Last Friday I decided that my term as drinks provider for my graduate society had run its course. I still have to inform the graduate society, and finding a replacement may take some time, but the decision felt good. I am tired of having projects interrupted by all of the little tasks that are required for the job, but more than that I am fed up ( Read more... )

LiveJournal tells me that it has been seven weeks since my last posting, and the last publicly viewable posting was a month before that, so I am a bit remiss in not keeping my LJ friends up to date with my activities. I do not have the time for a complete accounting (which may be a relief to some of you, although I did start this as something of a ( Read more... )

Today we determined that the electron microscope was not going to get fixed in less than a week (our EM person is away until then, and we do not know that it will not require ordering parts or getting service people to work on it). Given that our collaborator was here primarily to do electron microscopy, this was a major liability. She called up ( Read more... )

The last week has been pretty much as normal for me. My long-hoped-for and much-needed time off is not going to happen until after our collaborator leaves, as I have been busy with all sorts of labwork. I have, however, found myself with some time off of a different kind: last Wednesday evening I contracted either food poisoning or some nasty ( Read more... )

I have just finished watching Stardust. Yesterday angharad and I watched The Return of the King at a friend's place, using his projector and my subwoofer. Even with that going for it, I far prefer Stardust. In fact, I would venture to say that it is better than anything that Peter Jackson has ever done. I am writing this because angharad dared me to post it in ( Read more... )

Wow, I am behind. Actually, it has not been all that long since my last post, compared with similar unintentional hiatuses (hiati? -- it is a Latin word, after all) in the past, but it does not feel that way. It has been a busy couple of weeks!

For one thing, angharad and I flew to Houston a few weeks ago to attend a brother's wedding. I had to suspend ( Read more... )

A week ago I mailed off a manuscript for consideration for publication. This was the end of a project that had been dogging me for close to a year: it was first a presentation for a class (in April last year), then a paper for the same class (turned in the following May), and a long slow process of revising that paper for publication. Part of the ( Read more... )

I suppose that the first week of a term is always likely to be odd, but this last week was unlike any in my memory.

To begin with, my most productive period was on Monday, the holiday, when I went in to campus to do an SEM fix. angharad came along as well, which was nice, although we wound up staying far later than I had hoped, missing a party at a ( Read more... )

Wow: it has been almost two months since I last updated this Journal. I must do better than that ( Read more... )

I am doing well at the moment. Today I managed to do three things at once, without screwing any one up (although the timing for some was suboptimal): the second day of a TEM prep, a gel purification and a cloning reaction, and culture maintenance. I had a late start, and stayed late, and got a lot done ( Read more... )