Katie and her mental meanderings

The concept of the “conference poster” is a strange one. It is designed so that conferences can have a lot more presentations than if they were all actual spoken presentations, in today’s information-overload age, and so that nervous young scientists don’t have to stand up and speak in front of the three men and a dog, er, eminent scientists that attend their presentation session in an odd room no-one can find at 8am, er, in a large conference hall at a peak time. If you do have a poster, you stand by it for a couple of hours with an increasingly fixed grin, and airplane stewardess hand gestures*, and people come up to you and say “Talk me through it”, and you fight the urge to say “can you not read yet, or are you just lazy?”. On the other hand, other people come up to you and say “ooh, that’s fascinating, give me a handout, and your email address, I’ll be in touch”.

Anyway my assistant and I are going to Berlin to a conference next week and I have finally managed to get the poster she’ll be in charge of printed out. I have a presentation slot which is astonishingly on the first day (people won’t be fed up) and in a group with some actual similar papers (usually I’m in with everyone-they-can’t-work-out-where-to-put). So it should have a few people there.

A colleague asked where we were off to, today, and on hearing it was Berlin, said he’d always wanted to go there. Well, was my witty reply, you should research what I research, shouldn’t you?

*There are two emergency exits from my poster, and you will find the introduction located towards the front of the display, with the references towards the end. Please note the graph located at the bottom of the second panel, in which the most interesting results are displayed, and the statistically significant results which will light up should there be a loss of cabin power.

I found out yesterday that the possible new PhD student has definitely got the place. So I have two actual adults whose whole lives and careers I will be responsible for for the next 3 years, come September. Scary. Plus the second one will be doing a project that I really want to get done – following up some kids we’ve already seen – and which I applied for loads and loads of money to do, a month ago – but I won’t hear about till November. So that is a huge load off my mind in many ways.

I went in this morning to make an appointment for a haircut on Friday, and was told I could have it done immediately – it was 9am and I have to be at work till 6 today so I didn’t see any need to hurry in, and went ahead with it. I don’t know if I’m particularly useless at hair, but I always just want the hairdresser to do “something that suits me” and I never know how much I want off this bit, whether I want wavy or curly here, and where my parting goes. We discussed whether The Spouse™ would notice I’d had it done, and agreed he probably wouldn’t – she told me about when she went from black hair to blonde hair and her boyfriend asked if she’d had her fringe cut… But then my head of department noticed the haircut so perhaps it’s a bit more obvious than I thought.

If, however, he’s read it on here he gets no brownie points at all. I don’t know his IP address at work or on his smartphone, though, so I can’t necessarily check up on him… actually I’ve just noticed you can’t see the IP address of my visitors anyway… perhaps he’ll give himself away and make a comment…

Yesterday evening was lovely, so we drove over to the beach, which is very nice as long as you look the other way from the power stations.

We collected some very pretty stones for our “fireplace” (an MDF box where a hideous tiled thing used to be). The weathered brick bits are particularly nice.

We also put a half- basket thing up with herbs in, you can see it from the kitchen sink, where we used to have a blank wall. l put lemon balm, two types of thyme, and rosemary.

l do like living here, even if l complain sometimes.

As have some other wibloggers…

you can read it here.

In other news: my texted wiblogs still haven’t appeared…

And the boy (well, he seems very young and enthusiastic, in a way that makes me feel really old!) who wanted to do a PhD with me has got an interview with us on Monday. He seems very keen on the project which I’m also very keen on, and it would be an excellent way to solve the problem of the children we want to test getting older before we have any funding to test them, so let’s hope he gets the place…

I have a new toy. It is a smartphone/PDA and if you don’t know what that means, you may switch off now.

I dropped my previous phone down the loo (oops) and had been managing with The Spouse™’s old handset that was very creaky so I decided to take advantage of an upgrade I was due… except the website lied about the price and it was very expensive. One spreadsheet (that’s how sad I am) and a trip to ebay later, I am the proud owner of a SPV M2000. It does everything that my previous phone and Palm did, and more, all in one package… and it will connect to the wireless internet so I can sit in boring meetings and surf. Oops. You didn’t hear me say that…

I made a foray into the world of counselling yesterday (for a psychologist, it is a surprisingly large foray. Handwaving stuff). I was instructed to have a meeting with myself and discuss things.

I also discovered a prayer box. What would you put in the prayer box? This is not, as some people seem to think, a box for prayer requests. May I remind you that prayer is not just intercessions… it’s not a shopping list… and all those clichés. Currently it has in it some tea lights, some coloured paper, some of which is cut into shapes, and some glass beads, as well as a few psalm readings.

Of course, you could always just get someone to pray for you.

I sent in some entries while I was away for a few days, but they haven’t appeared.

(I’ve been told the texted messages should be visible if I edit any of my current entries, but so far no luck… perhaps Neil would like to try though)