the Daily Grind: July 2003 Archives
The last few days have been a flurry of activity whilst I batten down the proverbial hatches to prepare for my incipient departure; the stress seems almost to undermine the whole point of going away, but I have to face the fact that taking a break from work, in science particularly, is such a nightmare. Especially when your experiments are living; so much to see to, so many people to depend upon, and what is worse than having to depend on others?
Today I learned that my Aussie labmate has been to the very place I'm headed before - small Universe - and I gather it's very beautiful. That's really reassuring; I just hope it's half as hot as he says it is; I'm a bit of a heat monkey. Warning: catharsis: fUUUUuuUUUUUUuuuuuuuuck! So much to do - grrr! And I miss most of the Cambridge film festival, so no Goodbye Lenin!, Petites Coupures or Veronica Guerin for me (and Cate Blanchett will be there tonight - in fact, right now! @*!&±%). At least I saw Être et Avoir; so very touching. Sigh.
Greetings, planet earth.
The last week ended with me at Wimbledon, catching up on some good games of tennis (Isn't it all so exciting at the moment? Some new faces in this year's semis, and Serena got her own back on Henin-Hardenne - wohoo!), I had a busy weekend that included both work and pleasure (also during which I read all of the latest Harry Potter, on a whim, despite having vowed not to buy it), went running in rain so heavy that I looked pretty much naked in my white shirt, simultaneously witnessing the violent collapse of our two months of perfect weather, streamed the two-hour long Apple Keynote speech at the expense of a talk that I had to give on Tuesday (which I completed just in time, and to my own satisfaction; the keynote was worth it), buggered up one of my knees whilst running on a drier day, ate chocolate digestive biscuits nearly to the point of being ill, was nearly blinded by the painful myopia of almost seven solid hours of careful, tedious, closeup analyses of my latest experimental samples with a pair of unwieldy tweezers, and managed to avoid writing a single word about it on here. Which is why I had to relate it all in a single sentence.
There appears to be a point of balance between which one finds the time, or is at least comfortable enough, to sit down and weave the tapestries of inanity that constitute our online spheres. Judging from my attempt at a summary, I seem to have been madly dashing around at the busier end of the comatose-to-nuclear fission scale.
Nice. It makes time fly. And I was just photographed in a novel way - à la American beauty - but covered in banknotes instead of rose petals. Nothing remotely sordid (Mena Suvari was naked)... just playing around with concepts for the photographic scavenger hunt, 26 things, a follow on from the May Day project. I'm hoping to get some of these done in Poland. Got a site and bandwidth to spare - why not take part?
