Kyle eating a (classic) fried Twinkie at the State Fair

You know, being funemployed really makes it difficult to keep track of time and what I’ve been up to. I often don’t really realize what day of the week it is until the evening when I go to my more-or-less weekly activities. What I’ve been focusing most on these past two weeks is my PF-for-grad students seminar – the first week I worked on making my slides and scripting it almost nonstop and the second week I didn’t work on the presentation itself at all but rather tried to promote it. My contract work has also picked up recently as I became a squeaky wheel asking for more from my supervisor. I had another set of interviews this week for a position so I’m really hoping that works out!

I convinced Kyle to watch a scary movie with me in celebration of Halloween – The Conjuring. It was a good movie, but I think my expectations were too high based on the reviews I read. Or maybe I just need to accept that I will never recreate my experience of watching The Exorcist for the first time.

The really big news for the last two weeks, though, was our launch of PhD Stipends. We have over 120 entries so far! Even with just that number, there have been several entries that have quite surprised me. I’m really trying to not spend all day long looking at the entries. 🙂 If you are a grad student, would you please visit the site to enter your pay data and then (very very crucially!) share the site with your peers through social media, email, links from sites, etc. Thank you!

Top Comment on EPF

ervinshiznit added an extra bit of analysis to my simplistic comparison of the price of my MegaBus ticket to the cost of gas for making the trip: “You shouldn’t be comparing the gas cost of driving yourself to the Megabus ticket. The IRS estimates that when you take into account the maintenance that is eventually required for driving the average car on the road today, along with the gas costs, is 56 cents a mile.” With that calculation, the cost of driving would be $288 for the round trip!

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Have you gotten any big projects out the door recently? Did you do anything scary for Halloween?