It's been a while
In spite of the fact that I appear to never shut up for more than about twenty minutes on Facebook, and that I am putting together more and more posts to be published on my Actual Blog (tm), I appear to have neglected LJ entirely.
So here's the update. Mostly, life is good (as always). I'm having some mood problems relating to the Dark Darkness and the Howling Vinds, Will The Snows Never Cease, They Seem to Reach Back Forever, etc. etc., but things are getting done. Abby has settled in pretty much like she always lived here, although she did pee inside again recently so we're not sure how toilet training is actually going in her own mind. Our basic approach is to make sure toileting happens outside, and then that will just be a part of her process (at the time she had just been playing very excitedly). She also has dermatitis and an ear infection, so there is a laundry list of washes and medications that have to be applied twice a day at the moment.
She doesn't mind this, as she gets treats between every application to teach her to put up with it. Amos seems slightly miffed that Abby is getting this stream of treats, but then I get Michael to do some training with him and he perks up again. Training went well this morning - good fun, always is in fact.
I'm probably about two weeks away from resubmitting the Clarkcoma paper - I spent a great deal of time trying to resolve a particular issue and have come to the conclusion (after much consultation with others and many hours, nay, weeks of work) that it is not something that can readily be resolved. I've also got my "revise and resubmit" result for the Cenolia paper, but it's not too severe, so I will get cracking on that as soon as Clarkcoma is away.
Then I've got some more work to do on another of Belinda's bat papers (on pipistrelles! They are so tiny and cute), and back to Ophionereis (poor, neglected Ophionereis).
I gave a ten minute (closer to fifteen or twenty, I suck, but it was informal!) talk on cryptic species to the Educated Lay Audience crowd at ANZAAS last week, thanks to an invite from Leila.
The taxonomy is going reasonably well. I just invoiced CSIRO for an obscene amount of money, and I'm not even halfway through their samples yet. In theory I'm also waiting for another shipment from WAM (the West Australian Museum) but I'm also not-so-secretly hoping that it will be delayed until after I've finished the ludicrous pile of specimens from CSIRO and sent those back.
I continue to find a couple of things here and there that I think might be new species. It will all feature in the ABRS grant when I finally am able to try and apply for that.
So career wise, things are chugging along. Next week I'm off to Canberra to learn about using next generation sequencing data (genomics, whole genome, or exome, or transcriptome...) in a population and landscape context, which is a problem that has been troubling me for a good long while as the technology marches on and most people don't seem to know how to make efficient use of the reams of data that are being generated (I am one of those people - but not for much longer!).
This has involved downloading a megashitload of software onto my brand new little laptop (11" MacBook Air, which I call the TinyBook, and good thing I got that processor upgrade too). There has been some... disasters... around that, since most of this software is still very much in the "What happens if we do this?" stage and in the unix/linux source code stage and the compile command line stage...
Gym-wise, good and bad news: my feet are acting up again, so I stopped exercising for a few days to give them a break, and now all my muscles are stupidly tight and it's make it worse, but the fitness level has not quite subsided so I should be able to go back and halt the degeneration soonish.
So... yeah. Also the Tigers are in the semi-finals. Against Adelaide, who will probably pummel us like the inconsistent, easily distracted upstarts that we are, but hey. Excitement.
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So here's the update. Mostly, life is good (as always). I'm having some mood problems relating to the Dark Darkness and the Howling Vinds, Will The Snows Never Cease, They Seem to Reach Back Forever, etc. etc., but things are getting done. Abby has settled in pretty much like she always lived here, although she did pee inside again recently so we're not sure how toilet training is actually going in her own mind. Our basic approach is to make sure toileting happens outside, and then that will just be a part of her process (at the time she had just been playing very excitedly). She also has dermatitis and an ear infection, so there is a laundry list of washes and medications that have to be applied twice a day at the moment.
She doesn't mind this, as she gets treats between every application to teach her to put up with it. Amos seems slightly miffed that Abby is getting this stream of treats, but then I get Michael to do some training with him and he perks up again. Training went well this morning - good fun, always is in fact.
I'm probably about two weeks away from resubmitting the Clarkcoma paper - I spent a great deal of time trying to resolve a particular issue and have come to the conclusion (after much consultation with others and many hours, nay, weeks of work) that it is not something that can readily be resolved. I've also got my "revise and resubmit" result for the Cenolia paper, but it's not too severe, so I will get cracking on that as soon as Clarkcoma is away.
Then I've got some more work to do on another of Belinda's bat papers (on pipistrelles! They are so tiny and cute), and back to Ophionereis (poor, neglected Ophionereis).
I gave a ten minute (closer to fifteen or twenty, I suck, but it was informal!) talk on cryptic species to the Educated Lay Audience crowd at ANZAAS last week, thanks to an invite from Leila.
The taxonomy is going reasonably well. I just invoiced CSIRO for an obscene amount of money, and I'm not even halfway through their samples yet. In theory I'm also waiting for another shipment from WAM (the West Australian Museum) but I'm also not-so-secretly hoping that it will be delayed until after I've finished the ludicrous pile of specimens from CSIRO and sent those back.
I continue to find a couple of things here and there that I think might be new species. It will all feature in the ABRS grant when I finally am able to try and apply for that.
So career wise, things are chugging along. Next week I'm off to Canberra to learn about using next generation sequencing data (genomics, whole genome, or exome, or transcriptome...) in a population and landscape context, which is a problem that has been troubling me for a good long while as the technology marches on and most people don't seem to know how to make efficient use of the reams of data that are being generated (I am one of those people - but not for much longer!).
This has involved downloading a megashitload of software onto my brand new little laptop (11" MacBook Air, which I call the TinyBook, and good thing I got that processor upgrade too). There has been some... disasters... around that, since most of this software is still very much in the "What happens if we do this?" stage and in the unix/linux source code stage and the compile command line stage...
Gym-wise, good and bad news: my feet are acting up again, so I stopped exercising for a few days to give them a break, and now all my muscles are stupidly tight and it's make it worse, but the fitness level has not quite subsided so I should be able to go back and halt the degeneration soonish.
So... yeah. Also the Tigers are in the semi-finals. Against Adelaide, who will probably pummel us like the inconsistent, easily distracted upstarts that we are, but hey. Excitement.
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