Dr. Sue

Since 2003, Sue has been in school working towards her PhD, and as of yesterday at 3PM, she finished. Every single one of her doctoral requirements (except for an actual graduation ceremony and getting the diploma) are complete. Sue is now Dr. Sue!

Fittingly, after six years of brain-busting labor, Dr. Sue is sleeping in. She has about five weeks to collect her thoughts, get comfortable with her new status, then charge ahead into the land of the postdocs, where she'll be working for at least the next two years.

One of the exciting parts of her new gig is that she'll be able to focus more on research as a postdoc, as opposed to doing much "clinical work" (i.e. conducting therapy sessions). Congratulations to Sue and to all of her peers near and far who completed or will soon complete internship. (As Hackmeister would say...) Hooray!

Here's the last of the garage enhancements. In early September last year, we put up the pegboard in the basement. This weekend, we relocated it to the garage.







Here're the things we gave away for free this weekend. A bowling ball we picked up in Brooklyn. Our old Aussie grill, with a broken distributor plate. (I actually don't know what that part is called, but the piece of metal that directs the propane into small jets rusted through, so the propane came out the rusted hole in a big flame right in the center of the grill making our propane grill similar to a charcoal grill with only one piece of very hot charcoal.) Our old white shutters from the living room. And a bag of Dylox pesticide.


Dylox kills grubs so you can grow nice turf, but I don't want to kill my grubs. When I was looking around for a lawnmower on Craigslist to chip leaves for compost late last summer, I helped a couple empty out their grandad's garage. In the process I got a bunch of stuff we didn't need. One of those things was Dylox.

I looked online to see how to dispose of Dylox, and I couldn't find anything specific, so I looked on the back of the bag:


If you can't see it, it says nothing about disposing of Dylox. It says to "completely empty the bag into application equipment," then put the bag in a landfill or incinerate the bag without getting anywhere near the smoke. WTF? If the bag and its fumes are so dangerous, why in the world am I going to spread the bag's contents all over my lawn? Crazy.

PS
Here's a pic from Providence's Prospect Park. Jonathan and Noelle took us there over the weekend to have a little champagne toast for Sue's successes. Very nice. This is a statue of Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations (Little Rhody's formal name). Pretty smart guy, with a nice view of the city.



PPS
Here's a sneaky ProPil Pop Quiz only for those that read all the way to the bottom of the post:

ProPil Pop Quiz #9
Today's post is the 250th Provident Pilgrims post! Approximately how much time has been committed to the blog postings since the blog began? Not including picture taking and that sort of thing - just the time it has taken while actually sitting at the computer.