29 June 2007

Oh yeah, and me.

In case you're wondering what I'm up to these days, I am surrounded by precarious piles of journal publications, scrap-paper and lab books and I'm becoming very intimate with the backspace key. That's right my friends, I am indeed writing. Or doing tippety tappety, as it's know in this office.

Fear not, my lab work is not finished yet - I still have a fair bit to do in there before I can finish. But I decided to get a large chunk of the writing out of the way and then go back in there once I've knocked a bit of writing on the head.

Writing is kinda fun, cos when you get to the end of the day you can scroll back through your day's achievements and say - yeah - I did achieve something today. In the lab you can do a 70 hour week and end up further behind where you were, cos all you've managed to do is smoke your precious starting materials and bleed the chemical stores dry of solvents. That said, writing is pretty painful; when you manage to get a real tough bit done, you pat yourself on the back...and then start the next tough bit! Continuous stream of fighting with the literature (eg discovering someone else did half your work - and got better yields!) and trying to make sense of your garbled lab-book.

Still, it's going quite well and overall I'm kinda enjoying it.

Little bugger!

How did he know? Maybe some higher level of reproductive self-preservation kicked in.

So our kittens were supposed to get neutered today. Something which I feel quite guilty about in a way, not helped by both my parents (jokingly) saying - "oh how could you, when they trust you?!", and especially when Grey is so pretty and they both have such nice temperaments. Shame to take them out of the gene pool. But I know it's for the greater good of our cat infested neighbourhood. Just the other day, another kitten of about the same age as our two and who also looks suspiciously like Squish (their dad) showed up miaowing his little heart out! He's disappeared again so I'm hoping he was just a figment of my imagination.

But anyway, since we don't know who's feeding them, we had to keep them in last night to make sure they didn't eat anything. We've kept them in a few times before to let them get used to it (and Grey has now figured out kitty litter - I was so proud!) and each time they've been pretty chilled about it.

So this morning, bright and early I go out to find a happy Grey sat in her box, but no Monty. Anywhere. And there's nowhere to hide in our hallway. Was getting slightly spooked until I realised that our bathroom window was open by about 3 inches. Little bugger had managed to climb his way up there, then squeeze himself through the crack in the window and then drop down a good 6 foot. So now of course they both have to wait to get done next week.

So how did he know that this was the occasion to scarper? Did he get suspicious that we were being so nice? Has he had words with his homies round the neighbourhood? Beware the box, they say in hushed tones. I told Sean it was a bad idea to show them the boxes the night before!