Work in the middle of the night, DIY and PhD cartoons

For some reason I had major trouble sleeping last night. I woke around midnight and when I couldn't get to sleep by 1:00, I got up and did some work. It is quite odd working in the middle of the night! No noise inside the house, no traffic passing outside . . . My chosen work was an article by Miguel Granada from the University of Barcelona on the varying concepts of centrality, place and infinity in Aristotle, Copernicus and Bruno. This was actually quite an excellent paper, far more than I had expected. A well-spent three hours!

I have also started on some DIY projects - most specifically on filling the gaps between the floor boards in the kitchen and getting the floor ready for re-painting. It makes a nice change to be doing some practical work for a change. If I do get accepted for my PhD, one of the things I plan to do more of over the summer is DIY - which I see as a chance to refresh myself before the new course.

For the last few weeks I have been reading the weekly Times Higher Education supplement and have rather enjoyed the PhD cartoon that appears in each issue. I have tracked down the website for this - http://www.phdcomics.com/ - and have thoroughly enjoyed reading these. True, it is mainly based on science grad students, rather than humanities, and it does paint rather a bleak picture of post-grad life. One cartoon featured the strip's professor on holiday. He was standing on the beach with his wife who was talking about how beautiful the sunset was. Then she turned to him and said "you're thinking about research aren't you?". That did make me laugh out loud