is it just me?

So now even MORE of my equipment isn't working... I'm starting to think it has something to do with me... And my supervisors keep wanting to talk about my Future and my Career. Fair enough, my PhD is coming to an end, but at the same time all I really want is a holiday. Can you be a professional vagabond?

And would they give me a hat if I was one?

In the meantime, I have become completely addicted to two TV shows -weird as I haven't watched TV for well over a year.

This is a montage of clips from one of them. Enjoy!

TMI?

So I know a lot of blogs do a tmi-Thursday theme. I tend to avoid this because as I've been studyng Biology for a rather scarily long time, my idea of TMI tends to be a bit far across the tmi-line for most normal people.

But today I have a problem, and I wouldn't mind some advice on how to proceed...

So there's this guy in the lab. We get along pretty well, and everything's been great for the past few months. Then, on Monday... lets just say he can't have been eating very healthily and he "released" something in the lab. I gestured frantically ot Leia, who gestured back the universal signal for "WHAT?" a few times before it reached her. It was so bad we actually had to leave the room. We giggled in the passage before someone found some deodorant and made a big show of applying it very liberally (more around the room than anything else) so that we could get back to work.

This morning I arrived at the lab to find that Leia had attempted to help the situation by putting flowers in the lab. These had the fortunate side-effect of kickstarting my allergiies for the day, so I've been unable to smell very much. Once the Releaser gets going though it is actually powerful enough to break past the infected sinuses. I don't know what the guy has been eating, but WOW it's bad! Fortunately I have Leia as an early-warning system - every now and then I get a message on Gtalk to say "he just let another one go...its bad!" and then I can have a desperate urge to check my mailbox, go to the bathroom, or just take an impromptu walk.

The thing is, I don't know what's worse, the fact that we have to live in a lab full of noxious gases (and not the usual ones we use in experiments), or the fact that we're English enough to do just about anything to avoid mentioning it. I mean:

• We have code-signals
• We have an early warning system
• We have flowers
• We have excuses to leave the room
• we blame in on the drain that used to be blocked
• Leia managed to survive a particularly nasty one this afternoon by shoving a teabag over her nose and mumbling "Is this normal tea or Rooibos?"

I mean WHAT is so hard about saying "Oh my gosh! WHAT is that smell?"

And now that we've ignored it for almost a week, how on earth do we address it? I'm all for getting one of those auto-release air fresheners...

Anyway in the spirit of changing the subject, I forced my rather conservative parents to watch Robin Hood: Men in Tights last night. I started ahvng second thoughts when I remembered some of the scenes that I'd forgotten about, but rather than freak out they laughed like crazy and even finished it AND watched the special features after I'd left for gym!

So I figured I'd leave you with one of my favourite bits from the whole thing: