I want these!

It's no secret that I love socks, the funkier the patterns the better! But now that I've seen these ones, mine seem somewhat lacking.

I want to run into these guys!

This shirt:

To do tai chi without falling over.

To live down the awfulness of losing my parking ticket and being rescued by the stand-in tai chi instructor last night!

To have brightly coloured hair again (picture from here). I have a box of bright red dye at home, and I still have my blue extensions... but at the same time my hair is behaving relatively well at the moment and I don't want to ruin that!

Ignoring the hair straighteners I have already (my 'good' one decided to flake the ceramic coating off the plates, the next one wasn't hot enough and the next one was a cheap stopgap until I got paid), I'd really like a decent one. I've kind of got my heart set on the brand that Jo has at the photo studio, so we'll see!

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:

If only it came in yellow

Well Spring is officially here! Well it's freezing, the wind is trying to remove the roof from the house and I'm layered up like a champion, but our apricot tree is blossoming and along with it I have the age-old symptom of impending Springness (no not a heart full of warm and fuzzy feelings...) HAYFEVER!

 

I ran into an old classmate today and she was suffering from party-induced laryngitis (really) and I was sniffling and talking like Macy Gray (I try to walk away and I stumble...) and we got to see the medical students' complete swine-flu paranoia kick in. At least I HOPE it's hayfever, I have no time to be sick right now!

 

Anyway I thought I should say thanks to all you bloggers who were so nice to me after my last post. I haven't gone the chocolate milkshake route for fear of adding milk-products to my rather busy sinuses, but I DID have a chocolate croissant today! And it was really nice! And I barely went to gym, so maybe I'm on my way back to couch-potatoeness after all...

 

For the record, plan C sucked so I have plan D and E worked out, and I'm just waiting for the crazy Russian to get back from his dentist appointment tomorrow to decide which one is better. The superV and I will have our yelling match early next week. Deep breaths Helen, you can do it!

 

Did I mention how hard it is to go from super-stressed and functioning on less than two hours of sleep to learning new things in tai chi? Whooo-boy was I a dumb blonde on Tuesday night! I tried practising and got stuck, so I'm hoping the others can help me tomorrow night and I won't end up back in beginner-beginners!

 

So in the spirit of taking my mind off things I spent today in the guise of a lab-monkey doing the rest of the labwork that I started two weeks ago. It went suspiciously well (except for one minor-mishap where (while being uber-careful and not taking the usual physiologist shortcut of squirting  the radioactive stuff on the ceiling) I managed to misalign the tissue paper and... you know when you put your hand over a hosepipe at just the right angle? It was less than 1 ml, and I doused myself in water immediately and changed my labcoat and jacket, so I hope it's ok...

 

Oh, and I figured out how to use the thingamajig (I think it's called a stepper-pipette? Po?) which is basically a mega-pipette you fill up and then it has special attachments that you can set how much it dispenses with each click. I think it shaved about two hours off my lab-time! I used it before but only for the radioactive stuff and I'd got the guy helping me to set it up, but today I figured out that if you read the labels it's actually relatively simple. As the title says, I would marry it if only it came in yellow. Either way I wasn't a total wreck at the end of the day!

 

I like yellow! My test-tubes are yellow, my pipette-tips are yellow, my bedroom walls are yellow... why did they have to make the super-amazing thingamajig blue? sad times...

 

So tomorrow it's off to get the results (lets hope there's no more law-of-physics-defying results) sort out the details for plans D and E (and maybe make plan F?), organise with the Russian, sort out the undergrad I'm supervising, write protocols for the stuff that applies to her, try and figure out tai chi (before the actual lesson) and cut down on the coffee because it's been making me feel sick lately...

 

Sounds like a plan!

Realisations

Sorry for yet another miserable post. Here goes:

My project has been crashing and burning in the last few weeks. the thing is, I probably have enough for a PhD at the moment, but not a good one, not an interesting one and the novel cool stuff I've been waiting to do is currently hitting a brick wall (the experiment is, I'm not planning on throwing lizards around in construction sites).

basically I've been organised and had everything planned, and now at the 11th hour I have been let down y pretty much every single person who had promised to help me. I'm talking "Sorry, this person spent all your research money, you can't order anything right now!" to 'Oh dear, this chemical costs R5000 per milligram and I seem to have lost the bottle! Don't worry, I know you need it this week, but it only takes 6-8 weeks to deliver if you order it now!" kind of let down.

So last night I lay awake trying to make a Plan C (A and B crashed and burned already) I began to feel the panic attacks as they came and went and I might have sobbed into my pillow a little bit more than I'll admit to. Add on that I'm exhausted and can't sleep and this level of panic makes me nauseous which doesn't help and I'm hitting hay-fever season so I have a cough and a runny nose and a sore throat... I made a plan and lay in bed on Google (I love having mini-google on my phone) researching the possibilities while trying to ignore the fact that tai chi has become really difficult and I'm not looking forward to it and the people I would usually go to for advice on this (i.e. my mentor, an older PhD student who knows her way around these things and Luke) are all off overseas and I felt REALLY alone...

When I realised a few things:

1. I shouldn't have this much responsibility. While I've always been very independent, being totally alone at this level is ridiculous and I don't know why I put up with it.
2. I need a supervisor. I need someone to help me and tell me what to do. I can't keep on doing everything by myself. It's just making me sick.
3. If it doesn't work out, I'm still 24, as much as I want to finish next year, the world won't end if I don't.
4. I can always do fieldwork later the lizards are active until March-April at least.
5. Breathe in, breathe out. Breath in... breathe out...

So at 3am I got myself up, found a scary price-list for everything that I need and sent it to myself so I could handle it today, sent an email to my superV demanding a meeting and managed to get a few hours of sleep.

So maybe there's hope... either way I can sort of breathe again, as long as I think calm thoughts every few minutes!

Because there is very little of interest in my life lately

I thought I'd leave you guys with this to brighten your Monday!

Keep out of reach of children

So on Saturday I got to work to find that my boss had brought his older daughter to work. She's 7, precocious, quite friendly and one heck of an artist for her age. Seriously, she drew some incredible pictures, including an entire 'bird book' with things like parrots, blue cranes, peacocks, sunbirds...

Unfortunately I had done sprint-intervals cycling on Friday evening as well as staying up late doing paperwork and so when I stumbled in and headed straight for the kettle (I don't usually have time on a Saturday to make coffee, this time I decided the sick and bleeding animals could wait) I was not very enthusiastic at the prospect of being the impromptu babysitter for the morning. There was a rabies scare recently in a nearby suburb, so people were streaming in, my least favourite client kept calling and hanging up on me when I couldn't give him updates (I'm sorry, I can't ask the vet when he's busy with a cat the got semi-eaten and an owner in hysterics) meanwhile I'm trying to do everything I usually do with a seven-year-old perching on the counter in front of everything I need. NOT a good time for rehashing every Hannah Montana and Mr Bean episode ever made (and writing scripts for new episodes)!

When its your bosses child it's also quite difficult to do the usual babysitter style thing ("No sweetie, I don't think the cat likes being dragged around by its head. No, I need to put something in that drawer, no I don't want to make up a story because I have a queue stretching out the door right now..."). Fortunately she charmed most of the clients which made my life moderately easier. She also wrote a letter to my sister-in-law (I was going to the birthday party that evening) and decorated the envelope and got very involved in the whole thing. My sister-in-law loved it, so it was very cute.

I also worked a shift at the videostore because it was Jo's brother's birthday and he didn't want to work, and it was fun the guy I worked with used to be really annoying because he was so busy showing off to the boss (who isn't even there) that it gets really irritating and I just want to give him a gold star to shut him up. This time he had decided it wasn't worth it and he's going to resign, so we had a fun afternoon where we got everything done and still managed to watch the whole of Kung Fu Hustle - the only bad part being that people would ask us what it was about. I watched the whole thing and I still can't explain it. It was funny though!

I also found brand new bad-horror cave movie! I can't wait to watch it!

And now I'm sitting with my coffee trying to get everything done so that I can track down the incredible disappearing Scientist so that I can get chemicals from her and take them to the crazy Russian and get back to med-school to finish the rest of my samples.

Fun times!

If we were supposed to kick our own ears we would have been born with spaghetti-bones!

So lately I've been having an ugly few days. You know when you wake up in the morning and your skin is bleeeuh and your hair stands on end and you have that LOVELY pillow-crease down one cheek? This was all exacerbated by the fact that I've been feeling a bit sick for the past few days. Why?

Well lately I've been getting healthier and healthier. Without realising it I'd stopped eating junk food, exercised more and yadda yadda yadda... And so when having an ugly day I did what every other girl (I hope) does. I got chocolate. Which quickly turned into me eating more junk food in 3 days than I have in the last month. Stomach ache much? And of course trying to use said stomach muscles to support me in tai chi... not so much.

Tuesday was awesome, I kind of just ignored the nausea brought on by having bought lunch instead of packing it in the morning, as well as having ice-cream with someone I'd rather forget... and it was so much fun! So much so when the class ended we thanked the teacher and ran back to our spot to carry on practising! Then having had a mega-bucket of popcorn on Wednesday (and skipping gym in order to go to a girl's night movie evening) and going through a lot of chocolate and biltong-flavoured crackers (which rock) yesterday, I went off to tai chi to find out that they expected me to do this:

And this:

This morning I kind of hobbled in to the lab with legs of jelly... (the jelly flavoured like pain) and resolved to eat properly, stop skipping gym to eat popcorn and try and find someone who will sell me an IV filled with coffee. And start pilates again so that I can build up some kind of core strength. Mine is gone (I had some! I promise!).

On a happier note four of the searches that have found my bog lately are (drum roll...)

horst kleinschmidt
parents and pocket money uk
how to make shoelace don't drop off when running
lizards eat beef

Which I think is far funnier than the previous ones (of which my favourite was "If something happens to me, I got people" or "What do you do if a lizard on head while sleeping")

Makes me want to start an advice column...

If I was green I would die

I had an epic trip to Pretoria this morning to meet a chemist person about some of the work I need to do (of course he was an hour late because he was at the dentist...) and then back to the lab to meet my sister-in-law for coffee. Fortunately she was late too!

And I was diced this morning in my neighbourhod by some idiot who had baby-on-board stickers on their car. I mean REALLY!

Anyway being Thursday means that we have to reminisce about some of the musical classics from the 90s. Of couse this wont let me embed, but it made me dance around in my chair, so check it out! Of course this lead me to reading a lovely series of comments in youtube arguing about the lyrics. Someone is totally convinced it says "I'm blue if I was green I would die" and now that I listen for it I can see their point! Of course the homophobes jump in with "I need a guy" instead. Anyone hear anything different?

Of course when I was a little teenager it was cool to go and listen to bands on weekends, my particular favourites (among others) being Tweak, Sarongas (which became Seether) and of course these guys:



The drive out to Pretoria today also brought back a lot of memories from my first job when I was 15, my boss would pick me up in the morning and we'd drive out to Pretoria for the day. One of the songs I remember lsitening to on the way in to work was this:



And because I actually still kind of love those songs, I thought I'd have to put in one that makes me cringe. A lot.

If you're going to (i.e. accidentally crashing) a Tim Burton-themed wedding reception

It helps to have a cool hat. And to be mildly scary (the one in the red was actually really nice, if a bit creepy).

Besides wearing enough makeup to make blinking difficult, cultivating the emo-face is very important. Smiling might crack the makeup (although La isn't very good at keeping a straight face).

If you don't have a cool hat of your own, it's OK to adopt someone else's. In this case we adopted both the hat, and the owner (who had a very nice waistcoat and a steady hand with the eyeliner).

The only bad part is that we weren't able to find the bride, so I'll just have to imagine what she did with her dress...

Crawling for coffee

You know those silly cartoons with people crawling along in the desert looking for water? Well that's basically what I did this morning, looking for coffee. Last week I was annoyed to find out that Monday had been taken away because of the public holiday on Sunday (we have a rollover to Monday if it falls on a Sunday, if it's on a Saturday we just lose it), but I must admit that having yesterday off was exactly what I needed.

This weekend was AWESOME! I can't actually write about all of it because I do need to do some work today, so I will list the highlights. If you want any more detail let me know and I will elaborate on points.

Anyway this weekend I:

• Was on time for work
• Had insanely dodgy conversations with friends of friends
• Went out for dinner and ordered a salad because I felt like lettuce.
• Laughed a LOT
• Found out that with one more trial run I've got the job as freelance photographer at Jo's studio!
• Bonded with a makeup artist at the studio (the poor girl has had a tough few months) and learned a bunch of new makeup tricks!
• Convinced my boss to start geocaching
• Met a lot of guinea pigs (I blame that movie...)
• Went out pre-goth clubbing, and was proposed to by some random guy I'd met 45 minutes before. Escaped by accompanying a friend to the bathroom and not returning.
• Was protected by Chief Goth who refused to let anyone ask me questions without her okaying them first
• Went goth clubbing and met a bunch of people at a Tim Burton-themed wedding reception
• Begged a bunch of scary goth guys to let me wear their hats. Took photos.
• Adopted a random goth boy (with very impressive guyliner) and wore his hat a lot. He proposed. Nice waistcoat.
• Started off the dance floor when the goths were too cool to dance.
• Was "Do you come here often?"-ed by someone on the dance floor while trying to escape from his scary friend with the beard and one of my undergrad students who happened to be there. Later on we danced and he poured a drink down my back. He also asked me "where does it end?" a lot (turns out he was asking my name. Whoops).
• Raced a car through a drive-through (on foot). Won by a technicality (that I could stand between their bumper and the car behind).
• Got yelled at by Chief Goth who took us home, said goodbye to the others and burst into tears.
• sat up with Chief Goth trying to be supportive (until 4am).
• Had coffee for breakfast while sitting on the grass. It was nice, but the coffee meant I was unable to sleep for the rest of the day. had hectic conversations with CG, I'm hoping I managed...
• Had a braai to celebrate my mother's homecoming
• Saw EEbEE who had come to Joburg for the weekend! He has hair now.
• nearly died having had an hour and a half sleep the night before and staying up late talking to people in the parking lot.
• Washed and vacuumed my car!
• Cleaned out a cupboard (this led to interesting philosophical debates, like "why was it ever a good idea to buy black velvet pants? and "Who even SELLS black velvet pants?")
• Spent time with my brother and his wife.
• Cycled about 80 km (over the whole long weekend)
• Nearly killed people for talking loudly in the gym.

So ja... that was my long weekend! Do you understand my need for coffee?

Up, Up And AWAY...

So in case you didn't notice, I haven't been the happiest of campers
lately. The last couple of weeks were particularly bad. An existential
crisis will do that I guess...

Anyway, in the meantime I learned a lot about life and me and the
people I care about. And of course the viability of using exercise as
therapy- mentally it's good, physically not so much... I feel like I
have the joints of a 90-year old and a new appreciation for metal
music.

Anyway what I learned was that it's ok to admit to being miserable,
and it's ok to ask for help- having a support system is more than
decorative...

So after forcing myself to discuss things, and admit that everything
is NOT ok, I was taken off to dinner last night where I had the time
of my life, and I'm being taken out tonight... And while it's not all
that different to what I'd usually get up to, it feels different
because I think I'm different.

And I was early to work today, because getting out of bed wasn't
difficult anymore. I'm not reluctant to face the world.

So I guess it's just thanks to everyone for putting up with me! I
don't promise to be happy all the time, but I will try and stop doing
it all on my own!

Things they don't warn you about

I remember seeing a very clever ad campaign in the newspaper a few years ago. It was for one of those silly "drink this tea/shake/nasty stuff and lose 500kg in a week! No Effort required!" products and the advert was in the form of a letter complaining about hidden costs. You see this lady took whatever it was, lost x amount of weight and then complained that she had to buy new clothes.

 

I remember a friend reading it out loud while we were in a car while someone's mom dropped us off or picked us up or whatever and we chuckled at the cleverness of the campaign, while thinking that it was a GOOD problem to have.

 

So I started exercising regualrly about a year ago, in an effort to make the transition to fieldwork easier as well as to try and feel better about myself. I figured that I feel so awesome (when I'm not bruised, bleeding and otherwise exhausted - so basically on rainy days!) in the field because I'm outdoors using various muscles other than the teeny-tiny one between my ears (yes, the SMILE muscle). In November I started going to the gym regularly (i.e. 5-6 times a week) and working hard, and I've loved it!

 

I had no idea that exercise was so much fun, that I could think through my day while doing something that pumps endorphins through my bloodstream (seriously, the post-running high is second only to the post-tai chi high) and listening to awesome music (I cycled 25 km to the gladiator soundtrack on Wednesday and it was AWESOME! In a very epic way...).

 

Back to my main point, besides feeling healthier and happier, WANTING to eat healthily (and feeling sick after fast food), having tons more energy and feeling more at home in my own skin than I have in years... my clothes still fit. The same as always. But for some bizarre and obscure reason that I have yet to determine, my underwear does not. Seriously, nothing stays where it's supposed to anymore, I have to wear vests to keep... things... from emerging to say "HI" and seriously, try doing Tai Chi or pilates when things... move. Use your imagination as to direction.

 

So this weekend, between an awesome visit from EEbEE (yay!) and spending some time with LA and the crazy semi-goth crew (yay!) and having my mom come home and doing the cooking again (you have no idea!) I need to go shopping. Maybe next time I'll need a new belt as well, I can only hope!

 

Oh, and as an aside: how the HECK to guys wear boxers (besides the obvious one leg in and then the other)? I have some girl-boxers I sleep in and I wore them the other day and had to make several trips to the bathroom to stop them from doing a very stylish ballooning out ala prison...

And I thought it was just me?

If these don't have you giggling (or blushing) over the momories, and/or bouncing in your chair then you're too old or you spent the 1990's living under a rock. Yip, it's Thursday and so we have to remember those songs that influenced our childhood and teenage years as well as maintaining their ability to get well and truly stuck in our heads!

As I didn't manage last Thursday (I was too busy being gosh-darned miserable) I'll put up two songs today!




This one was one of those songs that I heard a million times sing by a million people (notably my counsin who I know reads this. HI!!!) and yet it was years before I heard the original. I kind of suspected it was one of those songs that people now by magic or osmosis, like school bus songs!

And this one, well, I like the violin part! And it's cool. And it made me feel all rebellious while longing for a leather jacket...



Ok fine, I'll give you three, just because I suddenly remembered this being my favourite music video at the time! Except or that one where everyone is lying on the street and someone is trying to figure out why. I get hte feeling it was Radiohead, but I'm not sure. Anyone got any ideas? I'll give five points to whoever figures it out!



Happy Thursday everyone!

I think there is a conspiracy...

OK well there's something in the men in my family that they are OBSESSED with the news. As a kid spending time with my grandparents, we used to watch my grandfather's evening ritual of reading the paper, watching the news at 6pm, 8pm AND 10pm! I elarned later that he had a tendency to fall asleep and so three news bulletins gave him a pretty solid picture of what was one one of them... Speaking to my Dad while the headlines were on was discouraged and when he was late home from work we had to record them (on our trusty Betamax machine, followed by a real VHS a few years later).

I hate to admit it, but I'm not great about keeping up with the news. I read the paper on weekends and Iw atch teh news if i'm home, but there's something exciting about hearing about the big things later. I don't ahve a TV (or any desire for one) when I'm in the field, so I tend to get the news in snippets. Like "Who is that guy and where's Thabo? - when we randomly got a new president last year and I was away. Or "Pirates in Somalia? Is that a new movie?" It's a different way of hearing it, and I like to think if there's anything important enough to affect me on a farm in the middle of nowhere, I'm pretty sure someone would let me know, or we'd all be obliterated, while woefully misinformed.

Anyway you can imagine our excitement (well not necessarily mine but anyway...) at the creation of the ETV 24 hour news channel. CNN and Sky had been kind of substituting before that but they're a bit US/Eurocentric and when we have people being shot in the streets it's nice to hear about it from someone with the appropriate accent and lack of basic grammar and syntax.

They tend to play the same report over and over and over with someone different reading the headlines, which means we can nitpick the grammar and pronounciation more than ever! IT's awesome!

Until you get to the weather and I have to leave the room. They have this "American" weatherman. So besides his complete inability to pronounce ANYTHING (and when you're listening out for the weather in Nelsproooooeeet" as for Phalaborwa...) and the completely annoying energetic excitement about fire warnings (true story) we have to handle him having an Americanised Afrikaans name (van Dam, should be vuhn duhm, not Van Dahm). Now I have nothing against Americans in principle, really! Promise!

What annoys me about this guy is that his accent isn't consistent. As my mom is away and I have to be home to cook I've had to sit through a lot of forecasts (and I can't find the weather in Mafikeng all that riveting) and his accent is slightly different every night. Plus he always starts off a bit shaky. Last night I could have SWORN there was a word or two in a lovely flat s'effricen accent. AS he progresses it gets more and more american.

So my thoughts are: Is he really american? Or is he a nice boy from Poffader (I've been there!) faking it for a publicity stunt?

And does anyone have a clip I can upload?

My ten things to do list!

So this morning there was a list on one of the blogs that I LOVE;

 (it's a great blog, check it out!) and I decided that I should make one too. The idea has been rattling around in my head for a while, but I'd never thought about getting around to it..

 

10 Places I Want To Visit:

 

The huge rock formations in Mali (heck, Mali itself looks incredible! It has Timbuktu!)

 

Madagascar, to see the geckos! And lemurs and chameleons and tree frogs...

 

Tanzania, for the lake and everything else!

 

Malawi - one of the guys I work with comes from there and the stories he's told me about it make me very keen to go and see it for myself! Lake Malawi is a plus as well!

 

Namibia - I love the bits of desert I've been to and I'd love to see real desert, and spend some time going along the skeleton coast. My grandmother grew up in/near Windhoek and I'd love to see her country!

 

South America - I'm not sure where exactly yet. I'd like to do a mega tour and spend a few months there. The rain forest has always fascinated me and I'd love to see it for myself!

 

Mongolia - ever since I watched the Long Way Round I've wanted to go there, it looked incredible!

 

Japan - after all of Sarah's stories as well as the stories from Ms MC's trip earlier this year I have to go and see it!

 

Antarctica (i.e. my obsession since I was about 10)

 

Australia - Great Barrier Reef! Plus I've never seen a kangaroo (not even in a zoo) and I feel that it's unfair that I've fed kangaroo to a cheetah without seeing a live one...

 

10 Random Things I Want To Accomplish

 

Get a PhD (very random, I know!)

 

Run 10 km (I can just about do 3 now!)

 

Do the Freedom Challenge (it's a mountain bike race from The Drakensberg to Cape town, over a maximum of 26 days) besides the obvious training and stuff I'd have to do, my main holdup is that you aren't allowed a GPS and with my sense of direction I'd probably end up cycling to Swaziland by accident...

 

See a cuttlefish in the wild. They're totally my favourite animals!

 

Go abseiling. I tried once but I was WAY too scared of heights. as I'm mostly over it now (thanks lizards!) I'd like to see if I could. Kind of like poking an old bruise to see if it still hurts...

 

Fly in a microlight.

 

Go in a hot air balloon. Or a helicopter. Either really.

 

See real snow (that one whole centimetre we got a few years ago doesn't count! I want to build a snowman and have a snowball fight and drink cocoa while shivering!)

 

Have a photograph published

 

Climb Kilimanjaro (I know I know, it's lame, but I really want to!)

 

10 Things I Want To Try

 

Ice-skate outdoors

 

Dune boarding!

 

Stay here

 

Thai food in Thailand

 

Real sailing, like a long-term mega-trip (so I can get over the pesky seasickness)

 

water-skiing

 

Jump on a  random train in Europe and see where I end up

 

Make meringues without setting the house on fire (true story!)

 

Going to a metal concert in Finland

 

Chocolate in Switzerland

 

It's official

Yes, that's right. Yours truly, while in the role of lab-monkey pipetter-extraordinaire, has managed to break the laws of physics!

So I went to the lab yesterday to finish with Friday's samples to find that the one and only set of keys for the room where we work with radioactive stuff was in the gently glowing pocket of someone who had left early for the day. Rather than pester the people who have been incredibly kind to me I went back to main campus and had an awkward lunch with the IT guy and went home to cook dinner and take a nap.

Oh and for the record: cycling 23km while listening to metal = good for the psyche when you've had a bad few days. Cycling 23km after eating dinner followed by ridiculously sweet toffee pudding (thanks Woolworths) = not so good. So I had a fun night of sore legs and nausea.

Back to the laws of physics... I went through to the lab this morning and started playing with the radiation measurers and getting data. Started with calibrations - looks good. Controls - look ok. First batch of samples - check. Max and min calibration - all good. About 80 samples in I got a result I didn't understand. There shouldn't be an answer higher than 100 % right? Like 7000 when the maximum possible is 3000...

So I recalibrated, checked the controls, checked a few of the ok samples, and went back to the tricky one. Still funky. The next 50 samples were weird (well the next 60 with one or two ok ones scattered throughout). So I went to the friendly Physiologist and asked him what was happening. He said:
"7000? That's not possible."
"Uh... but I rechecked and everything else was fine. I used the other counter, I remeasured-"
"What? But that's not possible. I've been doing this for long enough to have made every mistake possible, there's no way you'd get 7000!"
"But I did! On 7000 samples!"
"Oh. Maybe you- no... what abou- no... if there was- no...maybe the compan-no..."
Finally he shrugged.
"just remeasure the samples if you can. It'll be a mystery forever. You'll never know..."

And it's not even mandated by Hallmark!

I know that Mothers Day and Fathers Day are long past, and to be honest I find both days annoying. Why is there never a kids day? I mean we have Youth Day but that's actually in honour if people who did stuff and... stuff...

But lately I've realised that they both deserve some pretty sincere appreciation, so here goes:

My mother has taken her 4 degrees off to Oxford for a 2-week conference and left me to keep an eye on things and feed my father (who for some reason has a cloud of bad kitchen-karma. He tried to roast potatoes once when I was a kid and I can still taste the ash in my mouth...). I don't mind cooking, I've been helping out with it ever since my mom came up with the idea of letting us cook to earn extra pocket money (it was that or weeding the garden) or as punishment (which is a bad idea unless you want to be fed mashed dog food. I don't get mad, I get even).

But I hadn't realised how much changes when you have to be home to let the maid and the gardener out, or have dinner ready before Tai Chi, or have packed lunches ready and waiting in the morning, or make sure the laundry doesn't pile up. And somehow my mom manages this while working full-time, including weekends. It's pretty impressive and I must admit I will be supremely relieved when she comes home this weekend and I can sleep in safe in the knowledge that I can stay at the lab until 8pm to get my work done.

As for my Dad... we've always been a musical family. My parents met in a choir after all! I have a clear memory of my mom trying to teach me to play the recorder when I was 4 (which was quickly replaced by a weekly music class when she realised that we just liked making a noise) and when I was 6 my brother and I (and a bunch of friends) were allowed to join the church choir.

when I say 'allowed' I'm not kidding! The choir was run by a gentleman (no other word for it really) who had won scholarships and all kinds of things and been in some of the bigwig music schools in the uk before moving to Joburg. We sang Latin and harmony and all kinds of stuff. I think I may have been reading music before I could read words.

Anyway once teenage rebellion set in and my brother and I left the choir my parents stayed and we saw the choirmaster from time to time. We were always taught to be respectful to him (I still feel awkward referring to him by his first name) and we liked him because he used to pay the kids when we sang at weddings! I think it was the princely sum of R2, which was a lot to me considering I got R4 a week in pocket money (and made dinner for R10!). Am I giving away my age?

As the choirmaster was once an awesome singer and has now settled into his eighties, my father decided that he should give a concert. Did I mention that he's an organist in his spare time? He plays at a mega-huge church most of the time and at our church occasionally. I was the only kid at school who had an organ at home... So he and my dad picked a programme, practised, retuned the organ a gazillion times because the weather kept making it go funny and so on.

As my mother is off in Oxford, I got the enviable task of turning pages. basically that means you sit on the organ bench and follow the music and when you're a few notes away from the end of the page you turn it so that the organist (who is already playing with both hands and feet as well as pushing buttons all over the place to change which pipes get used) an keep going. Sometimes if it gets tricky the page-turner gets to push the buttons as well. I had a mildly stressful piece where I had to push the button that is RIGHT NEXT to the one that you must NEVER push (the one that turns EVERYTHING on and blasts the poor people in the congregation into oblivion).

And I realised two things:

1. It's been years since I've read music and even longer than tat since I read music of more than one line (viola has one, piano has two (left hand right hand) and organ has three (left hand, right hand, feet) and organ with choir tends to jump from 3 to 5 every now and then). It was really difficult to follow the music! The mega voluntary at the end was particularly bad where I was relying on sort of being right and hearing a 'NOW!' if I was late.
2. My dad is pretty darn good. There was one piece that he was literally just about tap-dancing on the pedals while playing on the keyboards like a maniac an I was stunned by how good it was.

So Ja... I guess it's time that I appreciated that my parents have done a lot more in their lives than produce the two of us, and that they're pretty darn talented in their own right.

And now I must go back to the lab so I can get home in time to make dinner before spinning class!

Pass the pink

It's freezing! It's been raining all day (apparently it started around 3am) and I'm totally unable to get warm. I went for a run on Wednesday and pushed myself a bit hard and now my ankle is punishing me - partly for overexertion and partly for not moving to the Sahara or Mexico or something. I swear I'm going to be one of those 90-year-olds who can predict the weather based on ankle-twinges.

I've been on a bit of an emotional rollercoaster lately. I guess there was some truth in what that person said when they said that my wearing pink signified that I was looking for change. Thigns ARE changing, but it's not a pleasant experience. Wednesday was one of the worst days I've had in a long time, although I was rescued by a friend who didn't quite know how to handle me and so talked about other stuff. I felt better after that.

Thursday was one of the hardest days I've ever had - mostly a result of Wednesday. I won't go into details, but there were some things that needed doing, and I did them. I spent a lot of time inwardly cursing Hollywood as well. It's all their fault! They make it look so easy and then you realise that while ripping off the bandaid (so to speak) may be the least painful method, it doesn't mean it's pain free, particularly when you're a slow healer...

And then there was Tai Chi. I know, I've had complaints that I talk about it too much. It's my blog and I will discuss the art of looking graceful (or trying to) while kicking someone (imaginary) in the shins if I want to. So THERE!

Anyway Tai Chi was my saviour. I was physically and emotionally exhausted, I had my ankle strapped to the point of non-mobility and I wanted to crawl into bed and cry rather than be sociable with the Tai Chi crowd (who are actually pretty awesome people, even if most of them are 20 years older than me and far more flexible that I ever will be). There were two beginner-beginners and me, and the advanced folks, so the other two were given some stuff to start on while the teacher (well the temporary teacher anyway) basically taught me a ton of new stuff! Bearing in mind it took me 3 1/2 weeks to learn the first form which only had 13 steps, I think I learned 11 this week of the new form! And one of them is the coolest thing EVER! It's called 'single whip' and it's SO much fun! I bounced out of there feeling so much better about life!

For the record the teacher totally thinks I'm crazy now! I think he noticed that I wasn't really myself and he was super-nice to me, while he fixed a lot of stuff I think he let more slide than usual because he knows I love learning new steps. His son (the real teacher) said he'd take over us newbies next week, which makes me quite nervous. I know the basics but there's a lot of polishing up I need to do to get it perfect.

I was on the Tai Chi high pretty much until halfway through labwork, when exhaustion set in and by the time I left (after 10 grueling hours in the lab) I was barely able to walk, and I had to go home and make dinner which woke me up somewhat.

So now I'm stuck with the dilemma- I'm freezing and I've got aches and pains. Is this punishment for the last week? Or is it the start of Swine Flu? I really wish I knew because right now I'm shivering with a blanket around me and I'd quite like to get to the gym and warm up, but obviously if I'm going to get a fever or something that's a bad idea. I tried practising tai chi but my house is too full of furniture and WAY too cold!

So for the record: "what's your problem?" is not something I want to be asked. In whatever code. It's nasty.

6 weeks to catching lizards and being able to breathe again! Just 6 weeks! 42 days and counting! I want to get away right now. Maybe I need more pink?

Tales of a lab-monkey

So I spent yesterday in the lab, all dressed up in the world's biggest
labcoat (I LOVE it! I can wear a full trenchcoat under it and it's
still too big!) prepping samples...

I kind of got into a 'zone' where I was totally focussed on what I was
doing and towards the end I noticed that I was tired, my shoulders
ached, my back was stiff, my ankle was NOT impressed with me, my right
hand was cramping from pipetteing, my left hand was numb from the
vortex.

I put my samples in to incubate and tried to guess what the time was.
I'd started at about 8:30, and done 150 tubes, most of them i'd
diluted in other tubes first...

I'd heard people chatting, so maybe it was lunch? 12? 1pm?

Guess again, I looked at my phone and almost passed out- 14:37- i'd
been pipetteing for over 6 hours!

What with the 3 hour incubation, I've left the rest of that lab test for monday!

Happy weekend!

Optimism for cynics

For those of you that read the previous post in the two hours that it was up I apologise. I took a walk and had a think and decided that stewing in misery isn't what I should be doing.

Good things that have happened:

1. Traffic wasn't bad this morning
2. I went running last night and I'm not stiff today!
3. My ankle (which is still dodgy from the bad sprain 2 years ago) was protesting rather a ot this morning and a very kind person went to her car and got out her first aid kit so I could strap it (thanks!). So there ARE decent people out there!
4. Even if Tai Chi kind of sucked on Tuesday, I think it might be better tonight, and it does make me happy...
5. Last night my friend walked into the lab, took one look at me and knew EXACTLY what to do (i.e. drinks and potato wedges).
6. My supervisor has decided that my emails are worthy of attention and I've heard from him more than once in the last two days (compared to once in the last month). Good to know he's still alive!
7. The scary bodybuilders at the gym all smiled and waved to me last night!
8. I had an incredibly bad dream last night, but when I woke up and realised it was just a dream it made me feel better about life! So in short, it isn't so bad, at elast I'm not wearing strawberry jam as lipstick which grows of its own accord and covers my face so I look like I dipped my head in oil and lay in the sun!

Anyway, I shold ge tback to work. I'm stuck pretending to be a lab-monkey tomorrow so I'll probably be a bit quiet for the next few days.

Oh and as for the title - a while ago someone told me that I was a perfect example of a cnical optimist... The cloud has a silver lining... which will probably kill you!

not a herpetologist, not a physiologist... cue identity crisis!

It’s official – I am not a physiologist! I spent the morning doing lab work, and had some major pipette issues (you know, those cool colour-coded thingies like they have on CSI?) Well I pipette stuff almost every day I’m doing data collection, but accuracy isn’t really all that important because when you’re taking a sample you kind of want the maximum from your sample (once it’s been centrifuged) so it’s more about getting it all out of there…

So this morning, besides my typical oversleeping and being cranky until after about cup 3 of strong coffee I had to sort through all my blood samples, while having a conversation with some random who was walking past and hearing an ex-lecturer go on about thermal gradient in my head (if your samples are in a minus-70 degree freezer, they warm up insanely fast when you take them out, which leads to me scrambling through my thousand-odd samples (fine, 600) to find number 612a_w/x_spring before the rest of them thaw. Fortunately besides having a numbering system that makes no sense to anyone but me, I pack them away in sections so it’s slightly faster than what most people have to do!).

And then with the strike going on of course South African motorists have to gawk and crash into the cars in front of them so I had to dodge two accidents to get to medschool, by which time I had poured coffee all over myself, but managed to avoid it getting near my samples, but then I nearly had an accident in the parking lot when some little soon-to-be-doctor darling came screeching around a corning at about 60km/h, saw me braking to avoid her and burst out laughing at me. What is the world coming to? And so I ran off to the turnstiles to get onto campus and…well... I was carrying two boxes of equipment, my laptop, a coolerbag with blood samples and a normal bag. I got stuck. The turnstile kind of turned halfway and stopped and nothing I did could move it.

Of course the security guard who had been glowering at me a second before miraculously vanished, but some nice students (also medics, which confuses me. They’re not supposed to be nice…) stopped to help. The problem was that our cards will only wipe once for exit or entry and they get denied after that (cuts down on the sneaking friends in and so on) and so they couldn’t help me without getting stuck… finally someone got fed up and used her card, only to be trapped in education campus for all eternity (or at least half an hour) by which stage I thanked her profusely and left her there (I was already late!)

Of course I had to go through another turnstile before I could get into med-school, but the security guard reappeared (I think it was the same one) and let me through the other side so it was ok.

Anyway the guy who is letting me use his lab is probably the nicest person I’ve ever met and he basically took me up to his lab, showed me where everything was, helped me to get started planning and left me to it. It was quite scary as I suddenly noticed exactly how many things I do wrong in a lab (now that it actually matters, fortunately today is a trial run). I also realised that I am SUCH a zoologist. Physiologists are all lab-coated and gloved up and I find it so tedious. I’ll do it, if just to avoid the lovely radioactive stuff I’m working with, but I hate it.
I’ve never known a zoologist to wear a lab coat willingly, except for Luke’s case but that involved working with dung, so of course that changes things. I wear mine if I’m teaching or if I’m doing something really disgusting – although not always – the best part of teaching a dissection is that you get to wipe your hands o the nearest student. As for gloves… it’s fun once or twice, but having fingers that smell and taste like latex gets old pretty darn quickly. The only time I wore them willingly was when we were de-fleshing a mildly decomposing mole-rat to get the skeleton out…

I also quite like the fact that in zoology you face simple dangers – being bitten by a test subject, catching a weird tropical disease or picking up an exciting gut parasite. My doctor has his textbooks ready whenever I make an appointment and I can recite symptoms and treatments for most of the more common zoology-linked ailments in English and Afrikaans. I can deal with these things; I’ve been doing it for years. Working with things that are toxic and/or radioactive… I worry when I realise that I may have to face the consequences in a decade or two when we find out that it was FAR more dangerous than we’d thought…

Physiology is scary – there’s also the fact that I’m working with amounts that barely even register. I’m talking 1/50th of a millilitre – that’s like 1 percent of a teaspoon. So making a tiny little error can really mess my results up. And as nobody has ever worked on my lizards before there is no way of checking if I’m messing up or not. No pressure!

And of course, there’s the simple and obvious fact- lab work is boring. Mind-numbingly, soul-crushingly, boring. Give me a rock face with a sneaky lizard any day! And once you finish with pipetting over and over and over and over, while trying to keep track of everything and take notes and not let things thaw or freeze or explode (I have bad karma around breakable things) you get to sit and wait for it to incubate. For three hours! THREE HOURS! And of course with the strike and the traffic and silly students there’s no point in going back to main campus so I had my lunch with the medics (cringe) and set up my laptop in the lab.

Thanks for keeping me entertained guys! Now I have to do some reall work… only an hour before I get to try to avoid blowing things up again!

Oh and I went spinning with a friend alst night and it was totally not as bad as everyone said! i think I work harder when I cycle on my own though, none of those pesky rest periods... and it's Tai chi day! I've got the form I'm learning on my ipod now so I'm hoping the learning will go faster this time :) w00t!

The dangers of being female

So on Sunday I wound up helping out at the video store and as Josh had his super-stylish netbook with him (I want one!) I got to pick the movie. We wound up watching this:

Josh was quite nice about letting me watch it, and by halfway into it he was watching as much as I was! He explained it in two ways:

1. One day he's going to have a girlfriend who is going to want him to sit through chick-flicks so he might as well get used to it now (not bad for an 18-year-old!)
2. Apparently guys like chick-flicks as much as girls, they just won't admit it. I'm not so sure I agree with that, but anyway...


All I can say about the movie is that I am SO glad I can laugh at myself! I'm typically not the kind of girl who behaves like that, but I could identify quite strongly with some of the stuff going on. There were moments that I cringed and hid my face a little bit though. And I agree, girls are the worst friends sometimes!


I mean, why is it that we have to tell our friends what they want to hear? And we get upset when friends are actually honest... I'm lucky in that my friends are mostly relatively honest with me, and I know who I can trust when it comes to opinions, but at the same time I know that sometimes I will ask people for an opinion, and I'll keep asking different people until I get told what I want to hear...


I suppose we're a bit doomed to pretend until 'the real thing' comes along. I kind of liked that take home message, that maybe YOU are what you're looking for. I'd hate to be someone who needed a guy to feel complete, and sometimes staying in a relationship because you don't know what to do otherwise can be the worst thing ever!


What do you know, I may just be female after all!

Does that mean next time I meet someone I won't: check my phone constantly, worry about missing a call if I'm in the shower and then not answer it if it does ring because I'm too worried about what I might say?

I'll do my best! And at least I know I'm not alone! And if the worst comes to the worst, I have friends who will tell me that he's:

• Lost my number
• Moved to Guatemala
• Is afraid to phone
• Is worrying about what to say
• Doesn't want to call too early
• Is afraid he left it too late
• Or my favourite: He's insecure because you're so wonderful!

Girls are dangerous friends, but I love them anyway!

We aren't really that crazy...

So last night I had a HORRIBLE dream and once I woke up I sent messages off to two people outlining the awfulness to them. They replied with their dreams, which made me realise just how often I swap dream stories with people.

Luke and Leia and I had planned on having a discussion on music in order to show all you people out there that we aren't all that crazy, but after about half an hour of trying to get Luke to stop working and come and talk to us (he kept saying "I'll be right there... " and then he'd start something new... it was lunchtime! You're not supposed to work during lunch!) so that we could record something before our labmate comes back. So of course half a minute into it the labmate appeared so you can hear him wandering around.

I hope you can understand us, I tend to talk pretty fast and the others don't sit still very often so it can distort... The picture isn't really significant, it just wouldn't load without an image so I put one in...

Oh, and besides the fact that I speakk faaster than I should, what it the general verdict on our accents? Luke and I have both been told that we don't sound very South African, so do we all sound like we've spent most of our lives in Joburg? Or has the accent been educated out of us?

Anyway if you're brave enough you can hear about:

1. each of us has a weird dream story from last night, and Leia added one in from last week where her tooth looked lie a carrot inside (?).
2. The aftermath of our first ever experience with doctor pepper.
3. The return of stationary to the rightful owners.
4. The horror of Lady Gaga songs being stuck in your head.
5. My realisation that I can smell and taste in dreams!
6. The evilness of our security gate.
7.The awesomeness of 2-ply lab paper!

In other news I had an amazing meeting with a collaborator/mentor this morning and I was so excited! I should be getting a huge load of lab work done really soon!
And, being a Thursday I thought I would mention some of the fabulous 90's songs that shaped out childhoods (is that a real word?

Do you remember:
The Chemical Brothers: hey boy, hey girl!
I hated this song SO much! This lead to a big debate in the lab about whether the songs on the list had to be things we had enjoyed, or just songs that were influential. The jury is still out on it.

And based on our discussion last time, bearing in mind that my labmates have yet to see Centre Stage (which was a bit part of my teenager-dom), I feel that I must mention:

The Red Hot Chili Peppers: Under the bridge.

This was one of my favourite songs when I was younger, it made me feel all rebellious and cool. The fact that I had a mega crush on the lead singer didn't hurt either.

And, for the purposes of being stuck in your head for the next few days... do you remember this one? I had completely forgotten about it until we stumbled across it the other day:

Do the locomotion...

That awful awful song is stuck in my head now! But quite true, I'm just moving steadily(ish), getting things done, and finding more to do. Leia was going to record something with me tonight but we couldn't decide what we were going to talk about so she went home because her car has been a bit unfriendly lately and she wanted to make sure she got home ok.

 

And the car broke down, so I got to sit and wait for her dad because she seems to think that sitting on your own is safe after dark... silly child! 

 

And I'm trying to write an article for the reserve where I do my fieldwork. It was a ot ahrder than I'd expected, but now that I'm getting into it it's not too bad at all! I'm just hoping they're not too strict on the word count!

 

So everybody's doing... the lo-co-mo-tion...

 

AAAAARGH!!!!

Po is amazing!

So as she named Norbert, we had promised to write a post on the amazingness of Po. But as I had discovered (to my joy) that my laptop has an integrated microphone, we decided to record a message instead. Of course, knowing us, we couldn't keep on topic at all, so I'm afraid you have to listen to our ramblings before you get to the amazingness of Po.

There are also (gasp!) pictures of Luke wit his broken nose, pictures of many people who aren't Leia, and some amazing audio-editing by Luke to remove Leia's REAL name (whoops). As I don't have a third party audio hosting site thingie, we figured why not make it a movie-type thing, as blogger lets you upload videos but not just sound files for some reason.

Oh, and don't panic when there are areas with a black screen, I decided that we had enough pictures!

Enjoy!

Getting things done

So in a fit of good admin-Karma (and long may it continue!) I went to see a physicist today who was really really nice, super-helpful and has basically said that once I submit my forms I will be able to start the next phase of labwork! And I contacted the guy who runs that lab I'll be using and he was really helpful (although in his case it was only surprising becasue he agreed to let me use his lab about two years ago and I haven't been able to get through the red-tape until now. He's always been incredibly nice to me).

 

I also planned a meeting for tomorrow with one of the undergrads who is going to be doing a project using some of my data which should make my life easier in the long-run (there's a lot of computer work that needs doing and I wouldn't mind having someone else doing the clicking), as well as getting some extra teaching experience which is always a plus!

 

I've been panicking because there's some super-urgent labwork that has been delayed for over a year which is incredibly urgent now as I have to be done in six weeks time in order to go back out to catch lizards in time. The lady who originally agreed to help me pretty much vanished off the face of the earth about 18 months ago and I haven't been able to track her down. So, walking back from an accidental meeting inwhich I had to explain all the creepinesses of the farmhouse to our HOD who apparently fixed the toilet and the leaky gas pipes a few weeks ago (score!) guess who I run into in the passage?

 

Well not run into as much as see her talking to two other members of staff, so I got Luke and Leia to stand in the passage and make conversation with me until their little group broke up, when I ran and intercepted her and had a long long conversation where she was incredibly helpful and it looks like I might make it in time!

 

And as it happens the 'easier' method I was thinking of using looks like it may be easier after all and I will be able to use it, which makes my last phase of labwork a little bit less stressful!

 

So everyone, PLEASE think good admin-karma thoughts for me for the next while, I really need things to carry on going well! I don't want to be doing this PhD still ten years down the line (particularly not if I'm going to change the world, but I will explain that tomorrow... duh duh DUHHHHHHN! Cliffhanger!)

To make the most benign situation into a crisis, just alter your perception!

So last night I was supposed to go and get diving gear for this weekend so that I could go diving with a friend. Of course now it looks like she doesn't need a buddy so I'm quite glad i didn't waste my money, particularly since she still hasn't let me know... whining aside, the clubhouse opens at 6:30pm and at 6 I was sitting in the lab reading some books on using applied chemistry in nuclear physics calculations when Luke and Leia's supervisor came past to say goodbye and to ask me to keep an eye out in case some visiting French researchers who were supposed to have arrived in the afternoon.

I might have scared him slightly with my enthusiasm for the calculations I was working on, as well as the fact that i have discovered that the best way to concentrate while reading physics is to paint my nails at the same time. The only colour I had with me at the time was black. I'm not seeing the problem but other people seems to find it a bit alarming. Add in the fact that I'm having some sort of allergy attack which makes my eyes water a lot (it looks like tears) and you have a super-enthusiastic, physics-quoting, black-nail (and eyeliner)-ed up apparently crying PhD student. I must admit, I'd beat a hasty retreat as well!

Anyway I got a phone call a few minutes later from the superV saying that he'd had a call from the French people saying that they were lost in the centre of town! For those of you who don't know, the centre of town in Joburg is a pretty scary place at night (and during the day) as it's dark and scary and people (mostly taxis) drive like crazy and you kind of remember all the stories of people not making it out alive...

He decided that rather than come back to the alb and figure out a plan he would leap straight into the area and try and find them. I mean, imagine being a foreigner who barely speaks English trying to understand convoluted directions over the phone while scared out of your mind... and in the meantime I tried to figure out where they were with the help of Google Earth... while he proceeded to get more and more lost. I can understand a map being out of date, but seriously, a streaming satellite image should be pretty much what's really there? Either he didn't follow my instructions or there was something seriously Twilight Zoneish going on because nothing went according to plan!

Meanwhile time was going by rather quickly and I was starting to stress out because Tai Chi starts at 7:30pm and I usually leave at about 6:45 so that I have plenty of time to get there and change and lock my stuff away and all that. By ten past 7 I was starting to stress out. I had told Leia by then that if the girl who wanted me to dive with her wanted me there, SHE could get me gear because I'd had nothing from her in the last few days and renting gear is expensive, particularly if you don't end up diving. I was not prepared to leave the map or my phone for very long because the whole situation of the lost people is REALLY dangerous! (And for the record she already made plans without me, so basically it's a good thing I didn't waste the time and/or effort).

Eventually I got a call at 7:10pm to say that the SuperV had found a sign to the place where the French were waiting, so I sprinted (I can honestly say I've never run that fast before) down to my car. it was FREEZING so you know that feeling when you take a deep breath of ice air? So as I was gasping away the superV phoned to say he's found them and they were all OK. Five seconds later, with my phone complaining loudly at the lack of battery life, the guy from last weekend started calling me and I was trying to drive up to the building so I could change and dash off to Tai Chi and I didn't really want to kill my phone because I don't like to be driving around at night without it and I was also waiting to hear if Luke had survived surgery or not so I just couldn't talk. He was pretty understanding (the fact that I wasn't speaking too slowly because I was all adrenalin-ed-up probably didn't help) and so i dashed into the lab, changed while crouching behind the lab bench behind Leia's desk (you don't realise how huge the windows are until you need to change, I don't care if the glass is frosted!) and somehow made it to Tai Chi in time!

And I learned a ton of new stuff so now I can officially get through the arm-up exercise (the whole group does the beginners form) without getting lost! And it was also a totaly relief to get there and do the calming breathing exercises (where you rpetend to hug a tree).

Blogger just ate my last post, which was almost finished and had pictures and everything! Rather than rethink it all I'm going to leave you with this quote from a friend of mine who was giving me advice over herbal tea last night (thanks EEbEE!). Basically I explained that being dumped really sucks and he replied with (paraphrased with my random comments removed):

"Wait. You think the dumping thing is bad!!! It's the BEST thing EVER. you are getting away from someone who doesn't like you instead of having one of those fake relationships. Look just stay away from anyone who thinks less of you. best recipe for a good future. So there."

Not bad for someone who claims he's useless at relationship advice!

Also I thought having made a giant list of songs form the 90's that shaped our childhoods, I wouldn't want to waste all that reminiscing. So I think in future I will post something on that on a Thursday. So basically the list of songs is about 3 pages long, but if there's anything that you remember that you really loved let me know and I'll add it onto the list if it isn't already there!

This week we have:

This was used in a play at my school and I was on backstage duty, I had to wait for the"He drinks the whiskey drink, he drinks the vodka drink" line to know when to start moving things around!

And of course we can never forget the way that only cool people listened to Fatboy Slim (and I absolutely adored this music video and spent an afternoon glued to MTV so I could see it once!)



And of course there is Radiohead. Maybe this was the start of the emo-mindset? All I know is that I spent several of my teenage years (when I wasn't pretending to like boybands or listening to angry music on the Night Zoo while hiding under the covers to muffle the sound from my headphones) identifying very strongly with this song!



Anyone got any particualr memories of these three?

Happy Thursday!

Don't fish if you don't want to catch anything

This post is partly a rant. I'm sorry but there are some things that have been bugging me lately:

A while ago a friend of mine sent me an email asking me to critique something she had done. i thought that what she had done was awful and just... it sucked. So after a few hours of getting advice from a few people around me as to what to say to her, I sent a carefully worded reply where I basically said that she was very creative, but it's not my style and I suggested a few things to make it a bit more... I think accessible was the word I used.

Either way I am very aware that I am fussy, people have very different tastes and I do think it's good for people to experiment a little bit because sometimes the things that work are quite surprising and are only found by trial and error and experimenting.

That was the last I've heard from her. And from what I gather from the other people she asked for advice is that she thought that her 'experiment' was awesome and everyone else dutifully told her so, so I have been removed because I'm not sticking to the script! It's not like I was mean or anything...

Seriously, if you ask for my opinion, don't be surprised if that's what I give you! And if you're just fishing for compliments, then say so and I'll be nice! And I'm not being silly - if I do something I'm proud of, I will call people over and say "Look what I did! Isn't it awesome?" not "what do you think of [my geranium garden]?" or whatever. Geranium, Pelargonium, tomayto tomahto....

Next up, is the age old "I put something out on the Internet, how on earth was I supposed to know that anyone could access it?" rant. so I started a blog in 2006, and 've become rather fond of it I've considered making a new one and using fake names and writing fictitious stuff to throw people off my true identity and blah blah blah, but I just don't want to. I like this blog.

I accept the fact that I'm putting things out there that can be quite personal, and at the same time I don't often write anything that I wouldn't say out loud. This blog is not a secret look into the inner workings of my mind. Those are mostly private and occasionally shared with very close friends, if I ever get around to acknowledging them in the first place. I try and avoid talking about people much if they don't ok it first and if I do I try and avoid using names or too many details that could 'expose' them.

Fair enough. At the same time, I like my privacy. I deal with a lot of different people on a daily basis and a lot of that is in a vaguely professional context. I don't really want everyone I've ever met reading about what I do on my weekends. You follow?

And so I was checking out my statcounter history this morning to find that someone had used a comment that someone who reads my blog had left on facebook (which is fast becoming the bane of my existence) and used it to google my blog.

If you want to read my blog and you know me in real life, then you should know that while I don't broadcast the URL from the rooftops, it's not really a big secret. So why not just ask me? Let me know that you're reading this/ want to read this? It's only polite. There's not much you'll get from here that you wouldn't get from a normal conversation with me anyway, but I think that 'sneaking around' trying to find someones blog is akin to trying to read someone's diary, which is totally dumb when I would have given you the address anyway.

What do you guys think? Are you ok with people you know reading about you? Or do you keep your identity top-secret?

Introducing... Norbert!

I'm afraid I've been a bit slack in concluding the super-awesome Name That Cactus Competition. Priorities start shifting when begging for large amounts of money become the main focus of the entire lab (fingers crossed that we get it!). Anyway, as I'm sure you can see from the poll on the right, by a totally democratic process, the cactus has been named Norbert! And just in case you didn't believe that we would follow through:

He's been tagged and everything!

Special mention goes to Hannah and Henno for their choices of Reuben McGarrige and Gulliver respectively. It was pretty close!

Of course, the glory all goes to Po, for suggesting the winning name, and as such we must give her TEN POINTS and of course discuss her awesomeness!

I will not mention the awesomeness until I've got the others locked into the lab with me (the weird thing about postgrads is that you mention 'writing' and they vanish and you have to coax them out from under their beds with donut crumbs and the promise of free food... It's almost as bad as the postgrad reaction to words like 'statistics'; 'graduate' and 'what will you do when you've finished?') although I don't think it'll be that difficult!

In the meantime, as promised, Po, I give you TEN POINTS and a group hug:

We couldn't find a photo of Po, so you'll have to use your imagination!

Yet another random encounter at the gym

It was a little known fact that George liked to plant daffodils in his free time. He also liked to play with kittens and experiment with accessories**.

I seem to have random encounters a lot! Anyway I'm still busy begging for money, but I thought I had to share this story with you guys!

There is a group of bodybuilders that go to the gym around the same time as me. I try to avoid them, as they scare me a little bit and at one stage one of them mimicked what I was doing from across the gym, which made me rather annoyed and freaked out. I worked next door to a gym for a year or so, so I knew a lot of body-builders and they were usually quite cool people, but I also learned how to tell which point they were at in the steroid-cycle quite often and you DON'T want to mess with someone that size who's in the cranky phase...

So anyway I was at the gym last night, keeping to myself, and I saw them. It's one huge (and rather ugly) guy with his entourage of three or four others who seem desperate to look like him, and his girlfriend/wifey. I went to a different area because they scare me and later on when I went back downstairs to the change rooms the main entourage guy stopped me.

I was mildly annoyed that I had to take my earphones out, and I was rather tired and hoping it wouldn't turn into an insult-slinging session. So you can imagine my reaction when he introduced himself, said they'd seen me around and all been really impressed with my progress, and to keep it up! Then he shook my hand and they left.

I was totally floored, and I'm still a little bit in shock about the whole thing! But at the same time it was pretty awesome to get a compliment so totally out of the blue like that!

**not my picture. Don't even know the guy. Don't beat me up!

When I grow up

I want to be Neko Case...




I'm all out of words, been applying for funding all day and I probably won't get it because I skipped a degree and therefore have all the beurocrats scratching their heads in frustration over which box to tick...

Word to the wise

Word of advice: don't be me. Weird things happen to me and to those around me (IF I happen to be there)...

So anyway, after an awesome Christmas in July celebration on Friday (being in the southern hemisphere, our Christmas is boiling hot and eating Turkey and pudding is unpleasant - we do it anyway - so we celebrate it in winter as well!) I dragged myself off to work on Saturday morning.

It was a quiet shift, made interesng by the fact that we had the world's cutest puppy looking for a home, and it stayed with me all morning ion order to be more visible to potential owners. It was exhausted from crying all night (missing brothers and sisters I assume) and so quite often someone would hold it and it would fall asleep and they would sort of look at it and melt. As for me, I was a big pile of goo by the end of my shift!

At the same time I was working on some nuclear physics problems I have to solve in order to get the people in the radioactive science department (name of department, not a description) to let me use their equipment. I asked the vet if he could help, but after about half an hour of brainstorming he ran off and got his old textbook. Bearing in mind that he studied at the only veterinary science usiversity in the country, which happens to be bilingual, I guess it shouldn't have surprised me as much as it did that the book was in Afrikaans.

The vet is fluent, and I'm not bad, but between us it took about an hour to find the right chapter and once we had we were pretty useless, so we played with the puppy instead! I'm hoping to get a chance to talk to a physicist friend of my parents tomorrow or so and get some help there.

After all that I went off to Bobbi Brown and had my makeup done (the staff were being evaluated or something and I'd been invited along to guinea-pig) which was a lot of fun as usual! And from there I headed off to a birthday party. This was also awkward as I knew very few people (I think I had met the birthday girl once before) and the music was so loud that we were limited to talking to the people right next to us, rather than the table. Birthday Girl was quite annoyed that we weren't mingling, but she wouldn't understand that a big group was impossible at those volumes!

I met a few cool people, heard some really dodgy jokes, caught up with La and giggled at the male models on FTV and the random camera angles they use, and found myself confused as to why on earth the bathrooms are at the top of some really steep stairs... Towards the end I had included myself into one of the dodgier in-jokes, with my friends apologising profusely for exposing me to such awful guys (not realising that I was giving as good as I got because I'm pretty used to that level of humour - we're biologists for heaven's sakes!) and giggling helplessly.

And then I wound up spending half an hour chatting to a pretty cool guy. I was completely thrown five minutes later when he took my hands, stared into my eyes and asked me out. Of course I couldn't hear him so I said "WHAT?" and he had to repeat himself about three times before I said "WHA-Oh!"

So before The Date I visited La and we were panicking about the whole situation, while shrieking with laughter at the fact that the guy she was working with was wearing a thong (under white pants) and reliving the dodgier stories from the night before, only to look up and see BOTH my bosses had come to get movies. With their kids. And they were looking mildly freaked out!

For the record, it wasn't all that bad, I had fun. Which I guess is why you should give people a chance before freaking out about spending time with them!

And I did Tai Chi this mornign and there was no instructor so we basically went through all the forms, so I got to join in the 24 and 42 hand forms! It was insane, there's so much going on and htere were some high kicks and I fell over a lot, but I also had a bunch of the advanced students helping me so it was a lot of fun!

Lazy eye... lazy tongue... lazy leg?

So Tai Chi was totally awesome as usual again last night! I may have scared the teacher a bit because he asked me after class if I was enjoying Tai Chi and I think my enthusiasm may have scared him slightly...

Anyway after making walking a little bit more complicated we finally learned some new steps because one of the beginner guys did something I can't pronounce that included aspects of Tai Chi and so he was getting bored and asked the teacher and i joined in. I can't remember past the first two steps but it was fun after doing the same 5 or so for a week...

The other interesting part was watching the teacher prioritising students. Prioritising is a bad word for it, but basically he would ignore the people who were there for the first time (I sidestepped this issue during my first lesson by asking questions ALL the time!) or the people who weren't trying too hard. So basically the people next to me were doing things upside down or backwards or missing steps entirely and he let it slide, and just told them to make sure they were expressing themselves and to try and 'feel the energy' and other abstract concepts.

The new guy who is totally better than me was picked on for not making his stance stable enough (I was picked on for that as well, but not as much) and I was corrected for the tiniest things like how I held my head or if my hands were too far apart or if my toes pointed in or not. This suited me well because I'm really loving the way that it's slow enough for me to really concentrate on getting each step right.

Anyway the whole point was, when we were walking I was stopped because whenever I balanced on y left leg and then stepped out with my right, he could hear my right foot landing. One a wooden floor! bearing in mind that the stance is something like this: (you start on the back foot and step out transferring your weight to the front foot once it's in position)Do you see why he might hear something when i put my foot down (and said foot is wearing running shoes with thick soles which doesn't help I don't think).

As it happens when I start on my right foot there's no problem, so basically my left leg isn't strong enough to control my entire body, complete with shifting centre of gravity until I'm ready to stand on my right leg. Weird.

So now I spend many hours doing this:

But just on my left leg :)

As long as I dont end up like this guy from Lady in the Water...

On the plus side I wore my new black and pink boots today and everyone has loved them! And according to one of the masters students I was speaking to this smorning, gravitating to pink things is a sign of change. And I think change is a good thing!

Here's a photo from my phone because I'm too lazy to find a real camera and I know that if I dont post a picture I may be lynched!

when the world gets too confusing, just live in the past!

It's Tai Chi night! I'm so excited! Really, I just did a little happy-dance in my chair. I never thought I'd get that excited over it, particularly when you only started doing Tai Chi in order to loosen up Pilatesised muscles...

Anyway, last night I was looking through a cupboard for an old camera box for Luke (long story and he can tell it) when I came across my old diary from when I was in high school. I used to be a total diary-geek and kept several, the first being pastel shades of purple, with scented pages and a lock that was amazingly easy to force open...

This one is slightly less awful looking, bright blue in a gellish cover that's a bit squishy and has flowers and pastic crystal thingies on it that sparkle. and I think I got it shortly before I stopped writing a diary so it's mostly empty. From the few entries in it I learned a few things about myself:

• my handwriting used to be HORRIBLE! How the heck my teachers ever managed to understand my work baffles me!
• I still feel like nothing much has changed, I'm the same person I was 10 years ago and so on, but reading through the old entries taught me that I definitely am not that much like my teenaged self! I think it's a good thing!
• I was not a very nice person.
• My spelling has improved dramatically! I used to be appaling and write things like 'sux' and 'RULEZ' and ;get with' and other things that make me cringe! I was also a big fan of writing in capital letters whenever I freaked out.
• I really loved multicoloured pens!

Anyway to illustrate just how far I've come (and to make you all giggle at the inanity of me at 16) I will provide you all with some excerpts:

I wrote a really bad essay fo Afrikaans, but Mev R-T loved it. It was al about trusting my friends when I was scared or some crap like that. Now it's going in the school magazine** which sux. The only one that was kitscher was someone who wrote about "Die lewe is soos 'n toffie"*** which was all about her puppy called Toffy who died and that life can be sweet like a toffee, but sometimes it's just really hard to chew."

"Since the last round of concerts I'm' really loving music. It sux bcuz I know I can't have it as a career bcuz I suck. I'm playing in 5th pos now. It HURTS!"

"He's such a loser! I mean he's not much older than me and he already has GREY HAIR and he's just a total LOSER. And he uses HEAD AND SHOULDERS**** and he LEFT IT IN THE SHOWER! and I totally tripped over it like 6 times, and he STARED at me like the whole way through lunch. And people knew he was coming to stay with us so I have to figure out what to tell them. Maybe I'll just say I didn't see much of him? I mean he was so BLATANT."

"Went to movies with G tonight and ran into KD. He invited me to a party tonight but I didn't go. It was just kinda late notice and I have like nothing to wear. I woulda liked to go tho, too bad KD's in boarding school and I totally never see him."

At the same time there are some entries about the holiday I spent volunteering at a preschool for kids with disabilities and how powerful and amazing the experience was. So maybe I wasn't a total loss!

It makes me sad that I've lost a lot of the innocence of the time, but also really glad that I've grown up a little bit!

**yearbook

***life is like a toffee

****anti-dandruff shampoo