5 Things Meme

Posted on November 18, 2008 by Cath@VWXYNot?

Tagged by Dr. A

5 things I was doing 10 years ago:

1. Kicking off my PhD in Glasgow by learning l33t plasmid cloning skillz from Obiwan Kenobi my awesome PI. (Seriously. I’m good. Or rather, I was).
2. Going drinking and clubbing with students and postdocs from my institute at least once every weekend.
3. Trying to decide if I could get over the height issue and ask out this really nice guy who was about 4 inches shorter than me. (I eventually did. We went on a date which started well, but then he announced halfway through that he’d never had a girlfriend before and didn’t really want one (“but if I did, it would be you”). The last hour was rather awkward).
4. Living in student accommodation with fab roommates from England, Ireland, France, and Malaysia.
5. Learning to cook meat for the first time (undergrad roomies were mostly vegetarian and we all cooked / ate together).

Me and my fab Glasgow roommates at our 1998 Christmas party

5 things on my to-do list today:

1. The usual kitty stuff: wash / refill food and water bowls, treat Google’s chin acne (don’t ask), deal with the litter tray (aka the world’s worst lucky dip).
2. Give my boss the final report from recent awesome unbloggable workshop.
3. Leave time free to deal with inevitable urgent tasks arising from my boss’s recent 4 city trip. He’s leaving again on Thursday…
4. Play with lab’s Mac laptop to see if I like it (computer business owner friend has a used G4 that he will give me for $500, but I have to decide by tomorrow).
5. Try really really hard to find time for fun but non-urgent InaDWriMo project that keeps getting pushed back due to less fun, urgent projects (could incorporate into #4 actually. Hmm).

5 snacks I love:

1. Cheese. Any good quality cow milk cheese, or goat milk feta. But no other goat cheese. Sheep milk cheese is right out.
2. Kettle or Miss Vicky chips (honey Dijon, yoghurt and green onion, spicy Thai, salt and vinegar, black pepper and lime – love ’em all)
3. Avocado with balsamic dressing
4. Mixed roasted salted nuts
5. Oat fudge brownies from the cafe on the ground floor of my building

5 things I would do if I was a millionaire:

1. Make sure my parents and mother-in-law have enough money for a fabulous globetrotting retirement.
2. Buy my sister a house. Oh, wait, she lives in London and I’m a hypothetical millionaire, not billionaire… an apartment then.
3. Buy a sailing boat – small enough to be sailed by two people, big enough to take friends with us – and pay someone to teach me to sail it.
4. Invest enough for #5 and for our own fabulous globetrotting retirement, then give some to charity and the rest to assorted young nieces / nephews / cousins for their education.
5. Quit work and become a writer.

5 places I’ve lived: (chronological order – next stop was Vancouver)

1. Ashington, England (1977-1979 and 1981-1982)
2. Hameln, Germany (1979-1981)
3. York, England (1982 – 1995, plus various summers up to 2001)
4. Newcastle, England (1995 – 1998)
5. Glasgow, Scotland (1998 – 2002)

5 jobs I’ve had:

1. Bartender
2. Cinema usher / ticket seller and checker / popcorn shoveller
3. Employer liaison at a job centre
4. Postdoc
5. Product manager (biotech marketing)

5 (sets of) people I’ll tag: (I don’t tag individuals)

1. Anyone whose day included / will include kitty litter
2. Anyone whose breakfast included / will include cheese
3. Anyone who knows how to sail
4. Anyone who’s ever been to any of the places I’ve lived (not including Vancouver)
5. Anyone who’s ever worked in a bar or cinema

Posted in career, drunkenness, food glorious food, furry friends, meme, personal, science, silliness, technology | 17 Comments

RBO being proud of myself

Posted on November 17, 2008 by Cath@VWXYNot?
  • I got up before my alarm.
  • I made a super healthy lunch* for today and tomorrow.
  • I went to the gym early enough that I had time to do 2 rounds of circuits rather than 1.
  • I’m finally starting to feel fitter and stronger – e.g. doing more reps and/or heavier weights than before.
  • I may have made a new gym friend.
  • I have finally figured out the best structure for the meeting report I’m working on, and am now busily sorting my unordered list of bullets into something I will be proud to show my boss when he comes back from his trip tomorrow.
  • I discovered some will power and did not buy a treat to go with my coffee.
  • I logged my morning commute for bike to work week.

Yay me!

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*wholewheat pasta salad with kalamata olives, cherry tomatoes, red grapes, asparagus, feta, and balsamic dressing.

Blogger Spellcheck is suggesting calamity olives, which does not sound quite as appetising. But it might offset the cheery tomatoes from my first draft.

Posted in career, cycling, exercise, food glorious food, personal | 11 Comments

So sad

Posted on November 14, 2008 by Cath@VWXYNot?

Snapped 15 minutes ago on my phone, right outside my office.
I wonder what the story is? How angry or otherwise messed up does a person have to be to trash a musical instrument? Especially a child’s musical instrument? (For this was a very small guitar). It’s analagous to burning books, at least to me…
Posted in bad people, music, photos | 5 Comments

Rhyme time

Posted on November 14, 2008 by Cath@VWXYNot?

Following Stephen’s excellent post about writing a “lay abstract” as a short story, I shall make a second attempt at blogging the day’s events in limerick form.

Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 9 Comments

Mr E Man’s greatest hits

Posted on November 14, 2008 by Cath@VWXYNot?

Previous descriptions of my husband’s smooth moves and smooth talk were received rather well, so here are a few more!

In a taxi, heading home after I’d met his friends for the first time:

Mr E Man: “Oh, by the way, I told them all that you have a prosthetic foot.”
Me: “WHAT?? WHY????!!!!!”
Mr E Man: “Well, when you went to the bathroom they started bugging me to dance with you, and I don’t like dancing. So I told them you’ve got a club foot. But then I decided that a peg leg sounded better.”
Me: “But WHY??!!! And what did they say??!!”
Mr E Man: “Well, they stopped bugging me to dance with you. And they said ‘ooh, you can hardly tell'”.

The next time I met them, I made sure I was wearing sandals so they could see that both my feet are in fact real.

On the first anniversary of our first date:

“When I met you, I dumped all the other girls I was seeing.”

On his first visit to see my family in the UK:

(He’d already met my parents a couple of times when they visited Vancouver).

My Dad: “Several people have mistaken [friend sitting next to him in the pub] for my father, you know”.
Mr E Man: “Really? I think you look older than him”.
Dad: “Bloody colonials! Coming over here, drinking our beer, eating our food, drinking our whisky, stealing our daughters… I’ve never been so insulted in all my life!”
Mr E Man: “I find that very hard to believe”.

(I should say that my Dad has the same sense of humour as I do, loves Mr E Man, and all of the above was said in jest. Although the “drinking my beer and stealing my daughter” line gets used a lot).

During our joint speech at our wedding:

I’d finished the first part of my speech (carefully written and revised and rewritten and revised again over the previous two weeks), in which I’d called Mr E Man my best friend and soul mate, amongst other nice things. There was then an awkward pause while Mr E Man fumbled through his notes to find the beginning of his own speech, which he’d written on the back of a couple of envelopes about an hour before the ceremony.

Me: “My notes say ‘[Mr E Man] will say something nice about me now'”.
Mr E Man: “Nice bum”.

I’m pleased to report that his actual speech was very good indeed.

Mr E Man also once spun a great tale for two of our nephews. He’d fallen while snowboarding, and as he landed his goggles slipped and poked him, causing an impressive black eye. When we got back to his sister’s house that evening, he told the boys that he’d got into a fight with a bear. They didn’t believe him at first, but as he went on and on about this epic boxing match, reenacting parts of it, and demonstrating how he’d knocked the bear over and pushed it down the mountain so that it formed into a massive snowball that got bigger and bigger and faster and faster and kept on going all the way into town, they gradually got suckered in. I wouldn’t be surprised if they still believe that story now! They also fell for his cheap trick later that night (it was Christmas Eve) of calling them up on his cell, from the bathroom, and pretending to be Santa. They magically started to behave and went quietly to bed, while the adults got on with the serious business of playing drunken Cranium.

The end of my wedding speech was “I couldn’t have imagined a better husband for myself in my wildest dreams”. And, believe it or not, it’s true.

Posted in drunkenness, family, personal, photos, silliness | 19 Comments

So confused…

Posted on November 13, 2008 by Cath@VWXYNot?

IT just upgraded me to Office 2007. I like the new Outlook email interface, but Word 2007 is confusing the hell out of me. It just took me ten minutes to find the Undo button.

Oh, and IE7 did not solve my issues with Google Documents crashing and Google Reader not loading at all. I get grant opportunity and journal table of content alerts via RSS, so this is not good!

Vent vent vent. Rant rant rant. Carry on.

Posted in rants, technology | 13 Comments

Does not compute…

Posted on November 13, 2008 by Cath@VWXYNot?

The following is a true account of a conversation I had a few years ago. I was in the middle of writing my PhD thesis, and was procrastinating by having coffee with a postdoc from the neighbouring lab. I’d always got on fairly well with “Dr X”, although others found her difficult, so her attitude took me completely by surprise.

Me: “How’s the job search going?”
Dr X: “Great! I have two offers! Norwich and Brighton!”
Me: “Congratulations, that’s great! Which one are you going to take?”
Dr X: “Well, I’m not sure yet. I visited Norwich a few years ago, and it’s just really really white, you know? I’ve found that places like that tend to be kinda racist. I think I might be happier somewhere with a bigger Asian population.” (Dr X is a born and bred British citizen whose parents immigrated from Pakistan).
Me: “So, Brighton then?”
Dr X: “Well I’m not sure. It’s a nice town, but it’s full of poofs”.

My first instinct was to laugh – I was sure she was joking. But not only was she most definitely not joking, she didn’t even understand why I laughed, or why my amusement gave way to disgust when I realised she was serious.

My reaction to Dr X mirrored how I responded to the passing in California of Proposition 8 – a ban on gay marriage, carried largely by yes votes from visible minorities. How can a person who has been subject to prejudice and discrimination their whole lives, discriminate in turn against others? It seriously does not make ANY sense to me. As a gay Californian said in the linked article, “people do not equate one civil rights struggle with another.”

Dr. A had a post on Tuesday that encourages Americans – gay and straight – to come out on Saturday to “Fight the H8”. A weekend trip over the border to participate is almost certainly impossible for me, but if you’re in the US, please do check out Dr. A’s link.

I promise that my next post will mark a return to the usual silliness.

Posted in bad people, personal, politics, rants | 6 Comments

miTunes

Posted on November 12, 2008 by Cath@VWXYNot?

Now here’s an unbelievably ignorant comment for you:

I don’t like most black people not because of their skin color, but because I don’t like hip-hop and dancing. I don’t like most women because I don’t like shopping and romantic comedies. I do have female and black friends, however, because they don’t belong to those cultures; they belong to my culture, which involves sci-fi, anime, and board games.

ScientistMother has already done an awesome job of ripping this comment to shreds, so I won’t bother. But seeing as I described myself on that thread as “a white chick who loves (good) hip hop and board games and romantic comedies and shopping and sci-fi, but hates dancing and doesn’t really get anime and likes square-toed boots more than pointy shoes”, I’ve decided to segue seamlessly (or not) into a wee discussion of my musical tastes.

When I first came over from the UK I brought my favourite CDs in a folder. They reflected my taste at the time – almost all British Indie “four white guys with guitars and drums” music, with the occasional Chemical Brothers, Finlay Quaye, Fatboy Slim or Propellerheads album thrown in.

I’m glad to say that my tastes have diversified since then, thanks mostly to Mr E Man. He has a very eclectic music collection and introduced me to some great new bands*. He also has several friends who go out of their way to find new music, and then evangelically get the rest of us to listen to it too.

So, my budding iTunes library now has the following genre breakdown:

Acoustic: 14
Alternative & Punk: 254 (old habits die hard)
Blues & RNB: 6 (I have more CDs to be imported as soon as I get them back from my sister-in-law)
Country: 22 (previously a big no-no for me, but there is some good stuff out there!)
Electronica & Dance: 77
Folk: 21 (see Country)
Hip-Hop / Rap: 77
Jazz: 9 (still learning)
Pop: 86
Rock: 340 (see Alternative & Punk)
World: 23

Hey, can I turn that into a meme?!

This year’s favourites:

Dusty Foot Philosopher by K’naan. Mr E Man saw K’naan at a music festival this summer and came back saying “you HAVE to hear this guy”. He’s in Canada as a refugee from Somalia, and incorporates his life story into his music. The whole album is great, but this is a stand-out.

(Mr E Man also brought back an album of didgeridoo music, which he admitted did not sound as good sober as it did when he was dancing to it at the festival).

Delhi to Dublin – Celtic / bhangra fusion. Seriously. This was the only clip I could find with decent sound, they’re mostly a live band. I’ve now missed seeing them TWICE due to circumstances outside of my control.

Mao Tse Tung Said by the Alabama 3. I think these guys have been around for a while – they did the title track for The Sopranos – but I’ve only just got into them. Incredibly catchy! Let me hear some of that sweet muthafuckin’ acid house country music!

And finally an old favourite that is in all my playlists – Good Girl Gone Bad by The Herbaliser feat Wildflower. I got totally obsessed with this tune the first time I heard it and played it like ten times in a row. I wanted to walk down the aisle to this song at our wedding, but Mr E Man wouldn’t let me. We went with Here, There and Everywhere by the Beatles instead. We seriously considered having U2’s I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For as the first dance, but sanity and decorum prevailed and we chose Not Fade Away by the Stones instead.

Anyway. Enjoy.

(If the embedded video won’t play or isn’t visible (it’s not from YouTube and didn’t show up in the preview), here’s a link)

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*on an early date, he took me to this little live music bar that looked like nothing from the outside but was hoppin’ inside. There was an amazing jazz band playing, so we ended up staying until about 1 am. At that point the band were still going strong, and Mr E Man confessed that he’d been hoping they would either suck or finish early so he could take me home (for the first time) instead! We’d been talking about my musical tastes, best concert experiences etc, so he said “if you like we can go to my place and listen to some U2”. “OK!” says the smitten English girl. When we got there he spent ages looking through his CD collection. “It doesn’t have to be U2”, I said. He replied with “Um, yeah, I don’t have any”.

This was also the night of the classic “This drink will put me over the limit so I can’t drive you home, but as it happens this bar is only one block from my apartment”. Just after we arrived at said live music venue. Yeah. I married a smooth mover.

Posted in bad people, music, personal, silliness, videos | 13 Comments

Remembrance

Posted on November 11, 2008 by Cath@VWXYNot?

Today is Remembrance Day. It is now 90 years since the end of World War I, and there are barely any veterans left who served in the trenches.

It is almost 60 years since the beginning of World War II.

I will be observing the two minute silence at 11 am. It is important that we never forget the sacrifices made by those who fought on our behalf all those years ago, and the sacrifices made today by those who still fight, regardless of whether we agree with the wars they are fighting.

In the UK the silence is observed on November 11th, but most of the services are held on the closest Sunday to that date. I’m glad that Canada chooses to grant a public holiday on the 11th, having had a difficult time observing the moment of silence in the middle of an experiment in a busy lab on a working day in Scotland.

I mentioned in a previous post that, one week ago today, we saw Obama’s election announced on the big screen at a Vancouver Canucks game. I think that, given a longer break in play, that moment could have become something really special. But it still wouldn’t have lived up to something we witnessed at a game two or three Remembrance Days ago.

The Canucks were not doing so well, and worse than their lack of results was their lack of effort. There’s nothing a sports fan hates to see more than a team of overpaid athletes not putting heart and soul into their play. So the fans’ response to the Canucks team on the ice that night was lukewarm at best.

At a break in the play, there was an announcement that a group of World War II veterans would be coming onto the ice. This group of old men moved slowly into the centre of the rink – and every man, woman and child in the stadium stood up and clapped and cheered. I’m tearing up just remembering that moment. You could see that several of the veterans were crying too. The applause went on and on and on. The players were getting restless on their bench as the break in play stretched to twice and then three times its scheduled length. But the fans chose to honour the true heroes in the building, not the professional athletes.

They shall grow not old,
As we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them,
Nor the years condemn,
At the going down of the sun
And in the morning
We will remember them.

Laurence Binyon (1869-1943)

Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments

Style over substance?

Posted on November 11, 2008 by Cath@VWXYNot?

I am in the market for a laptop and find myself leaning towards a Mac. I’ve never really used one before, and for some reason I feel the need to justify the switch to myself using something more than “because they’re cooler”.

I don’t need anything fancy (in fact I’ll probably get a reconditioned used computer, whichever kind I decide to go for), just internet, word processing, and maybe website development.

I know there are lots of MacUsers* in the blogosphere, so please let me know of any convincing reasons for switching!

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*A postdoc in my PhD lab in Glasgow subscribed to the MacUser magazine. The rest of us always said it sounded like a support group for Scottish drug addicts.

Posted in English language, personal, technology | 18 Comments