Or at least it would be, except that I went home, but my parents were both elsewhere having adventures, hopefully ones worth writing home about!
Last Friday lunchtime found me frantically trying to finish a DNA extraction by 2pm, in order to get home, pack a weekend bag for myself, one husband and six rats, and brave the M25 and M4 on a Friday afternoon, all to get to Bristol by 6pm.
You see, what started as a Sunday trip to Cheltenham to go to a rat show snowballed into a long weekend of fun and frolics as soon as my sister in law Kate got wind of our westward travels.
After sitting in traffic for 3 hours, we finally emerged triumphant in Bristol city centre, just in time for the Emotional Brilliance launch party at LUSH cosmetics. It was lovely to spend some quality time with Kate, and see all the lovely LUSH girls who hosted my hen party back in April (yes yes, blog posts on hen party AND wedding sorely lacking!). Needless to say, much fun was had and much money was spent, and we left the party at 8pm smelling lovely.
Bit early to leave a party? Well yes, but it was only the first party of the evening, followed by a trip to the Fleece, a lovely little live music venue in Bristol, to see the marvellous Jim Moray and friends, both his and ours, including his lovely sister Jackie Oates, who has been an inspiration to me since my pre-teens.
This isn't going to turn into a music review, because I admire all these people way too much to write anything objective about them and don't know all the fancy terms you're supposed to use, Suffice to say Jim's eclectic blend of folk and many other genres I don't know the names of was at times haunting, uplifting and occasionally comical, but always a winner.
The real treat for me though was the support act. This came in the form of a very talented young lady named Chloe Foy. I'd met Chloe nearly 2 years ago when she was at school with my stepbrother, and had kept half an eye on the progression of her music since then, but had never seen her live. She, and the two musicians accompanying her, effortlessly blended contemporary lyrics with a sound that was at once fresh and somehow timeless, and were absolutely beautiful to listen to. I felt both awe and envy at the fact that a 20 year old could be so talented and have such a gorgeous collection of songs under her belt. Definitely one to watch.
Anyway, enough not-quite-reviewing of very talented people. On Saturday I discovered WINE. Generally speaking, drinking alcohol doesn't do much for me. It makes me sleepy at best, and obnoxious at worst. I've never liked wine, and have never felt the need to change my mind. So on Saturday night when the in-laws cracked open several bottles from their recent trip to France, I was fairly unbothered. Two sips in I was giggling like a toddler tearing up paper, and after a glass and a half I found myself relieved of my washing up duties as my mother-in-law feared for her crockery. In my defence, I still managed to win Pictionary.
Needless to say, I was feeling a bit fragile when my alarm went off at 7.30 on Sunday morning. Bleary eyed, I bundled the ratlings and myself into the car and set off for the National Fancy Rat Society summer cup, leaving a sleepy husband to catch up with me later.
This was my first experience of spending a whole day at a rat show. There are two classes of judging - varieties and pet. I had a rat entered in each, and nervously set about clipping claws and smoothing fur at a small table amid the hustle and bustle of a dozen odd breeders preparing their prize winners. Eventually I conceded that I was hopeless at clipping claws, and picked up the courage to seek some help.
It was a long day, but a lovely one, with various family members, including both siblings and my niece, showing up to cuddle some rats and drink tea with me, and my sister declaring after meeting Jackie from Rat out of Hell rescue that she had "a moral obligation to go home and tell her husband about the 60 odd rats needing homes." My girls both came 3rd in their categories, despite Figs who was entered in varieties having "pale points, white feet, creased ears and a dirty tail" at which point I decided varieties class was shallow and I would enter pet class from now on, because I can't take criticism.
I really wanted to enter the agility contest (a mini assault course) but had spent all my change on tea and cake so couldn't run to the 50p entry fee, and Jack was reluctant to let me enter any of our rats in case they embarrassed themselves. A solution presented itself when Jackie handed me one of her rescue girls that she'd entered, allowing me to do the course with a rat that wasn't mine, saving my rats the embarrassment and myself 50p. Needless to say she did the course in record time, attracted the attention of a new owner, and was christened Nelly. Win win win.
Sunday, 29 July 2012
Saturday, 30 April 2011
Science communication
So, really not very good at this blogging lark - I'm now 7 months into my PhD studies and 4 months into planning my wedding!!
The PhD has been an interesting ride so far - I'm working on a wheat ear fungus called Fusarium culmorum, but modelling the infection in a little cress type plant called Arabidopsis - it has a quicker life cycle and is far easier to study at the genetic level - which is also susceptible to Fusarium infection in its floral tissue.
"Susceptible to Fusarium infection in its floral tissue". I spent the first 5 months trying to get the fungus to successfully infect Arabidopsis floral tissue. It's a published method, so must have been done successfully in the past (by my group in fact, cue awkward meetings with supervisor) but I was darned if I was getting it to work on my plants, in my growth room. I tried everything, from lowering the temperature to infecting the plants earlier to giving the fungus special nutrients to help it grow, with varying degrees of success. I'm still working on it - it's working, sort of, but not with high enough infection levels to get a decent sized tissue sample for metabolomic analysis.
I got lots of helpful comments from friends and family "well then surely you've cured the disease if your plants aren't infecting?" which made me realise that I maybe wasn't communicating my research very well. This irritated me, because Science Communication is something that I'm very passionate about and would like a career in some day, and I felt I had failed if I couldn't get my own mother to understand the point of my research, and that the cress plant was just a 'model' - it's wheat that we're trying to protect against Fusarium.
The problem is, not all Science is equal(ly interesting) in the eye of the lay person. This became very clear at the student symposium in March - an event when all the PhD students at Rothamsted Research made posters and gave presentations to showcase their projects. Topics ranged from control strategies against invasive ladybirds, to whether sick bees have altered learning capability, to the epigenetics of defence priming against Pseudomonas to....oh sorry, did I loose you at bees and ladybirds?
And herein lies the problem - some research areas just seem more lay person friendly. Nearly everyone with some level of interest in ecology will know that honey bee populations are declining, and that a foreign ladybird named the harlequin is eating our natives. And even if they don't, a simple explanatory sentence, such as the previous one, will suffice as a basic introduction. And people generally like honey bees and ladybirds. Fungal diseases of wheat are, on the other hand, an acquired taste - very acquired in fact, since many produce poisonous toxins. The fact that fungal diseases are the leading cause of yield loss in wheat, and that wheat is one of the most widespread and important food crops in the world, should get people pricking their ears - but without the degree of anthropomorphism assigned to bees, butterflies, ladybirds and dare I say it, even aphids - it's a tough topic to get people interested in.
Oh dear, this is beginning to sound like a bit of a bitter rant about how easy entomologists (those who study insects) have it! Yes, perhaps I am a little jealous, having chosen my fungal project over one on parasitoid wasps (bona fide bodysnatchers!), and pining after the aphids I used to work on at Birmingham. Mostly though I'm just dancing around my own head looking for ways to use my research as a springboard into science communication.
Until then, I'll stick to judging primary school competitions and telling people about stuff I don't personally work on - no one said I had to communicate MY science, right??
The PhD has been an interesting ride so far - I'm working on a wheat ear fungus called Fusarium culmorum, but modelling the infection in a little cress type plant called Arabidopsis - it has a quicker life cycle and is far easier to study at the genetic level - which is also susceptible to Fusarium infection in its floral tissue.
"Susceptible to Fusarium infection in its floral tissue". I spent the first 5 months trying to get the fungus to successfully infect Arabidopsis floral tissue. It's a published method, so must have been done successfully in the past (by my group in fact, cue awkward meetings with supervisor) but I was darned if I was getting it to work on my plants, in my growth room. I tried everything, from lowering the temperature to infecting the plants earlier to giving the fungus special nutrients to help it grow, with varying degrees of success. I'm still working on it - it's working, sort of, but not with high enough infection levels to get a decent sized tissue sample for metabolomic analysis.
I got lots of helpful comments from friends and family "well then surely you've cured the disease if your plants aren't infecting?" which made me realise that I maybe wasn't communicating my research very well. This irritated me, because Science Communication is something that I'm very passionate about and would like a career in some day, and I felt I had failed if I couldn't get my own mother to understand the point of my research, and that the cress plant was just a 'model' - it's wheat that we're trying to protect against Fusarium.
The problem is, not all Science is equal(ly interesting) in the eye of the lay person. This became very clear at the student symposium in March - an event when all the PhD students at Rothamsted Research made posters and gave presentations to showcase their projects. Topics ranged from control strategies against invasive ladybirds, to whether sick bees have altered learning capability, to the epigenetics of defence priming against Pseudomonas to....oh sorry, did I loose you at bees and ladybirds?
And herein lies the problem - some research areas just seem more lay person friendly. Nearly everyone with some level of interest in ecology will know that honey bee populations are declining, and that a foreign ladybird named the harlequin is eating our natives. And even if they don't, a simple explanatory sentence, such as the previous one, will suffice as a basic introduction. And people generally like honey bees and ladybirds. Fungal diseases of wheat are, on the other hand, an acquired taste - very acquired in fact, since many produce poisonous toxins. The fact that fungal diseases are the leading cause of yield loss in wheat, and that wheat is one of the most widespread and important food crops in the world, should get people pricking their ears - but without the degree of anthropomorphism assigned to bees, butterflies, ladybirds and dare I say it, even aphids - it's a tough topic to get people interested in.
Oh dear, this is beginning to sound like a bit of a bitter rant about how easy entomologists (those who study insects) have it! Yes, perhaps I am a little jealous, having chosen my fungal project over one on parasitoid wasps (bona fide bodysnatchers!), and pining after the aphids I used to work on at Birmingham. Mostly though I'm just dancing around my own head looking for ways to use my research as a springboard into science communication.
Until then, I'll stick to judging primary school competitions and telling people about stuff I don't personally work on - no one said I had to communicate MY science, right??
Sunday, 24 January 2010
He decidido....
This week has been MENTAL. Monday afternoon I drove to my cousin Sarah's hotel in Hertfordshire, where she was very kindly putting me up while I visited my two potential PhD supervisors at Rothamsted. The journey took HOURS as I was held up on the A14 by not one, not two, but THREE broken down lorries, one of which I nearly broke even more in my haste to get off a roundabout. Finally arrived at the Hardwicke Arms, just in time for a catch up chat, some drinks, a burger and off to bed for a sleepless night worrying about what the next day would bring.
The next day brought an awful lot of fun. I arrived at 10.30am, parked my little flowermobil and met potential supervisor number 1; David, and very quickly got down to business discussing Robert Downy Jr's role in the new Sherlock Holmes film. The other team members and head of department gradually trickled in for cups of tea and the conversation turned to, err, more relevant things like what on earth I was doing there, what the project might involve and the direction in which I'd like to take it. Turns out the project would involve a fair amount of identifying dead insect samples from previous years' trapping, mingled with some time in a balloon with a big net and a stint over at Cardiff doing the molecular side of things, identifying aphid parasitoids with the aid of some very sexy molecular techniques. The guys were lovely, talked very easilly (although for some reason I stuttered through Biology and RAMBLED through folk music, films and the best way to entertain 2 year olds) and took me for lunch, which I have yet to pay them back for, at a super good Thai restaurant/pub in the village of Harpenden. I also had a tour of the farm, where I would be doing my own sampling, the labs, where I might keep pet aphids, and the manor, where the PhD students live in catered accomodation and, from what I can tell, pretend to be freshers. The day was really relaxed, the guys were super lovely and very human (at least by academic standards) and I came away feeling like, although I might not know a great deal about parasitoids, and neither did they, we'd get on really well and I'd have no problems fitting in.
I'd brought a ridiculous amount of reading with me, so that night I settled down in the bar at the Hardwicke and tried to plod through plant defence papers for the next day, my head still full of aphid-parasitoid interactions and my tummy still full of Thai food and Sarah's sausage and mash. Needless to say, I didn't sleep awfully well on Tuesday night. I hadn't finished the reading (mostly because I'd attracted interest from the locals who, in turn, had inticed me into a debate about Bt crops), I was overtired, and due to excessive time on the road every time I closed my eyes I was behind the wheel on the A14.
Wednesday saw an even earlier start with me arriving at Rothamsted at 10am, to be met with the first of FOUR power point presentations that I sat through that day. The supervisor, Kim, and co-supervisor Jason (who I have mutual connections with at Birmingham) were clearly very excited about the project and keen to impart on me everything they had discovered so far, and I in turn was surprised to find myself making feasable suggestions about the direction the research could go in. It helped that I already have a background in plant defence genetics from my final year lab project, so although I have avoided plants, fungi and molecular biology for the best part of my academic career, I was surprised to discover that I knew, and cared, about the things they were discussing. The other 3 presentations were from 2 PhD students and a post doc, with whom I had lunch and spent most of my day. It gave me a chance to ask a few questions about the supervisors which obviously I couldn't do in front of them, engage in a bit of student banter and to some extent guage the quality of life of a Rothamsted PhD student. They all seemed pretty happy, and almost human. Kim, it transpired, was rooting for me to do her project despite having another candidate visiting the next day which meant ultimately the decision was up to me. Shucks.
Sarah had Wednesday off so when I had finished at Rothamsted I drove back to her house for an afternoon off with Chinese take-away, her over excited dog and Pulp Fiction. I opened a fortune cookie and it read "today is the tomorrow you are searching for". OK. I would like to get something straight. I don't read horoscopes, or particularly believe in or care about fortune telling of any sort. I'm very much one for making my own decisions and I guess I see God as fairly non interventionalist. However, when it comes to big life decisions that I'm having trouble making, I pray. This was a big life decision. I had prayed. Whether God was even listening is a whole other kettle of fish, as is the question of whether he would choose to RSVP via a medium as ambiguous as a mass produced fortune cookie. I'm still not sure if the cookie swayed my decision, or if it made me even more careful about making it for fear of being swayed. Either way, at 4pm on Friday (my self imposed deadline) I was still nearly ready to toss a coin, except that I'm no good at that so someone would have had to do it for me.
Then Rachel finally rang. I'd been waiting to talk to Rachel since Wednesday. She's the other half of my brain, and I'm not entirely sure if I'm even capable of making a decision without first consulting her. If God has ever put anyone in my life to help guide me, that person is Rachel. Rachel isn't very convinced by fortune cookies either, but she thought I should do Kim's plant defence project. She agreed with me that it fitted in nicely with my final year lab project, and that ultimately, however much I claim to be an ecologist, I like nothing better than a nice clean lab and a good bit of sterile technique, and to grow plants and talk to them. Dead insects are just fine, but they don't talk back.
So ultimately I made my decision based on a fortune cookie and a little help from my best friend. It maybe wasn't the most sensible way to do things but it was so close that I may not ever have been able to choose by myself, and I still think parasitoid wasps are the coolest creatures on Earth. I have a phone conference tomorrow about the interview for funding, and am therefore missing Rachel's first dress fitting, which I guess is what happens when I take her advice!
This post is way too long, and I am super tired. I didn't even get on to my night out in Brum on Friday with my long lost friend Becky, the fact that I miss Matt and Tom stupid amounts having had lunch with them on Saturday, Shelley and Simon's new baby girl and equally cute 2 year old boy, or my 7 year old niece and our night in watching Hannah Montana. I suppose these are all stories for another day.
The next day brought an awful lot of fun. I arrived at 10.30am, parked my little flowermobil and met potential supervisor number 1; David, and very quickly got down to business discussing Robert Downy Jr's role in the new Sherlock Holmes film. The other team members and head of department gradually trickled in for cups of tea and the conversation turned to, err, more relevant things like what on earth I was doing there, what the project might involve and the direction in which I'd like to take it. Turns out the project would involve a fair amount of identifying dead insect samples from previous years' trapping, mingled with some time in a balloon with a big net and a stint over at Cardiff doing the molecular side of things, identifying aphid parasitoids with the aid of some very sexy molecular techniques. The guys were lovely, talked very easilly (although for some reason I stuttered through Biology and RAMBLED through folk music, films and the best way to entertain 2 year olds) and took me for lunch, which I have yet to pay them back for, at a super good Thai restaurant/pub in the village of Harpenden. I also had a tour of the farm, where I would be doing my own sampling, the labs, where I might keep pet aphids, and the manor, where the PhD students live in catered accomodation and, from what I can tell, pretend to be freshers. The day was really relaxed, the guys were super lovely and very human (at least by academic standards) and I came away feeling like, although I might not know a great deal about parasitoids, and neither did they, we'd get on really well and I'd have no problems fitting in.
I'd brought a ridiculous amount of reading with me, so that night I settled down in the bar at the Hardwicke and tried to plod through plant defence papers for the next day, my head still full of aphid-parasitoid interactions and my tummy still full of Thai food and Sarah's sausage and mash. Needless to say, I didn't sleep awfully well on Tuesday night. I hadn't finished the reading (mostly because I'd attracted interest from the locals who, in turn, had inticed me into a debate about Bt crops), I was overtired, and due to excessive time on the road every time I closed my eyes I was behind the wheel on the A14.
Wednesday saw an even earlier start with me arriving at Rothamsted at 10am, to be met with the first of FOUR power point presentations that I sat through that day. The supervisor, Kim, and co-supervisor Jason (who I have mutual connections with at Birmingham) were clearly very excited about the project and keen to impart on me everything they had discovered so far, and I in turn was surprised to find myself making feasable suggestions about the direction the research could go in. It helped that I already have a background in plant defence genetics from my final year lab project, so although I have avoided plants, fungi and molecular biology for the best part of my academic career, I was surprised to discover that I knew, and cared, about the things they were discussing. The other 3 presentations were from 2 PhD students and a post doc, with whom I had lunch and spent most of my day. It gave me a chance to ask a few questions about the supervisors which obviously I couldn't do in front of them, engage in a bit of student banter and to some extent guage the quality of life of a Rothamsted PhD student. They all seemed pretty happy, and almost human. Kim, it transpired, was rooting for me to do her project despite having another candidate visiting the next day which meant ultimately the decision was up to me. Shucks.
Sarah had Wednesday off so when I had finished at Rothamsted I drove back to her house for an afternoon off with Chinese take-away, her over excited dog and Pulp Fiction. I opened a fortune cookie and it read "today is the tomorrow you are searching for". OK. I would like to get something straight. I don't read horoscopes, or particularly believe in or care about fortune telling of any sort. I'm very much one for making my own decisions and I guess I see God as fairly non interventionalist. However, when it comes to big life decisions that I'm having trouble making, I pray. This was a big life decision. I had prayed. Whether God was even listening is a whole other kettle of fish, as is the question of whether he would choose to RSVP via a medium as ambiguous as a mass produced fortune cookie. I'm still not sure if the cookie swayed my decision, or if it made me even more careful about making it for fear of being swayed. Either way, at 4pm on Friday (my self imposed deadline) I was still nearly ready to toss a coin, except that I'm no good at that so someone would have had to do it for me.
Then Rachel finally rang. I'd been waiting to talk to Rachel since Wednesday. She's the other half of my brain, and I'm not entirely sure if I'm even capable of making a decision without first consulting her. If God has ever put anyone in my life to help guide me, that person is Rachel. Rachel isn't very convinced by fortune cookies either, but she thought I should do Kim's plant defence project. She agreed with me that it fitted in nicely with my final year lab project, and that ultimately, however much I claim to be an ecologist, I like nothing better than a nice clean lab and a good bit of sterile technique, and to grow plants and talk to them. Dead insects are just fine, but they don't talk back.
So ultimately I made my decision based on a fortune cookie and a little help from my best friend. It maybe wasn't the most sensible way to do things but it was so close that I may not ever have been able to choose by myself, and I still think parasitoid wasps are the coolest creatures on Earth. I have a phone conference tomorrow about the interview for funding, and am therefore missing Rachel's first dress fitting, which I guess is what happens when I take her advice!
This post is way too long, and I am super tired. I didn't even get on to my night out in Brum on Friday with my long lost friend Becky, the fact that I miss Matt and Tom stupid amounts having had lunch with them on Saturday, Shelley and Simon's new baby girl and equally cute 2 year old boy, or my 7 year old niece and our night in watching Hannah Montana. I suppose these are all stories for another day.
Tuesday, 12 January 2010
PhDs!!!
So last week I applied for two PhDs, one in plant pathology and one on parasitoid wasps. Parasitoid wasps are really cool. They lay their eggs in aphids, while the aphid is ALIVE and then the egg hatches and the larva EATS THE APHID ALIVE and turns it into a mummy. Cool huh?
And the plant pathology one is looking at the genes in Arabidopsis (the coolest plant ever) which confer resistance against fungal diseases of wheat.
So anyway in the last day I've had a phone interview for the plant pathology studentship AND a nomination as candidate for the other one, and they've both invited me to visit so it looks like, provided I win the funding competition, I might be able to do either one. Which is very very exciting given I've always wanted to be a research scientist!!
Downside? They're both at Rothamsted, in Hertfordshire, which is really close to the M25 and my big cousin Sarah, and really far away from Jack. When I graduated, I promised Jack that within a year I would be living in Bristol and we could start our life together properly. I was hoping to get a studentship at the agricultural station in Bristol and start a PhD Oct 2010, and if that failed do a PGCE and become a teacher.
Then the studentship disappeared, and I realised I wasn't ready to be a teacher. It's something I want to do one day, but I really want to do a PhD first, or I probably never will. So I had to reduce my promise to "we'll work something out" which makes me feel SHIT, because Jack is REALLY important to me, and having been with him 4 years, our relationship is just as much of an investment as my degree.
But I think if I stay in the Bristol area just to be near Jack and end up doing a job which has nothing to do with my degree I will end up resenting him, and that will be sad, and detrimental to our relationship in the long run, so in a wierd way by going away to do a PhD I will still be putting our relationship first. In a very wierd way.
I feel this post has taken a downward turn, having started with the amazingness of parasitoid wasps. And this is what I must remember, if I do go to Rothamsted it will be to do something amazing, which I love, and which may just save the WORLD. peace out.
And the plant pathology one is looking at the genes in Arabidopsis (the coolest plant ever) which confer resistance against fungal diseases of wheat.
So anyway in the last day I've had a phone interview for the plant pathology studentship AND a nomination as candidate for the other one, and they've both invited me to visit so it looks like, provided I win the funding competition, I might be able to do either one. Which is very very exciting given I've always wanted to be a research scientist!!
Downside? They're both at Rothamsted, in Hertfordshire, which is really close to the M25 and my big cousin Sarah, and really far away from Jack. When I graduated, I promised Jack that within a year I would be living in Bristol and we could start our life together properly. I was hoping to get a studentship at the agricultural station in Bristol and start a PhD Oct 2010, and if that failed do a PGCE and become a teacher.
Then the studentship disappeared, and I realised I wasn't ready to be a teacher. It's something I want to do one day, but I really want to do a PhD first, or I probably never will. So I had to reduce my promise to "we'll work something out" which makes me feel SHIT, because Jack is REALLY important to me, and having been with him 4 years, our relationship is just as much of an investment as my degree.
But I think if I stay in the Bristol area just to be near Jack and end up doing a job which has nothing to do with my degree I will end up resenting him, and that will be sad, and detrimental to our relationship in the long run, so in a wierd way by going away to do a PhD I will still be putting our relationship first. In a very wierd way.
I feel this post has taken a downward turn, having started with the amazingness of parasitoid wasps. And this is what I must remember, if I do go to Rothamsted it will be to do something amazing, which I love, and which may just save the WORLD. peace out.
Thursday, 7 January 2010
Sainsbury's reduced salt reduced sugar baked beans
What was I thinking? I was thinking of adding a little guilt free imbelishment to my hearty cooked breakfast. I wanted the tangy salt-sweetness of bean sauce mixed in with egg yolk and meat fat. So there I am, in the bean isle at J. Sainsbury's, trying to decide between several different brands' conventional and "reduced beans", and for some unknown reason, I chose the cheapest, most boring beans available to mankind. Far from enriching my sausage and bacon, the bean sauce seemed to add a thin veil of nothingness to everything I put in my mouth meaning, chew as I might, I could taste nothing of my "taste the difference" outdoor reared pork products. You would have thought that sainsbury's beans and sainsbury's meat would work well together, being the same brand. It's like when shampoo bottles say "for best results, follow with OUR colourmate/smoothing/balancing/curling conditioner" because we are the best, you don't need to buy anyone else. Think again people, from now on it's nothing but heinz on my free range pig.
Tuesday, 5 January 2010
2010
I was just chatting to my friend George about all the rubbish that happened for both of us in 2009, and how 2010 is going to be so much better. I may be unemployed and living with my mum, but at least I have potential, and no strings.
When I look back on 2009, I see the destruction of two friendships ( though over the last 2 days both have begun to heal), Chronic Anxiety Syndrome, hours of couselling, days and nights of uni work which sometimes amounted to nothing, and a job where I was made to feel like a bully for wanting people to achieve their best. But I also see the first home I ever truly built for myself, with a little help from Rachel :), all the amusement and sadness that comes from actually, truly keeping your own pets for the first time (as apposed to that hamster you had that your mum cleaned out) and the joy of achieving everything that I'd worked so hard for. I also learnt to grow pot plants, dye my own hair and make reasonably good cappucinos. Not bad all in all.
My life has always been made or broken by the people around me, so I'd like to aknowledge, in particular, Rachel, Jack and my parents for being frankly amazing this year, you've supported me emotionally and financially (and occasionally physically) and I couldn't have got through the year (let alone got a 1st) without you. I also wouldn't have survived without the Canvas house, who frankly saved my faith, in Christians as people, if not in God.
So on to 2010. I'm waiting to hear back on an Education Officer's post at Bristol Zoo. If I get this job, my whole life may just be able to fall into place, by which I mean I will be able to live in the same city as Jack and do a job which uses my interests, and my brain, at the same time, while still being fairly near my friends and family.
And if I don't get this job....then I don't know. I've been looking at PhD projects, but given that I didn't get a single interview last year I'm a little reluctant to apply, considering also that none of them are anywhere near Bristol, where Jack is settled in a good job with awesome colleagues. I think this year might hold some difficult choices, but in a weird way I'm excited about having the freedom to make them.
When I look back on 2009, I see the destruction of two friendships ( though over the last 2 days both have begun to heal), Chronic Anxiety Syndrome, hours of couselling, days and nights of uni work which sometimes amounted to nothing, and a job where I was made to feel like a bully for wanting people to achieve their best. But I also see the first home I ever truly built for myself, with a little help from Rachel :), all the amusement and sadness that comes from actually, truly keeping your own pets for the first time (as apposed to that hamster you had that your mum cleaned out) and the joy of achieving everything that I'd worked so hard for. I also learnt to grow pot plants, dye my own hair and make reasonably good cappucinos. Not bad all in all.
My life has always been made or broken by the people around me, so I'd like to aknowledge, in particular, Rachel, Jack and my parents for being frankly amazing this year, you've supported me emotionally and financially (and occasionally physically) and I couldn't have got through the year (let alone got a 1st) without you. I also wouldn't have survived without the Canvas house, who frankly saved my faith, in Christians as people, if not in God.
So on to 2010. I'm waiting to hear back on an Education Officer's post at Bristol Zoo. If I get this job, my whole life may just be able to fall into place, by which I mean I will be able to live in the same city as Jack and do a job which uses my interests, and my brain, at the same time, while still being fairly near my friends and family.
And if I don't get this job....then I don't know. I've been looking at PhD projects, but given that I didn't get a single interview last year I'm a little reluctant to apply, considering also that none of them are anywhere near Bristol, where Jack is settled in a good job with awesome colleagues. I think this year might hold some difficult choices, but in a weird way I'm excited about having the freedom to make them.
by way of an introduction
I'm Nelly, and this is my blog. I'm writing a blog because my friends told me to. I'm a reluctant writer, mainly because I cannot commit to writing and have a creative flare maybe once every 5 years, if that. I'll probably end up writing shopping lists, to do lists, lists of things I love about my best friend Rachel, that sort of thing. But don't expect any witty social commentary or profound insight into current affairs. That's what Simon is for (http://srbishop.blogspot.com/)
I'm in my 2nd day of unemployment. I'm still not sure why I chose now to quit my job at soho coffee co., just that I had to or I was going to end up bitter and resentful of my superiors, none of whom have a class I degrees in Biology. There we go, there's the bitterness, right there!
I think it's time to get dressed :)
I'm in my 2nd day of unemployment. I'm still not sure why I chose now to quit my job at soho coffee co., just that I had to or I was going to end up bitter and resentful of my superiors, none of whom have a class I degrees in Biology. There we go, there's the bitterness, right there!
I think it's time to get dressed :)
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