview. My gut feeling is to turn down Job 2 (which is pretty much a concrete offer) if they don't want me for job 3, because I'm not a mug and Job1 is better over Job 2.

Anyway - its exhausting thing about this!

My gut reaction is that Job 3 would be great for mat leave. But if I'm not offered that and go with Job 1, it is only 12 months, and I'm the only RA there. Obviously I wouldn't need to take time off during that, but it does mean I'm potentially jobless this time next year and going through it all again and if I fall pregnant I'll be out of work for ages.

Have no fear - I've had 3 friends lose their babies at 6, 7 and 8 months, so am definitely not complacent. I'm really supersticious too, so the plan is to wear a big jumper and not announce it until 7 months - I have put on weight over the PhD, so I reckon if I lose that, get pregnant - then people will jsut think I stayed the same size :p

Let me start by saying, i'm not pregnant and am not planning to be for at least a year. But I am late 20s and hubby has expressed a wish to at somepoint have a small Sneaks running about (what a nightmare!). Anyway, my trouble is, it looks like I have a 12 month research job lined up - but while that is great, it means I'm not in a job that can offer me mat leave.

What do research workers do about this - I would feel awful signing up to an 18 month reserach project for example and then 2 months in announcing I'm going to be leaving for half of it. But then I'm not sure if me and hubs have enough cash for me to take mat leave outside of employment - and then have the risk of finding it v difficult to get back into employment afterwards.

Anyway, what are your experiences? sometimes it is v annoying being a woman!

I was wondering what my tea:tomato ratio is, I reckon I probably have about 200 cups of tea to 1 mytomato :$

yep, agree with Dunni and Corinne, while it is possible to work without your sup, I don't think its advisable if you can avoid it. My hubby's sup will still be a co-author and he's a nice enough bloke, just wasn't bothered in the slightest about the thesis, but crucially, he did agree to the submission and was happy enough for it to go in - just had never read it!

I think if anything its kind of just polite to put them as a co-author, in my field anyway. I also know of one person who did submit without the supervisors permission and he had to re-do about half the thesis and re-viva.

at my uni you can submit without the supervisor, although its not advisable as wanderingsage says.

My hubby submitted with minimal supervision - the supervisor helped him with the topic choice and in the first year saw about 2 bits of work and made a few verbal comments about it - no written feedback at all. THen he stopped answering emails when my hubby had to go to work full time after his stipend finished. So I helped hubster get it all together, the sup never read anything past a draft of one study, the rest we just had to wing it and hope it was PhD standard. We used other peoples theses to make sure we were along the right lines in terms of depth of content, type of info to include etc. but essentially did it without any help. He recently passed with about 3 minor corrections e.g. "move table 3 onto the next page" type corrections. So it is doable.