To those responsible for the weather:

Berlin is not known for its tropical climate. Actually, the whole country isn't.
If the thunderstorm looming up there would finally break, temperatures below 20°C might be achieved during the night.

---

My lack of updating in the last weeks was only partly due to not having the time - though working 50+ hours a week, not counting the weekends, does tend to limit your free time. More on that once I get around to babbling about the job - but also on not being sure if I were allowed to continue to do so. Probation was supposed to be for three months, but since Prof Blub told me he and I would need to have a talk soon about a month ago, I was scared ever since.

I'm not so much a natural pessimist, as that I try to be prepared for every worst case scenario. No matter if I expect to be told that I'm allowed to stay, being prepared to be told the opposite makes it easier to deal with any outcome.

A popular question for online quizzes is whether one makes wishes/dreams or plans. I'm all for plans. You can add a level of realism to plans that dreams can't afford. What to do if you fail. How to pick yourself up and go on.
But I hate to talk about these plans before they are fact. Because if you tell people before that, you have to deal with people asking you about them and telling you how they feel bad for you if they didn't turn out as hoped. It's easier to say "I thought about that, but it didn't work out and now I'm doing that". Less emotional declarations and stuff for one thing.
Because if you've trained yourself/just naturally don't take things serious enough to mind very much, these can be awkward.

This is all a very convoluted way of saying that he told me I was allowed to stay. And since the person who would be my main adviser/supervisor for the dissertation in the area I asked about, is on vacation for another two weeks he told me that he had another topic I could do if I were interested.
I'm still not sure saying that I wouldn't mind waiting for two more weeks - especially since he is known for being busy and not good with appointments - to work out the actual topic and get started was a good idea. While I like anaesthesia, my main reason for selecting it as the general topic for the dissertation attempt was that it's relatively easy to get enough cases for a study. My main objective is getting these two letters in front of my name while gaining lots of experience that has good chances as counting as an internship for most of the colleges of the EBVS after all. But it's also a dissertation and I'd like it to be more than the glorified literature research some others a doing. And a clinical dissertation will looked down onto anyway by some people.

---

In less navel-gazing news, J. bought a washing machine. Yay, for being able to do the laundry at home and not having to drag everything to the laundromat far, far away.

Finally, if people could just stop their pets from jumping out of windows, my whole life would be so much easier. (Really, there are at least 15 cats every week coming in which have been injured this way. Though the few dogs that do amaze everyone. How can an Akita even survive a 5 floor fall? We'll never know).