A cure for piles?

One of the Research Ethics Board applications I submitted last week bounced back today, with a request to attach the original patient consent form used for sample acquisition.

I searched all my computer files (I use extremely logical folder and file names, and rename every file that people send me to fit my structure) and found...

nothing, nada, zip. Not a sausage.

My boss took over this project when the original PI retired a few years ago, before I started my current job. The active patient accrual phase was well and truly over by then, and we've just been renewing the ethics certificate every year to allow us to keep following patients and hence assess correlations with long-term clinical outcomes. We've never been asked for the original consent form before, but this time we'd requested a couple of minor protocol changes alongside the usual annual renewal, which must have been what triggered the request.

I searched through all my old emails, and eventually found some correspondence dating from my first few months in this job. One email said that the original application file - dating from the mid 1990s - had been dropped off at my desk while I was at a meeting.

I had a vague, misty memory of this, but no good idea of where the file might be.

With a sigh, I regarded the piles and piles of stacked up folders and loose paper all over my work area. I am not a tidy person, to say the least, and I knew the folder I needed was likely to be somewhere near the bottom of one of the piles at the very back of my desk. But I thought it was probably best to start at the top of the front piles.

As I started to wade through everything, I realised how useless most of the paper actually was. Much of it was in folders that were handed over to me when I first started, and back then I didn't have a solid grasp of what kinds of documents are important to keep. So I kept everything, probably thinking that I'd go through it all a few months in and decide what to keep and what to recycle.

Three years later...

Some folders contained reams and reams of printed out emails - the person who initiated most of the folders is old-school, and doesn't trust electronic copies, so she prints everything. And I do mean everything - there were endless printouts of email conversations about arranging meetings to discuss the project, that kind of thing. There were faxes, too, and pretty much every single draft of the grants and manuscripts that were submitted well before my time.

In the folders I'd started rather than taken over, there were no printed emails, but I'd kept lots of stuff that I now know to be useless. Not everything with a signature on it needs to be kept, especially when the grant has already been submitted, reviewed, and the project is either funded / published or long since abandoned, with only grudges against reviewers to remember it by. And, more shamefully, I'd also neglected to recycle drafts of grants and manuscripts that are now ancient history, one way or another, not to mention all the paper relating to the early stages of projects that the PI abandoned as a bad idea even before submission.

I'm glad to say that not everything was useless - I've kept the annotated handouts from various courses, and all the printed research papers and in-progress manuscript drafts (I can't read or edit on screen, although if anyone would like to buy me an iPad I'd be willing to revise my habits). And the exercise as a whole was a great reminder of how far I've come since I started; I now tend to know what's important and needs to be kept, based on previous experience.

 

 as it turns out, this is all the paper I need for my many in-progress projects

There was another benefit, too - I liberated a bunch of empty folders, bulldog clips, and big paper clips (all of which are always in short supply around here).

yarrrr, buried treasure, matey!

Oh, and I found the consent form. Right at the bottom of the very last pile of folders. It's now been scanned in as a PDF, given a logical file name, and saved in a logically-named folder, so I can find it again in a few seconds next time it's needed.

Thank the FSM I'm so much more disciplined and tidy with computer files than with paper.

Elevated anxiety

Spotted on the top floor of my building yesterday:

In other, no doubt completely unrelated news, we have a new PI in the building! Dr... Wonka, I think it was. Model organisms guy, working on a species closely related to C. elegans - V. kniddus.

Now that's an odd name for a dog.

Weird that they didn't give the photographer's name, eh?

(Awesome photo, though, that is in danger of making this Yorkshire lass feel homesick. Check out the series - there are some stunning shots included in the slide show).

What I Did On My Staycation - Part II

Wednesday

The heavy rain that greeted me first thing in the morning made me exceedingly glad that I'd braved the windstorm to visit Stanley Park while the sun was still out the day before. However, an hour or two later the bus driver greeted me with a cheery "did you bring the sunshine with you?", and by the time we reached my stop (in the scary heart of the Downtown Eastside) the glare of bright winter sun off the wet streets was almost blinding.

My destination was the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden,  a delightful oasis in the middle of downtown, which I'd never visited before.

East meets West

I took KJHaxton's advice and arrived just in time for the guided tour. There were only four of us there - me, a woman from New Zealand, and a couple from Italy. The Italians seemed to have difficulty understanding our guide's accent, and soon started talking quietly to each other in Italian, which was a bit annoying, even though the first part of the tour wasn't exactly stellar. Our guide carried a folder containing various printouts (some from Wikipedia) in plastic protector pockets, and rifled through it at an alarming rate, showing us each picture as he got to the corresponding part of the talk. He spent more time telling us about the high speed train network in China, and how we should visit China just to take the train, than about the garden itself - and I started to wonder if he was on commission.

However, things quickly improved as we finally moved out of the entrance hallway and into the garden itself. It really is lovely, and it was great to hear about the reasons for each design feature (it's all about contrasts).

Contrast between square and circle

 

 The pool was made deliberately cloudy, to create better reflections

After the official tour we warmed up with tea and dodgy calligraphy, and then I (and the Kiwi and one of the Italian guys) continued to wander around the garden, chatting quietly (I provided them with several suggestions for their remaining days in Vancouver!) It was so peaceful, a great change of pace from city life. Definitely recommended!

I wandered into the main downtown core, had a late lunch at Trees cafe (site of one of my worst first (or indeed any) dates of all time, but I hold no grudges), tried on (but didn't buy) a couple of pairs of shoes, then SkyTrained out to Burnaby to meet Mr E Man at our friends' house for the 4pm Canucks game.

Thursday

Another day, another attraction I'd never visited before - hell, let's make it two attractions I'd never visited before!

This time, cycling was the wrong decision - the heavens opened about five minutes after I left home, and I was drenched and freezing before I'd even made it onto the sea wall. I turned left this time, rather than right, and pedalled as fast as my frozen, wet legs would take me along the southern edge of False Creek. The foul weather was mitigated somewhat by the opportunity to be the only person on the stretch of path that goes through the shiny new Olympic village development (it was too cold to stop and take photos, sorry), but only a little bit.

I paused to cast a lingering, longing look at the lovely warm Granville Island public market, but kept going, and was soon locking up my bike outside the Vancouver Maritime Museum.

This wasn't part of my original staycation plan, but I'd spotted a Groupon a couple of weeks earlier, and thought why not? I love boats, having been brought up watching old naval battle movies with my Mum, and the museum has a great one as its centrepiece. The St. Roch was an RCMP supply ship that was the first to sail the Northwest Passage from west to east (second overall), and the first to completely circumnavigate North America (see, I was paying attention!) I love stories of polar exploration just as much as I love boats, so I greatly enjoyed the video about the boat's voyages and especially the chance to get on board, poking around the crew quarters and climbing ladders all over the place.

 

View from the bridge of the St. Roch. Note mangy stuffed walrus on the starboard deck. The stuffed huskies  (out of shot) were also rather tatty.

The boat exhibit was very well done, but I have to admit that the other display cases didn't do much for me at all - lots of models of old steam ships, that kind of thing. The museum was definitely worth visiting at the reduced Groupon rate, but I'm not sure I'd have felt the same way if I'd paid full price!

I thought again about heading straight for the cozy warmth of Granville Island, but decided to persevere with my cultural education and head to the adjacent Museum of Vancouver instead. Mr E Man and at least one other long-time Vancouver resident claimed to have never heard of the place, but I can confirm that it does indeed exist (tucked away in Vanier Park, in the same building as the Space Centre / Planetarium), and has a rather fetching crab sculpture outside:

 

That's a fountain, not the prevailing weather conditions, although admittedly it was hard to tell the difference

I was really, really cold at this point, and didn't want to stay too long, but I really liked the museum. The rotating exhibit was on local food production (backyard veggie gardens, beehives and chicken coops), which was quite interesting, but I liked the permanent exhibits much better. They had photos from when the site of the Marine Building downtown was literally an old growth forest, and then more photos, videos, and artifacts from that period right up to the 1970s, which was exceedingly cool (there aren't many cities with a full photographic record of their development from trees to skyscrapers!) I particularly enjoyed the wobbly film taken from the back of one of the old street cars - oh how I wish we still had them!

The exhibits were pretty comprehensive, and didn't gloss over the terrible treatment of the city's First Nations, Chinese, and Japanese inhabitants over the years (there's more comprehensive coverage of the city's original First Nations inhabitants at the excellent Museum of Anthropology, which I'd been to several times before and so didn't visit on my staycation). Overall I thought it was very well done, and good value for money. I'll be back, some day when I'm not quite so cold and wet!

 Britain AND Scotland???!!! I don't see that working...

Onwards (in the still-pouring rain) to Granville Island, where I treated myself to fish and chips and a hot cup of tea and felt sooooo much better. I picked up more dinner ingredients before hauling my poor self through the pelting rain and up the steep hills to home, which is where the heart bathtub is.

For dinner, I roasted a Cornish game hen with fingerling potatoes, some adorable mini squash, and the rest of the asparagus and red pepper. We had some lovely olive bread with it, and some yumtastic chocolate brownies afterwards, as we watched the snow start to fall.

If I could shop at Granville Island every day, I'd cook more often, eat more healthily, and be completely broke.

Friday

I decided I'd had enough culture for one week, and went shopping instead. I trawled all my favourite vintage stores on Main Street, and although I didn't find the perfect burgundy leather jacket that I've had in my mind's eye for a couple of years now, I did manage to find a funky sweater and two very nice, very gently used winter coats (one grey, one tweedy one that I can actually wear with brown pants without looking like an eejit) for a combined total of $82. I suspect the grey one might actually be a guy's jacket, despite being bought from a women's clothing store (the shoulders are ever so slightly boxier, and the arms are ever so slightly longer, than usual, and the buttons are on the wrong side), but hey, it looks good on me IMNSHO and it cost $35, so who cares.

I met up with Mr E Man halfway through the day for a tasty lunch at one of our favourite restaurants, The Reef, and then again in the late afternoon for tea and cake at The Grind. I love this place - the front part is just your average coffee shop, but the back room is a cozy haven full of mismatched schoolroom-type furniture and is a great place to hang out and read or write. Before Mr E Man arrived I wrote a proper letter to my sister (who STILL doesn't have internet at her apartment in London, where she's been for over a year now. I am Not Impressed), but didn't manage any other writing.

In fact, not doing much writing was an ongoing theme of my staycation, and the only disappointment (I thoroughly enjoyed the rest of it and have considered starting to play the lottery so I can bum around parks and museums and coffee shops and watch early east coast hockey games all the time). This was mostly because of Mr E Man unexpectedly being off work - I left home later each day, and came home earlier, than I would have if he was working his usual 11-12 hour days, leaving less time for writing between my visits to all the galleries, parks, and museums. I really enjoyed what little writing I did do, and I'd like to build more writing time into my regular schedule. If I'm home with Mr E Man I tend to get distracted by conversations, TV, the internet, and our traditional long Scrabble and card games, so I think I need to set aside some designated time each weekend (or maybe on the occasional work day lunchtime) to leave the house and go and write somewhere else. I think I made enough of a start on a couple of projects to get me over that initial hump and keep me working on them... time will tell!

Overall, I highly recommend a staycation. Especially if it's in Vancouver, which (as I said in my last post) I have fallen in love with all over again. It was so relaxing, and so much cheaper (and more eco-friendly - I went everywhere by bike or public transit) than any other vacation I've ever taken! I wanted a second week, to do more writing and exercise than I managed to fit into my busy sight-seeing schedule, but it was not to be, and it's back to waking up in the dark and braving the snow and ice on my way in to work.

I do enjoy my job (mostly), but, well, it aint no staycation.

What I Did On My Staycation - Part I

(This got way too long for one post. Also, the return to work has been a wee bit stressful, and our internet connection at home is all messed up,so it's taken me ages to write it. Boooooo. I'll try to get Part II written soon! It'll even have photos!)

Monday

First of all, I slept in - bliss! I had a leisurely breakfast, then took the bus and SkyTrain down to the Vancouver Art Gallery. This is the same route I take on work days when I'm not cycling, although I usually get off a few stops earlier, and it was so much nicer than during the rush hour! I even had a lovely chat with a woman who was, like me, trying to decide whether to take the #8 (comes every five minutes, but is usually heaving and stops on almost every block and is therefore slooooow) or cross the road and wait for the faster #33 (stops only every two or three blocks, and is generally less crowded, but only comes every 15-30 minutes, depending on the time of day). I used my Translink iPhone app to figure out that the #33 was the best option (it almost always is), saw this woman wavering between the two stops, and decided to share my information with her. We continued our conversation all the way to the art gallery. She's new to my neighbourhood and, like me, is excited about some upcoming changes to the area (post to come!) I'm used to fighting for space, having my face wedged into a stranger's armpit, getting hit by people's backpacks, and/or dealing with general commuter rage (mine and others'), so this was a lovely surprise.

The gallery was very nice. I'm not a particularly arty person, and know next to nothing about art history or techniques, but I do enjoy looking at pretty and/or thought provoking things, and I love the general atmosphere of art galleries. I wasn't allowed to take photos, but I did jot down some notes on the pieces I enjoyed most: a glass box with First Nations designs and old family photos engraved into it, with a light inside, all alone in a small white room, such that the designs and photos were projected onto the walls (Marianne Nicolson - I think it was this one); and some stunning images of the recent BC forest fires by Evan Lee, who prints photos onto the reverse of the usual paper, then smears the ink around before it dries - like this. 

I had some rooms completely to myself... until the school groups hit the building. This was the hidden flaw in my cunning "enjoy popular attractions in the weekday peace and quiet" plan... man, kids are loud, and big stone buildings are echoey! I escaped to the gallery's cafe for a healthy and tasty salad, although the echoes of kids yelling and adults scolding followed me, and then headed back to the galleries once things had quietened back down. I saw everything except one room before the usual gallery fatigue overtook me, and I even managed to avoid spending any money in the gift shop (I have such a weakness for blank journals to write in, and they had some gorgeous ones, but I reminded myself that I have a couple of still completely virgin journals at home). A success!

I headed off to the Salt Spring Coffee place on Main Street (excellent as always, especially because I had an ethicalDeal coupon) for my first installment of sitting in cafes pretending to be a writer, managed to write one blog post, and then got the bad news about Mr E Man's accident. So I headed home via our usual grocery store to sympathise with him over his poor mangled finger, make a quick-and-easy dinner (baked potatoes with sauteed garlicky mushrooms, leeks, and bacon, with grated cheese on top, of course), and watch the Canucks game.

Tuesday

I woke up to find a beautiful sunny day waiting for me - but with a crazy windstorm also in progress. I'd said on Sunday night that I'd spend the first sunny day of the week biking around Stanley Park, but the wind was a little intimidating - I don't tend to enjoy riding during gusts so strong that you have to pedal to get down the hills, and from past experience this looked like just such a day! However, this being November, there was no guarantee of any more nice weather during the rest of the week, so I decided to go for it. (Mr E Man was invited, but said he wanted to snuggle on the sofa with the kitties and feel sorry for himself. To be fair he was on some fairly strong pain killers and hadn't slept much, as he kept catching his injured hand on the duvet when he rolled over, and he woke up shouting in pain several times during the night).

It was indeed ridiculously windy, and I did have to pedal down all but the steepest hills on my way to the sea wall (pedestrian / bike path around the city's ocean front) at Science World. But I persevered, buoyed by the exhilarating sun-shining-on-snow-capped-mountains-and-sparkly-blue-ocean-and-glass-skyscrapers-and-sailboats view. It was a day in a million by any standards, one in a trillion for November - truly stunning. What little skill I may possess in the wielding of words and cameras is hopelessly inadequate; I just can't hope to capture the beauty and joy of the day.

I fought the headwind all the way around the northern edge of False Creek (actually an ocean inlet, hence the name), along the beach at English Bay, and into Stanley Park. The wind died down considerably as I headed east onto the more sheltered edge of the park, and I was even able to sit outside in the sunshine to enjoy the excellent tea and muffin I bought at the totem poles concession stand. I watched bald eagles and seagulls play in the wind, seemingly just for fun, and felt exceedingly glad not to be stuck in the office.

This feeling grew and grew as I made my way around the rest of the sea wall, and when I passed under the Lions Gate bridge, around the point, and back onto the more exposed western edge of the park, the sight of the ocean waves crashing into (and occasionally over) the wall made my heart sing with pure joy. There were a couple of other cyclists, four or five joggers, and several more walkers on the same stretch of sea wall, and every single one of us wore a massive grin across our face. It was... there are no words. Magnificent comes close. I hopped off my bike, sat on a rock on the beach, and fell in love with Vancouver all over again.

If I hadn't already moved here, I would have headed from the beach straight to the immigration office. Seeing as I'm already a card-carrying citizen, though, I headed back along the English Bay beach front and over the Burrard Street bridge (LOVE LOVE LOVE the new protected bike lanes, which I hadn't used before) and went to Granville Island for a very late lunch (red snapper soup and bread from The Stock Market, an old favourite from when I lived nearby and went to the public market most Sundays). I wandered around the blissfully uncrowded market, bought dinner ingredients from several different places, then enjoyed a sweet treat and some tea at the Blue Parrot cafe. I even did some proper writing - in a journal, with a pen! I just fleshed out some ideas for a project I've been thinking about for a while, but it was fun, and just how I'd imagined it might feel to sit in a cafe overlooking the ocean and pretend to be a writer.

Dinner was three different kinds of fresh ravioli (porcini mushroom, asparagus, and butternut squash) with spicy Italian sausage, asparagus, red pepper, and a yummy cilantro pesto from The Stock Market. Mr E Man agreed that I'd spent the day most productively.

So apparently I suck at calligraphy

First of all, my sincerest apologies if I inadvertently wrote something offensive. If so, it was a result of incompetence, not malice.

This was at the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen classical Chinese garden, which was lovely (full post on my staycation adventures is to come). You sip on your free tea and use water and a brush on a reusable slate thingy, which explains a) why the top part had already dried and disappeared before I finished, and b) the long vertical stripes (caused by excess water from the brush running down the slate).

This isn't quite what I meant when I said I was going to hang out in cafes and pretend to be a writer...

Should I stay(cation), or should I go (to White Rock)?

This is Day One of my staycation! I've been to the art gallery and am now poncing about in a cafe with my MacBook, pretending to be a writer. Too bad I forgot to clean the laptop screen and outer casing before I came out, but hey, maybe the smudges add to the bohemian look.

I originally declared the weekend that's just finished to be the beginning of my staycation, but then Nina pointed out on Facebook that it doesn't count because I didn't stay at home. So let's call it a pre-staycation vacation.

It was another moment of genius from Mr E Man. Our friend and former tenant had invited us for dinner and a mini-party in White Rock, about a 40 minute drive away. Recent changes to the BC drinking and driving laws mean that two glasses of wine now put you over the limit, so a commitment to driving home would also be a commitment to being the only sober people at the party (and this friend is known for her parties). She said we could stay over - but she'd made the same offer to several other people, mostly our biggest male friends, and only has a small apartment. Images of drunken, snoring sardines swam into my mind... 

...until Saturday lunch time, when Mr E Man said "right, let's get a B&B and make a weekend of it".

I knew I married a genius.

Amazingly for a miserably wet weekend in November, the first few places we called were full, but we found somewhere eventually. According to Google Maps it was 600 metres from our friend's house - score! So we threw some stuff in a bag, gave the kitties some extra food and water, and jumped in the car.

Now, I'd never been to White Rock before, but it instantly looked very familiar. Like many places in and around Vancouver, I'm sure it's been featured in a gazillion movies and TV shows (checks IMDB: yep, items 2-7 on the list explain it). We checked into our B&B, ran a couple of errands (our friend had called while we were on the road with a unique request: "hey, can ya pick up a couple of laser pointers for me?"), and then - because my parents raised me to always politely support the local brewing and hospitality industries of every vacation destination - it was time to meet up with some other visiting friends for the Canucks-Leafs hockey game! And what a game it was - with two parties of Leafs fans present in the bar, for added fun and insults.

Game over, we headed to dinner (three different kinds of lasagna) and the after-party. It was great fun, even though I got into a rather heated argument of the cyclist vs. motorist variety (hey, Mr E Man warned the guy not to start with me on that topic...) I met some lovely new people, and had a very deep and meaningful conversation with one of our quieter friends, who later drunkenly declared "I'm so happy that you and [Mr E Man] met each other!"

Good times...

...until it was time to go home.

I'd noticed on our way in that White Rock streets are on some of the steepest hills in existence. I mean, seriously, it's like they paved some cliffs on a dare and called them roads. Some of the sidewalks have to have hand rails and little mini-risers to stop people's legs from running away with them when they walk downhill.

And the 600 metres back to the B&B?

Uphill.

That was fun. But we made it back safely, even though we'd neglected to bring ropes and crampons, and also survived the rather hungover breakfast-with-strangers-in-their-own-house aspect of the B&B experience.

And then... the obligatory walk on the beach in the mist and the rain!

 A white rock in White Rock

I actually really love beach resorts in the winter. There's such a melancholy air to them. White Rock did not disappoint - we walked along the beach, skipped some stones, and walked along the pier, serenaded by the fog-muffled quacks and honks of ducks and geese, and the whistle of a train making its way along the water front.

And, of course, we went to visit the white rock.

Mr E Man told me about this rock in the car out there, and I thought the whole thing was hysterical. The original rock had a white top, apparently due to guano. It was so distinctive that sailors used it as a navigational aid. But once the town was named after the rock, they apparently decided the white top wasn't enough...

...so they painted the whole damn thing white.

The white rock in White Rock. This pose was Mr E Man's idea; I think he enjoys testing the limits of how cheesy I'm prepared to be on my blog

The informational sign next to the rock skips this part of the story, but it's pretty damn obvious.

 I guess "Grey Rock Painted White, Badly" isn't as good of a name for a town

Well, I've just had a call from Mr E Man informing me that he's just back from getting some stitches at the hospital after injuring his finger by catching a falling router at work - while it was running. He's going to be off work for two weeks, but he's basically fine. He claims he did it all for me, so he can spend more time with me on my staycation, and please can I bring him some chocolate? So off I go, back out into the rain! It's a hard life, pretending to be a writer...

Mr E Man ponders how cheesy HE is prepared to be on my blog

Nuclear fiction

Conversation last night:

Mr E Man: "I was really enjoying that show I was watching before we went out"

Me: "Oh, it was a show? I thought it was a movie"

Mr E Man: "Yeah, it was a movie"

Me: "Oh right, I keep forgetting that you guys [movie industry people] call movies shows. It's very confusing sometimes"

Mr E Man (in his best fake-patronising voice): "Well, you've only known me eight years. Maybe in another decade or so you'll stop being confused"

Me: "Well you must get confused sometimes too! Like, like, when I say genome when I mean exome!"

Mr E Man: "I'm never confused. I always know exactly what you mean"

Me: "What's an exome, then?"

Mr E Man (confidently, without a hint of hesitation): "It's the part of the genome that's outside the nucleus"

Me: "..."

Me: "That was such a great answer that I almost want to tell you it's true"

Confidence, kids! That's the secret to successful bullshitting!

Lest we forget

Hockey pool, week 5

I forgot to check who was going to post the update this week, so I guess that means it's me!

It was Chall's week all the way: just look at the slope on her line as she took first place!

Lavaland and I also had good weeks, climbing from 8th to 6th and from 7th to 4th, respectively. It's still pretty tight at this early stage of the season though, and it's definitely still anyone's game!

Here's the full graph, showing just how many changes in the rankings there have been so far:

It's fun having this many people involved!

Bob, can you post an update next week?

Cocktail sausage

I've never before had a drink that came with meat in it.

Mmmmmmmm. Meat.

QUIZ: Elementary, my dear readers!

Ooh, this is gonna be a good one!

Remember that this time I've activated comment moderation (for the first time EVAH), and you have 24(ish) hours to submit as many answers as you can before I open up the comments (as soon as I get up tomorrow). Put them all in one comment, or keep coming back and leaving multiple comments - either way is fine!

Once the comments are open, you can keep submitting answers to any outstanding questions on a free-for-all basis. Once all questions are answered OR you've all given up, I'll declare the winner(s)!

Right.

This is another anagram quiz, with a chemical reaction twist. You're given some of the letters from the left hand side of the "equation", but the other letters are from the name of a chemical element. You "react" the letters of that element with the given letters to make a synonym of the clue word (or phrase) on the right hand side of the equation.

For example, for this clue:

Element + given letters = clue word/phrase

_ _ _ _ +          R             = kind of tree

the answer is:

L E A D +       R             = ALDER

You need to provide both the element (e.g. LEAD) and the clue word (e.g. ALDER).

Clear as mud?

Off we go!

1. _ _ _ _ + S P = jail


2. _ _ _ _ + T I E = resident


3. _ _ _ _ _ + C = wild horse


4. _ _ _ _ _ + A L = crunchy cereal


5. _ _ _ _ _ _ + N T = alight


6. _ _ _ _ _ _ + K U = power loss


7. _ _ _ _ _ _ + I S E = submarine spyglass


8. _ _ _ _ _ _ + I L U = stereoscopic


9. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ + Y = modesty


10. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ + E = augment


11. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ + S T = Satan's sulphur


12. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ + L O = accident


13. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _  + U = kind of dog


14. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ + C = history


15. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ + N = postulation

Easy peasy lemon squeezy! Have fun!

Woohoo!

 

(posted from my iPhone)

ETA: Wow, what a show! The best I've seen in years!

More photos:

I danced my ass off and sang and yelled until I was hoarse. Awesome stuff.

Fox hunt

Yesterday, while composing an email to our IT department trying to persuade them to let me install Firefox on my new computer*, I decided to quickly check that the new version of Internet Explorer doesn't have any of the necessary features** I was claiming were unique to Firefox.

I guess it doesn't:

Yay, Microsoft!

----------------

*it's not so slow that I want to throw it out the window! And it will let me open more than three programmes at a time without crashing! No longer will I have to keep closing and re-opening programmes when I'm trying to compile a progress report from Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Adobe source files, plus PubMed! And the mouse scrolls properly, and the keyboard is crumb-free! I am almost crying with gratitude right now...

**mostly spell check and the Lazarus add-on, for when I'm submitting a grant or report that uses web forms.

The people have spoken!

Poll results

The next quiz will be posted at 7am PST on Friday, November 5th. Comments will be closed for the first 24 hours (well, probably more like 26 or 27, because I'm not getting up early on a Saturday just for this!) You will be able to submit answers for as many questions as you wish during that time, in either one comment or multiple comments. After the 26(ish) hours are up I'll open the comments, and you must can all trash-talk each other.

AND NO MOANING!!!

In other news, it's official: the most Canadian thing I've ever done is play drunken hockey outside on New Years Eve.

So now you know.

Hockey Pool, Week 4

First of all, many thanks to Chall and ScientistMother for hosting the last two updates!

Here are this week's results:

Congratulations to Thomas, who reclaimed top spot from Bob this week!

You two must be getting lonely at the top there, but luckily ScientistMother is making a bid to join you. I think it's obvious that we need to have a Canadian in the top spot, so yay Scientist Mother!

Chall and Gerty Z also had strong weeks, climbing from 6th to 4th and 7th to 6th, respectively. Ricardipus held on to 5th place, and Lavaland continues to hold steady in 8th.

And as for me: well, clearly, I suck. I can put some of the blame on the NHL scheduling gods; the Canucks only played one game in the last ten days, so I ditched all three of my lovely Canucks (who'd been doing pretty well for me), and chose players from busier teams who'd scored the most points for their cap value. Clearly this technique is not as effective as choosing your own team's top scorers.

I did see one of the Sedin twins in Safeway on Saturday though, so the week wasn't a total write-off, hockey-wise.

The Canucks play four games this week. Onwards and upwards!