Remember "The Undersea World of Fifi LaFume"?

So this has been a rather uneventful week for me. My days were spent ordering stuff for the lab (I've managed to isolate beautiful RNA, by the way) so that I can do the qPCR. I just hope I get to do this before 2006, as I'm told that my RT-PCR reagents are only going to arrive in three weeks! Otherwise, time was spent reading The Quantity Theory of Insanity by Will Self, going for sushi at Kung Fu Kitchen and setting up a colony of sea monkeys. We decided that we need some low maintenance pets for the lab, and Artemia was the obvious choice. I remember being about eight and marveling at those ads on the back of forgotten comic books from the 70s I found in my grandfather's house in Malvern. Since the reality is now swimming on my desk, I can assure you that you cannot teach these shapeless crustaceans any tricks. However, they are quite adept at dying. They dissapear miraculously each time the air conditioner goes on the blink, rather like their lab mates the Russian wheat aphids. We've had to re-seed the colony twice already. Perhaps they're not so low maintenance, after all...

The festive season is looming, with its never-ending list of stiff social dates to commit to, its frenetic over-spending, its over-eating (oh! the guilt!), its children having grand mal in the malls, its increases in accidents on the highways, its people asking you about your New Year's plans when you haven't even had time to think about Christmas yet. I think I might just keep working and not take time off. You know, just for a change of pace.