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End-of-Term Changes
It has been a long time, and I am very tired. This term has involved a lot of hard work for not very much progress. I have not been a very efficient worker, and I continue to hope that taking time off will fix that ( Read more... ) -
A Brief Update
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... ) -
Sudden Change of Schedule
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... ) -
Bleeurgh!!
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... ) -
Conferencitis
Wow. The LJ startup screen tells me that my last message was posted three weeks ago -- which is pretty much exactly just before the insanity in my life truly broke out. Two weeks with a visiting student from another lab, working on a project very much complementary to mine, and then over a week of solid conference, with fairly constant late ( Read more... ) -
Stardust
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... ) -
Lots of Catching Up
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... ) -
Unloading Projects
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... ) -
Sudden Endings
Today has been a difficult day for many people in my life. A former Dalhousie Biology grad student died in a plane crash, someone well known and much liked in the department. I knew him as he was writing up his thesis, so of course I did not have much of an opportunity to know him, but I had the strong impression that I would have liked to have ( Read more... ) -
Adventures in Staining
Recently I have been trying to sort out staining problems with some of my TEM specimens, and today I got farther along with that. Normally, we prepare specimens without stain, and stain them after cutting them and mounting them on grids. The specimens that I have been looking at lately were prepared by another lab, though, and they included some ( Read more... )