Autumnal illness

Just a quick moan - yesterday I woke up feeling ill and mildly feverish, but got better as the day went on. Today, I woke up feeling refreshed, but my body temperature seems to be creeping up sneakily above normal and I feel worse as the day goes on.
I'm demonstrating for a 1st year undergraduate practical tomorrow, so I may catch yet something else to make me feel more ill. Or on the bright side, maybe I've already caught it all and can spread pathogens around them instead - in which case, my job on monday (yet more teaching) will be easier as everyone will be too ill to turn up.

I think it's karma for the many years of never being ill without really appreciating my good health.

retraction

Remember I said in my last post that I thought my friends were being optimistic? I take it all back.
I think I'll just hide in my lab and avoid putting my foot into things.

T_T vs ^_^

Originally, this entry was going to be an out-pouring of annoyance, as everything has been going wrong work-wise this week. But when I logged into the homepage of my blog I noticed that several of my friends have been very prolific and updated their blogs very frequently this week. Being a nosy person by nature, I spent a little while catching up with their news via the medium of internet blogging. Having done so, I found that my mood had lifted considerably as they all seem optimistic and up-beat. It feels as if a few worries and minor burdens have been lifted off my mind.

My friend once told me that I can be rather presumptous, as I worry a lot when making decisions as to how they might affect other people, yet in reality, what I say or do is not that important. Similarly, I worry too much about friends and don't give them enough credit - they're perfectly capable of looking after themselves! I agree, yet it's something embedded into my nature. Perhaps because in the past I've made a lot of decisions and carried out actions without considering properly the feelings of the people I love, and so now I'm over-cautious. But reading my friends' entries now, I feel much re-assured.

But, back to my original moan - my department is a building site. You can't step out of the lab without having to dodge people hoisting big -80 degree C freezers up (and back down) the stairs, builders in yellow jackets and hard hats, people with clipboards wandering around. The lab water supplies and fume hood ventilators work intermittantly. To get to our growth rooms by the botanic gardens we have to go right round another building site, and the growth rooms themselves keep malfunctioning. My plants are being heated to rainforest conditions or being plunged into darkness for days on end, and retaliating by dying as soon as I let even a whiff of virus near them. The portable equipment keeps going walkies and I have to track them down by wandering lab-to-lab and asking for news. On the rare occasions when nothing's broken down and everything I need is around, I still can't do my own work because those are inevitably the days when I have to supervise the undergraduates working in my lab and I daren't leave them on their own for long.

How am I supposed to finish my PhD?!! Let alone dedicate time to finding a new job. I spend my rare free evenings at the gym when I have the last dregs of energy, and collapsed face down on my bedroom floor when I don't.

And my last cheque came last month. But so did my college bill.

I accept food parcels in lieu of sympathy.

michaelmas term

It's the Saturday before Full term, and so the roads in town are grid-locked. On most street corners there are groups of lost-looking students and family members either admiring the architecture or examining an upside-down city map. Unfortunately they tend to stop suddenly, so that people behind them slam into them, or decide to set off immediately without checking for cars or cyclists. And of course there are the new cyclists, rather lacking sense of direction and sense of balance, and also the sense of their brakes.

I nearly got run over by a cyclist yesterday. Well, wobbled over. It was a little like an old-fashioned comedy clip, Laurel and Hardy style - I had already stopped to let the cyclist past, and she was only going at about 3 mph. But for some reason she wobbled straight for me, and only by twisting round at the last moment did I avoid having tyre marks up the front of my coat.
Having avoided that, I then proceeded to be crushed in Sainsbury's, dodging backpacks and baskets. These days, I feel my blood pressure rising the moment I step across the threshold of Sainsbury's.

Start of a new academic year. Looks like it's time to stock up on the aspirin.

lost in translation

I've been browsing the internet looking for inspiration for birthday cakes. One of the websites I quite like is leisure-cat.com, which has a lot of 'Hong-Kong style' recipes. As such though, everything is in Chinese, and although I can read Chinese, it takes me a long time to do so - I find English much easier. I also find it difficult to work out what certain ingredients are, as the Chinese terms are unfamiliar. I decided to let Google translate some of the pages into English for me, with comical results.

The chinese for gelatine (魚膠片) was literally translated into 'Fish film', and that for white chocolate (白古力) was 'Gu Li Bai' (the recipe has shortened the term for chocolate, using a widely accepted less formal term, but the Google dictionary was therefore unable to find a translation, giving the phonetics of the phrase instead).

As for the actual instructions - instead of 'beat the egg yolks with an eggbeater. Then add the milk and beat well', Google got 'eggbeater playing with egg yolk, adding fresh milk again'.
Similarly, 'beat the cream until peaks form' (將淡忌廉打至8成企身 - which is a rather cryptic way of putting it), become the even more cryptic 'Will be light cream into a fight to 8 who are standing', whilst 'pour the mousse into the mould on top of the cake already placed inside and solidify in the fridge' is now 'Qing has been placed into the mold piece of cake into the refrigerator to snow solidification'.

But I particularly liked the last phrase on the page - '為食貓有野講', a very colloquial phrase that would probably only make sense to Hong Kong Chinese. To Google, it reads as 'There are wild cats for food talk'.