Triple bad blogger update - on tenterhooks

Apparently you're meant to update your blog every week if you want people to read it. Woops.
However I reckon now is a good time to update because I've got some free time...I'll come to that in a bit :)

Since the last update, I've done two sets of exams and a research project. There were four exams in January, Solar I, Wind I, Water and Biomass I. And the results for the nightmare that was Sustainable Energy Systems. The exam I was worried about most and spent most time on was Solar, because it had some horrible maths in it (mathematical proofs - ugh). Wind turned out to be the most difficult in the end.
Then came semester 2 in very quick succession - I think I had four days of freedom before we started again. We had Integration, which was about integrating renewables into the national grid - all Electrical Engineering and very difficult for anyone who didn't already know all about it. Then Biomass II and Solar II. I changed to Solar from Wind at the last minute and was glad because I really enjoyed it.

An added bit of stress in the January exam period was that we had to choose our projects, which we could pick from a list or propose our own for a 'private deal'. Someone told me about three weeks before the end of the winter term that your enjoyment of the course was pretty much made on whether you enjoyed your project, so it seemed pretty important. While I was revising for Biomass and googling uses for glycerol I came across an article about anaerobically co-digesting glycerol with pig waste, which inspired me (!) and I ended up proposing a project called 'Co-digesting Glycerol and Municipal Solid Waste', which was accepted and supervised by Prof. Andrew Wheatley, who I then discovered was one of the leading lights of anaerobic digestion (he's cited in lots of references). The project was absolutely brilliant, quite a lot of hard work and I needed to go into the lab every day, including weekends, but some interesting results and very satisfying. Somehow my anaerobic digesters became known as my 'poo babies' and were duly named (Raspootin, Pooella de Ville, Poopert, Poodolph and Poocilla Queen of the Desert). Last week I handed in my dissertation and had to do a presentation on my project and findings, and now all I can do is wait. We haven't had our results for the second semester exams yet, so I really haven't got a clue how I've done. Apparently we're going to get the results 'after 21st September'. So definitely not yet, but not long now.

The reason I've got a bit of free time as opposed to infinite free time and a job search is because, almost incredibly, I've found a job! I wrote to the guy that showed us round the Anaerobic Digestion plant at Marmite in November, and he came and met me in Loughborough. Then I went for an interview with his boss, the plant manager, and they've taken me on. I'm going to work in the Safety and Environment Department as an Environmental Technologist. I'm not yet entirely sure what my responsibilities will be but I imagine that there will be a certain amount of negotiation or feeling the way seeing as the job didn't exist before I got to them. Anyway I'm very chuffed to have got the job. I've spoken to my boss and he sounds really keen about what I'm doing and full of ideas about what he wants to achieve. I start on 27th September, in 10 days. Exciting!!

I'll be working in Burton so I've moved into a rented house in Burton. I've spent the last week moving, sorting my house out and biking round Burton getting to know the place properly. I already love living there. Burton is full of activity and industry, the people are lovely and it's just the right size to get around. There are a lot of bridges so it's going to keep me fit if I'm biking everywhere. There's a newly refurbished leisure centre and library too. Yesterday I got a cooker delivered, which was dead cheap and fitted by a lovely and very efficient gas bloke who had it all sorted in a matter of minutes and even arrived early. I celebrated by inviting my mum round for dinner and made mushroom and walnut bolognese. Yum.

Credit card fraud, of a different kind

This is nothing to do with my career shenanigans, but I'm cross and I need a rant. I've just booked a ticket, single from Burton on Trent to Basingstoke, 18th Dec. It's 3 bleeding changes and costs £21.45, and that's with a railcard. I don't think that's too expensive, and I like getting trains so I'm not too fussed about the journey. However what I DO object to is all the random fees that the trainline adds at the last minute.

You've gone through the hassle of finding the right train, weighing up whether you can make the connections, if there's any better way to do it etc etc, you finally get to the paying stage and you find that the TrainLine has added a £1 booking fee. FOR WHAT????

Then you choose your payment method. You can either pay with a debit card (risky) or pay with a credit card...for which there is a £3.50 charge. FOR WHAT????

I was talking with a friend the other day about crime, and he said something about the difference between crimes that rich people make and the crimes that poor people make. It strikes me that these stealth charges are a prime example of this. We just accept them because there's no other option, and we don't complain because it's a clever steady drip-drip-drip of taking our money and the more it happens the more we become numb to it. In the meantime the credit cards and banks are making loads of money and giving themselves £1 million bonuses. What can we do about this ridiculously unfair system? Nothing.

Two weeks to go

I'm cooking stew, so I thought I'd do an update while I was waiting for it to cook. The carrots are just about there but the swede is still pretty solid.

There are two weeks until the end of term. It's got cold, and we've finished 4 out of 5 of this semester's modules:
- Sustainable Energy Systems
- Solar 1
- Wind 1
- Biomass 1
The next module is Water, and then Christmas! And my sister's wedding, which I'm sure will be fun too :) I've been existing without cake (and other Bad Stuff, but it's the lack of cake I feel most) over the last couple of weeks so I can fit into my dress which at the moment is on the snug side. Not sure if I've lost weight yet, and I won't know until I go home in a couple of weeks and try it on. The anticipation is unbearable.

Looking forward to the end of term as the two-week cycles of modules are quite stressful. However in a way I'm not looking forward to it because then it's only a short spell away from exams, which I hate. Over the last couple of weeks, when I should have been concentrating on Biomass, I've mostly been trying to get my head around aerodynamics, so I don't panic when I start to revise it. I think I've managed it now, just about.

We went for another field trip on Tuesday, to somewhere very exotic...Burton on Trent! We visited the anaerobic digestion plant in the Marmite factory. It was actually really interesting, and also pretty cool to see the insides of a factory I've been past hundreds of times. Here's a picture of their explanatory text in case you want to know more:


Having thoughts about my project, which I think we have to have worked out just after Christmas. I think I'll probably end up doing something about Biomass, unless I get inspired by the Water module. I like anaerobic digestion, and all the human factors involved as well - like economics and process waste. If I make up a really interesting project, the last part of this course could be really good fun, and maybe even produce something useful.

In other news, I'm still doing the clarinet lessons, and getting on really well with it. Also still singing, and our concert is a week on Monday. Yikes!

And another bit of news...I'm going down to London next week to demonstrate at the Wave. My first march. It's a march to support the Copenhagen Summit, which is happening from 7th-11th of December and will set the goals for CO2 emissions reductions until 2012. If the reductions goal isn't high enough, then it will be pretty bad for, well, the world. I wasn't sure about going but then I saw The Age of Stupid yesterday and decided it was Important. I'm a bit nervous about it and hope that the police don't start getting handy with their superior weaponry and combat skills.

Childish but funny

As I have discovered how to post pictures, I thought I would add this pic of my breakfast which amused me greatly the other day:


It's a pair of pants! :)

Field trip

We had a field trip last week, to the house of a local eccentric entrepreneur called Tony Marmont who lives just outside Loughborough. He’s what my friend Dave would call a ‘survivalist nutcase’ as he’s got a totally off-grid power system, but makes it reasonable by having constructed it a very long time ago and explaining that he wanted to see if it was possible. Tony is 70+ and still full of ideas and very active in the world of renewables.

The system consists of:
- two boreholes that supply water
- a big lake with two little water turbines
- a huuuuuuuge hydrogen generation and storage unit (this is a way of storing power, like batteries, but needs very expensive kit to use)
- two 2-blade wind turbines
- three 20-tube solar water heating arrays
- a massive bank of solar power modules
- a water source heat pump

Solar power

Electric car

Electric car 'petrol cap'

Tracking solar power

All this runs a house for two people, a farm and some offices. It’s a bit overkill :) However, it was great to see because it’s basically what everyone on my course would love to do. As a piece de resistance, at the end of the visit we were greeted by the man himself who presented his idea for replacing aviation fuel to us (combining hydrogen and carbon dioxide to make hydrocarbons) and as a special treat showed us his helicopter. Yes, helicopter.

Tony's helicopter

Let the music take you…high above the hillside…and away from all this ridiculously hard maths

I had another choir practice yesterday and enjoyed it so much that I came back home completely hyper. I stayed in for half an hour, had a cup of tea to calm down and then went for a walk around the campus.

It was about 10 o’clock when I was out and still really warm. It’s been so warm these last few weeks, and I’ve been amazed by all the foreign students that live in my building complaining about how cold it is. I’m wondering if living in Wales has made me a bit more hardy. Especially after last winter, which Rhian and I spent huddled in front of our gas heater in the lounge. People actually came round to our house solely to warm themselves up, because it was warmer than their house. At the same time I got the cold from hell which came with an incredibly irritating and painful cough that lasted for three weeks. Cough cough cough. Cough cough cough. Cough cough cough. COUGH COUGH COUGH. And so on.

ANYWAY…at ten o’clock there’s still a lot going on at Loughborough University. Lots of getting ready to go out was happening and it was a really nice atmosphere walking through the student village, where all the halls are. I stopped and sat down next to one of the many sports pitches on campus, on which three teams were practising – girls’ football, men’s lacrosse and girls’ lacrosse. It was all pretty confusing, probably because they weren’t playing proper games. They only stopped playing at 10.30, I was amazed that they were out so late.

Anyway…the choir practice was great. Here’s a rundown of what we're doing, and if you want to hear us there’s a concert in Loughborough on 7th December:
• Handel’s Messiah: And the Glory of the Lord, And He Shall Purify, Glory to God, His Yoke is Easy, and His Burthen is Light, Hallelujah
• O Magnum Mysterium
• Go, Tell It On the Mountain
• Riu, Riu, Chiu
• Here is the Little Door
• Gaudete
• Lullay my Liking
They’re all very nice apart from Go Tell It On The Mountain which is terrible, mostly because there’s a horribly embarrassing attempt to make it ‘cool’ at the end where the sopranos tell everyone to spread the Word on Facebook... *shudder*. O Magnum Mysterium is the best of all of them followed closely by Lullay my Liking. All the tunes that aren’t Handel’s Messiah are old Christmas songs, and they’re very lovely even if they look funny and unfamiliar :)

I’m having a clarinet lesson tomorrow, and going to a Church Orchestra practice on Sunday (it’s a short but boring story!). I think all the music playing is a bit of a reaction to the incredibly hard work I’ve been doing, and needing to get out of the house. And possibly also because there’s so much sport going on that I can’t take part in (I have back problems because of a slipped disc – it’s not a day-to-day problem but it means I can’t do anything to aggravate it like running). So music it is!

This week’s module is Solar 1, and I’m in the middle of writing up a very exciting lab report studying how temperature and irradiance (amount of sunlight) affect photovoltaic cells. Definitely not as bad as the Sustainability module, but still pretty difficult, and lots of very hard maths! We’re going on a field trip tomorrow, to a PV lab and then to a PV installation.

I went to a careers fair in Liverpool last week, which was basically as I was expecting (a big corporate affair, not really the sort of thing I’m interested in at the moment) but I did manage to pick up a bit of information that was useful. I also managed to pick up loads of free sweets and even scored some cake at Dundee Renewables :) I’m starting to get an idea of what I want to do after…something involving people I think. That’s as far as I’ve got at the moment! Well it's a start.

Helen is hardly working

I’ve just finished a very stressful project so I’m very happy, and I thought I’d do an update before heading off to the pub. I’m celebrating by eating cake and drinking coffee whilst sitting listening to Super Furry Animals (the right kind of multitasking!).

The first module in my course was all about sustainability, which is about ‘development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’. I was glad it was first because it’s something I’m really into, and it sounds like a good way to start the course…then I realised how the course was going to be marked…100% group coursework, 8000 words, in a week and a half. Urrrrrggggh. Blimey I’ve had the same thought many times over the last couple of weeks, which is that if you gauged my stress levels with an emergency light on top of my head (signalling ‘danger’) it would have been going off constantly for 10 days. I had a lovely team but we had some very unfortunate miscommunications at the start (a poor Spanish guy called David has had a baptism of fire into the English language, I don’t think he’d be out of his depth at a football match with the expletives that I’ve uttered over the last few days, sorry David). Couple the miscommunications with reams and reams of information to gather, assimilate and make sense out of and you’re starting to get the picture. I’ve been working for all the 16 hours of the day several times, was in the library until half 11 last night and I didn’t spend one minute staring at the ceiling feeling bored. On the up side:
- I can write references in my sleep
- I’ve learnt quite a lot about the Greek language and
- I’ve learnt that when an Indian person shakes their head they actually mean yes. Oh how we laughed about that one.
- I’ve probably lost a couple of pounds through stress. Although I’ve undoubtedly put that on again through cake.
We finally handed our coursework in at 4.20pm this afternoon, having had a last minute panic because our PDF file was too big to upload (honestly, they could have told us there was a 2MB limit at the start). Luckily our Nigerian group member kept his head and while the rest of the group was running round frantically trying to reduce the file size he calmly downloaded a file compressor, compressed the file and handed it to me, at which point I uploaded it and sat back. We’re all still friends amazingly. And apparently we weren’t the last people to hand our work in :)

Time for the pub I think!