a worthy competitor

Due to the lack of other fourth-year PhD students to compete with, my lab mate and I have decided to compete with phd comics' Cecilia, who is also thinking about writing up her thesis. Given that Cecilia is an American (and we all know how long PhDs in the USA take) we're going to be really gutted if we lose to her (especially since she's imaginary).

In addition, my lab-mate and I are competing against each other. Whoever loses buys the other a pint. It would be buying each other a pub dinner, but as we have no job lined up as yet, and our funding has run out, we decided to make it a more economical prize.

Hopefully we won't die of thirst first.

the next generation

I just found out that my oldest friend is pregnant! And not just pregnant, but 8 months pregnant! How come it's been so long since I last talked to her? We have communicated by sms, but that bit of news was omitted....

Wow. I still remember having sleepovers at her house with the clown nightlight in her room so it wouldn't be completely dark - and being more scared of the clown when I needed to get up in the middle of the night. I babysat her tamagochi and her guinea-pig when she went on holiday to spain. I remember being mildly grossed out when we found out she was going to have a little brother (we were ten years old by then and thought our parents were ancient). I remember when that little brother was in a cot. And now she has a cot in her room for her own baby.

She says it's payback time for her brother - after all those years of babysitting him, he has to babysit for her now. He's only 14 though, so it might be another 2 years before he's legally allowed to babysit for her on his own.

I have other friends who have had babies, and the number of children belonging to my generation of my family seems to grow at an alarming rate. But somehow this is harder to take in. Perhaps it's because I only have a month to get used to the idea before the bump turns into an actual baby, or perhaps it's because I remember being seven years old with my friend. And the screams she made when we cycled into a (parked) car and scraped her knee. She didn't scream when she actually scraped it - she screamed because the antiseptic her mum put on stung so much.

But I think I'm looking forward to being back in manchester and saying hi to the new arrival. Perhaps I can teach him/her all the naughty tricks we did then?

the last of the fourth year students

Aaargh
I'm officially the last one of my batch of phd students not to have submitted their thesis!! And I haven't even left the lab yet.
I'm hovering between panicking and complacency now that I'm the last one - I can't be any more last than last. Except I know that people who started after me are also starting to write up.

Oh and yes. I finally set up my cantab address. Not that I'll be leaving anytime soon.

Wallace and Gromit rise again

I watched Nick Parks newest Wallace and Gromit short last night - A Matter of Loaf and Death (cue appropriately dramatic and scary music).I love Wallace and Gromit, the writers have a brilliantly wry and British sense of humour - and as my friend points out, they actually create a storyline which works without taking itself too seriously. The amount of attention to detail and the painstaking effort required to film it frame by frame is worthy of our appreciation in itself. How is it that they can convey more expression via modelling clay than most computer-generated animations seem able to do?(excepting some Disney and/or Pixar films - I won't concede all.)
The best bit for me is the waking up of Wallace scene, with a *new and improved* bakery-incorporated method of getting Wallace out of bed and into his trousers (literally). My glee amplified when the contraption played an extra starring role later in the clip.
A bit floury, very nutty and very well done.

What should have happened...

This is what I wanted to achieve with my laser capture microdissection work. This is the cross-section of a tobacco leaf. I've used the laser to remove only the upper epidermal cell layer (The section is upside down). I had to camp out for a week in a room cooled to 12 degrees Celsius, with the cooling motors making a racket in the background, to get these tissue sections.