There's a spider living in my bathroom

See, it's a long story. First of all, ages ago, there was a rumour of a spider living below the toilet. Rumor because I had not seen it, just heard about it from my flatmate. Apparently it was really big. Then it was dead one day, and we vacuumed it up. For the record, it wasn't that big. Maybe Ireland big, but absolutely nothing compared to those huge dark brown spiders that used to appear on the bedroom wall back home. Which I used to be able to deal with, but now would not be able to go near because I am so un-used to big spiders that the smaller ones make me run away.

So, to get closer to the point of the story. The other night I had tag practice and they kept us running for 2 hours in terrible humidity, after which I really needed a shower. I got home and jumped in the shower and switched it on, then I looked down and there was a centipede crawling around the plughole trying to get out! It was really big too! I mean, not like tropical big but pretty big for what you expect to see in you house. It was all crawly and full of legs and I started yelling 'ew ew ew ew ew ew ew' and turned the shower off and jumped out, wrapped my towel around me and rushed out of the bathroom to get my flatmate to come and deal with the centipede problem. Which she did, amid lots of laughter. So the centipede was gone, we put it out the window and it happily landed on some roofing tiles. But that's not the end of the story.

See, in the morning, I was just getting out of the shower (yes, I had to have another shower, because how can you wake up without a shower?) and I saw another centipede! It was big and gross and crawling over the bathroom floor. But then it crawled under the toilet and suddenly it couldn't seem to move anywhere, it was just wriggling about in one place. Then a big spider came out and attacked it. At which point I left. And no, the spider wasn't that big, compared to big NZ house spiders, but I am accustomed to no spiders in my nice little city apartment so it seemed pretty big. Next time I went into the bathroom there was neither centipede nor spider to see, so I guess the spider must have pulled its meal into its hidey hole. I have since vacuumed the house, including the bathroom, so I must have got the spider web, but the spider was hiding, and he has probably made a new web. I have never seen him since, but I know that he is there, beneath the toilet somewhere. He is not as big as the spiders that used to live in the bathroom when I was growing up, but it is still unsettling and I am not impressed.

Sunshine!

After a spectacularly wet end to summer here in Galway, autumn decided to treat us to a couple of last days of warm weather. It went from this, the weekend before (which I did spend lazing about on the couch after all):

To this on the Friday just been:

It was 25 degrees! I took the day off to make the most of it, because it is very unlikely that it will happen again this year. Spent the whole day on the beach, went for a swim, and only got very slightly sunburnt. It is still the school holidays here so the beach was packed with kids and parents, but luckily we found a nice quiet spot down the end.

Of course, after a long day of sunshine I was incredibly exhausted, and my head was pounding, though that may have been on account of staying up late to finish my book. So I spent the weekend quietly, enjoying the slightly colder, but still good weather. Until Sunday, when we woke up to sunshine, went out to make the most of it, only to have it cloud over. So we went to a cafe and sat in the garden, but then it started to spit and it was awfully windy. So we picked up our things and went inside. Next thing you know, the sky opens up and drops down another heavy, torrential downpour. When it finally stopped we went home, and luckily we live right in the city centre, just in case. Not that it would have helped much, just a few seconds in that sort of rain and you'd be soaked to the bone. Now it is on and off every day, and we can only hope that it stays fine for rugby on Thursday.

Autumn has begun...

Galway has finally got a pie shop. It is right beside where I live. They have steak and cheese pies. But it is not a steak and cheese pie. If they tried to sell this in NZ they would have to hang their heads in shame. First of all, there are no noticeable pieces of steak in the pie. The gravy is not rich and meaty. There is carrot in it. And the cheese is just not right. Plus the pastry is not so good and the pie is sort of soggy. It does not cut the mustard. Clearly Galway and the whole of Ireland could benefit from a proper NZ pie. I don't know why it is so bad, when the UK is so close and they can make a good pie. They have this franchise over there called Pie Minister and they make amazing pies, with proper steak and gravy and delicious pastry. This Galway pie shop is just a half arsed attempt at making money of ignorant tourists and gimmick loving city people that don't know what a real pie is like. Even the outside of the shop shows it, it is poorly painted and the signage is terrible.

So other than a terrible excuse for a pie shop opening up down the street, absolutely nothing has been happening here. OK, so there was the arts festival, but that's not so great. I didn't even manage to see the Macnas parade, which is the only real parade that they have in this city, because it was on at 9 pm on a Sunday and it was raining so I just did not want to leave the house. And then when the arts festival was over the Galway races began, but I'm not much into wasting money on horses, so I didn't bother with it. For a little while I got excited about the prospect of ladies' day and the best dressed competition, but then everbody from here told me that it is not actually a competition that includes the public, no matter what they say, but it is always pre-determined and the winners are members of societies like the Rotary Society or Miss Ireland or something like that. How crappy is that, when the advertisements say that anybody from the crowd could be chosen? They should have a proper little fashion show included, that would be much better. So after getting all excited about the idea of making something and winning something again I didn't bother because apparently it doesn't work that way, and just in time for the races the monsoon season has hit Galway so there is no way that I was venturing out to the race track to stand around outdoors in a dress an heels while it rained down on me.

However, it is a long weekend here in Ireland and I feel that I need a proper break from work so I hope that the torrential downpours stop for a day or so, so that I can get out of the house and do something, so that my long weekend will not feel wasted. Besides, this apartment is so small and race week is so loud that if I don't get out I will surely go stir crazy, so hopefully I can find some entertainment for the weekend. If not, I will just have to walk around town mindlessly window shopping because I have cute new boots that need to be worn in, until they stop giving me blisters, but I can't go too far in them in case I really need to rush home and take them off, on account of the blisters and all. Yet window shopping is difficult in this ridiculously crowded city, so maybe after all that I will just stay home and read books and watch movies, because that is the best thing to do when it is raining. Besides, techincally it is autumn here now, so a colder season has officially started and it is time to stay in the house and bake yummy things to eat.

Another week, more moaning about work...

So at the moment life is very busy, except for when I am at work procrastinating. I would like to not be procrastinating, but sometimes the amount of work I can do in the lab is limited by what actually needs to be done, and I'm struggling to motivate myself to work on writing stuff up. I dislike sitting at my desk all day on the computer - I would rather be doing some sort of more active work. Like a couple of days ago when I went out to beaches, having a little look for washed up barnacles and putting up posters to appeal to the public. The weather was pretty grim and there were no barnacles, and I don't like long car rides, but I do like going to the beach so it was a pretty good day. Hopefully I will go out again next week and hopefully the weather will be nicer.

What I am busy with at the moment is dealing with all sorts of  people after sending out a press release to ask for help in looking for stupid barnacles. Though the press release doesn't call them stupid. Instead it makes my work sound interesting and exaggerates how applicable it is. Unfortunately for all of those people out there, I am not actually looking for barnacles in order to extract their glue and use it as a surgical adhesive. What I actually need more animals for at the moment is to collect the adhesive for some microscopy work - there is this microscope that uses lasers to look at the chemical bonds holding things together and we are hoping it will tell us something interesting. And I need more animals to do more structural work - if the lab work goes well in the next couple of weeks I will have DNA sequences to work with, and I will make probes that will attach to that sequence in the tissue - which means that I can look at sections of the animal and see where this DNA is expressed, and if it is in the right place then I will know that it is adhesive-protein DNA. Fingers crossed that it works because I really want to finish this bloody PhD!

So anyway, the press release has so far got a lot of responses but has not yet brought me any barnacles. We released it yesterday, which means that the university sent it to all of the newspapers and radio stations on their mailing list. There was a piece in one of the national papers yesterday and I was called up by three radio stations. Hope I did an OK job of the radio stuff. There is a much bigger radio interview next week but I'm not sure if I am doing that or my supervisor is. And then this morning I was called up by a television person! However, it's for an Irish news show (on national television though). So that means they want an Irish speaker. It will be really good coverage so perhaps my supervisor will do it. And hopefully all of this will eventually mean that somebody will call me up and tell me that they have seen live barnacles that I can then go and collect. I don't need much, just a few good healthy ones would do. The thing is, this is getting so much attention that we really should have done it right at the start, but nobody suggested such a thing back then. I have also got one bad response already, some marine person that contested the newspaper's statement that these animals are rare and that extracting their glue is a feasible idea - well of course things are made simple for the wider public, stupid man who thinks he knows better than us who have been working on it for 3 years or so. I wrote back to him with very lengthy explanations.

In other news, Wilbert the snake is doing very well; he is eating loads of mice and growing very quickly. Except last month the mice I got were not so good and I didn't realise until I had already fed him quite a lot of them. When I got them from the pet shop that had mostly thawed already but I thought it would be OK to refreeze them. Wilbert ate most of them just fine, but then he started refusing his food and he took ages to moult. I think he was not very well. But now I have better mice from a different pet store and he is much happier. He is growing so much that I will try him with a larger size - the extra large mice are called monster mice, which I find amusing so I would quite like to feed him monster mice.

And I went away for the weekend, to Limerick for a day long tag-rugby tournament. The games were just 15 minutes long and it turns out that our team is not so good at short games - we got our butts kicked. It wasn't just that though, we were also playing teams that were better than us and that had real rugby players on them. We only won one out of four games, but at least we won by a lot for that game. And I got a try! It was very exciting. Then this week we lost again - it was the last game of the tournament and if we had of won it we would have won the whole thing, but they were a good team full of real rugby players, and we were off our game after the long weekend. The last time we played that team one of our players had her head split open so at least there were no real injuries this time. Except I have a giant bruise on my shin - someone must have kicked me.

Now it is about lunchtime and I should go do some work. I have DNA fragments to clone and sequence and more sequences waiting to be analysed. Lab work makes me tired, makes me just want to go home and bake something, or sit in front of the tele, or finish knitting that hat that I started the other day. Or finish making the dress that I started weeks ago and then stopped when I got to the finishing touches. Or just go to sleep. But at least I can listen to music while I work, on account of having a brand new ipod. It's pink. My old one finally stopped working - the buttons just wouldn't do anything anymore. It had survived a lot though, it was a good few years old and had been dropped countless times, plus once into a glass of water. But I don't like the new one, it is too small - it is only about an inch and a half square! Plus it has no buttons, it's all touch screen! But then again, all I want to do is listen to music and it does that, so the other things don't really matter. And it has a built in pedometer to measure all my steps, so that's fun. Yesterday I walked 10,000 steps! That seems like quite a lot. Makes me feel justified in going home and blobbing out on the couch.

It's been a really long couple of weeks here in Galway. The last post ended with chocolate caramel cupcakes, which were a huge hit for my mate's birthday, and after that I did nothing for the weekend. Except run 10k. It was called a mini-marathon, which is sort of insulting really, because it's nowhere near a marathon. Still, it was really hard. Way harder than 8k. I managed to finish in 56 minutes, which is two or three minutes faster than last year. And I decided that running really isn't my thing, and I don't enjoy it enough to want to do an actual marathon, or even a half. I will stick to short runs and the odd 10k for a good cause.

When I finally decided to try do some work, I realised that what I had been planning on working on was already finished, I had just done it so long ago that I had forgotten. On the Monday I had my GRC meeting, which went just fine, and made me determined to make my stupid lab work go well, so that I can finish this stupid PhD. However, that's much easier said than done. So it's pretty much agreed now that I will try to finish enough to write up my thesis at the end of this year. Which is good.

Then later that day I fed Wilbert the Snake a mouse, which must have not been a very good mouse, or maybe I defrosted it too quickly, because when he bit it and wrapped around it the mouse's tummy burst open and spilt guts everywhere! It was gross. He still ate it though. He has been very boring since then - he is getting ready to molt, but sure is taking his time about it. He would not eat his mice this week, which is very annoying, because they went to waste and they cost me 2 euro each! However, after I changed his bedding and water he did get right into his water, his whole body, and went for a little swim, which I had never seen him do before.

After Wilbert's dinner it was time for rugby practice, where we played a practice game against another team and my legs were hurting me so much that I decided I should really go to the physio. I did so the next day, and she was really good. She used some ultrasound thing on my legs to get rid of the shin-splints, then did dry-needling to fix up my calf muscles so that I wouldn't get more shin splints. Which hurt. A lot. Dry-needling is exactly what it sounds like - needles are stuck into you. There were at least four needles sticking out of my calf muscle and she wriggled them around, which made all my muscles twitch. For the rest of the day I was limping and felt as if somebody and tried to tear my calf muscle right out of my leg. But on the bright side, my legs are almost all better. Unfortunately that hasn't made me much faster for rugby. Yet despite my lack of speed I got my first try in our game last week! Yay! It was a very exciting moment.

So that was all the news of last week, and then over the weekend the Volvo Ocean Race festival started. It involved a lot of noise and huge crowds. There is a little 'village' set up down at the docks, with loads of food stalls (really good ones) and little shops, plus a huge stage. A stage with such hugely load amps that I can hear the noise very clearly from my apartment, which is blocks away. So when the boats came in on Monday night and I was trying to get a good night's sleep (which I needed because I had a cold) I was woken up at one in the morning by the sound of Split Enz 'I See Red' and some incredibly annoying woman shouting through the microphone. I listened for long enough to, first, gather that the NZ boat had come into Galway first (but we didn't win overall, sadly) and, secondly, get so annoyed with that woman at the microphone that I hunted in my earplugs and slept with them in. Which is very uncomfortable! The next day I went down to check out the boats and they were much smaller than I expected. To think that a group of people spent 9 months on those little things, sailing across huge oceans with big waves!

Now it is Thursday and I have had to sleep with earplugs every night. The crowds are huge and the rain is not dampening their spirits. For those of us that live here it's pretty funny that it won't stop raining - now everybody will know what Ireland is really like, instead of being fooled by the bouts of good weather that often show up just for tourists. However, the rain has not improved my cold at all, which has gone from a sinus cold to a gross phlegmy cold to a sore throat cold. I was getting better, but then yesterday it rained on us for our entire rugby game. And then as soon as we finished it stopped. Chocolate cookies helped, and so did going home and making soup for dinner. Yesterday was July the 4th so for the Volvo Race Week it was America day, and there were fireworks out in the harbour. They were really good, and the first fireworks I'd seen in ages! It didn't last long enough though. Apparently fireworks are illegal here, to the point where even the cities don't hold a fireworks display at New Years. How crappy is that?!

I have given up on working for the day. It's nearly time for my first yoga class. Because I joined yoga this week. Which made the physio much happier with me. I am very un-stretchy, and it would be easier on my legs if I was more stretchy. I reckon it is going to be hard, but all my friends do it and say it's great. So I guess we'll see.

The most awful week ever

This last week has surely been the most awful week ever. It all started on Monday. Obviously. On Monday morning my supervisor shows up in my office to tell me that my GRC meeting will be in one week. That's the yearly meeting with my graduate review committee to decide how my PhD is going and if I can continue. Which isn't really a big deal, it's just a formality really. But what it meant was that I spent the week making plans for the rest of my PhD and actually thinking about it all instead of repressing it like I usually do. It wasn't fun. There are only four months until my third year is finished. The first half of the PhD is done and my paper has been accepted (yay!) but I still have a lot of lab work. Can it be done in four months? I don't know. Not to mention that my supervisor doesn't realise that I want to leave so soon. I wrote up a schedule and it is awful - lab work every day, lots of it, and on weekends, no more procrastinating. It will be so exhausting! I am already so exhausted just thinking about it.

So if a week of hard work is not enough (and I really was working hard), we played the most awful, disgusting rugby game imaginable. It's not that we lost - that's really not such a bad thing. We have lost before (although for the summer league we had not lost a game yet). It was the other team that was awful. The were the most vicious pack of savages that we have ever come across. Some of it was also bad luck, but that bad luck definitely had a lot to do with their aggressive attitudes. About 10 seconds into the game one of their guys managed to elbow one of our girls in the face and he split her forehead open! She was gushing blood everywhere and had to go to the hospital for stitches. The ref was useless, the organiser of the league came over and he was useless too - they didn't do anything! You would think that they would be concerned for the players' safety and that at least somebody there would have some first aid knowledge. Instead they didn't even seem to possess common sense. I mean, she had a head injury, there could have been more damage than what we saw, and they didn't even offer to call an ambulance! I think they really should have done at least that. Instead she went off to the hospital, meaning we lost two of our best players and had no more subs. The game continued and a couple of minutes later the other team took out one of their own players - one of the blokes knocked one of the girls down and we all thought she must have broken her shoulder or something because she didn't get up for ages. She was crying and couldn't play the rest of the match. Yet it continued and the ref did not send off the guy that hurt our player nor the one that knocked down the other team's player. If that was our team being aggressive the ref wouldn't even have to do that because our own captain would send us off to chill out for awhile. So the game continued as it started; we were bummed out and off our game after the accident, they were aggressive and the ref was useless. Instead of penalising them he threatened to send our captain off for whining. For the last 10 minutes of the game we played in a torrential downpour. So all in all, it doesn't really get much worse than that.

But we still only lost by about 6 points I think, and we are still at the top of our division in the league. We just have to make sure that we win all of the rest of our matches by lots of points. And that the team we played this last week don't do so well. Which they might not, I'm not sure that they're really so good as all that - a lot of people were saying that the players last week were not the same players as in other weeks, as if they had borrowed some new people just for the purpose of beating us. That would explain the huge aggressive guys on the team, they were probably real rugby players and not used to non-contact sports. I hope so, because after what they did to our player (I mean, she is all swollen and scarred!) we really need to beat them in the league. And maybe meet them in a dark alley and beat some manners into them. It was such an awful, depressing game.

Well, all of that happened on Wednesday, so there were only two days left until the weekend, but they were days full of lab work, so they were not very good days. Not only that, but the lab work was not very successful. So that sucks. The week got moderately better when a woman stopped in with a box of chocolates for me, as a thank you for giving a group of students a tour of the zoology museum. It was very unexpected, and I felt quite underserving of it because I do get paid for my time. Unfortunately I couldn't even stop to chat to her and say a proper thank you because my supervisor was in my office trying to get her head around my research (in other words, wasting time that I could have spent doing real work). But finally Thursday was over and that evening I had a real break from work - I made cupcakes instead, for a friend's birthday. They were delicious, chocolate with caramel frosting and more caramel sauce on top. It was a long evening though, full of silly blonde mistakes, probably on account of my being so tired. First I screwed up the caramel by burning the sugar (it tasted awful). That was OK though, I had enough butter to make more. But then I didn't have enough butter for the frosting. So I dashed out to get some more, and as I went to take the butter from the shelf I noticed the weight of a pack of butter. That is when I realised my blonde mistake. The reason that thought there wasn't enough butter was that I had forgotten how much butter is in a pack of butter. I had used twice as much butter as I should have for the cupcakes! This is why you should always weigh everything!! Luckily cupcakes can survive quite a lot of mistakes and they were still good. Just somewhat denser than they usually are. Everybody loved them and thought they were like little chocolate brownies. So basically, I got through another day of work, then on Friday evening I fed everybody cupcakes, and now it is Saturday and I should have been working but I took the day off instead. Now I'm going to go to bed early and try to recover from my awful week.

Too much work, too little play

OK, so sorry for being really lazy at the moment but there really is not much to be writing about at the moment anyway you know. I think I last wrote when we were having a couple of weeks of crazily good weather, during which I managed to not get sunburnt. I think that was two weeks ago now. Since then, I have been working. Boring, right? But things are going OK at work for the moment so it's not so bad. However, if I don't stop procrastinating about the lab work that I have to do then things won't be OK for much longer. It's just so difficult to get motivated when, one, you don't know what you are doing and have to teach yourself everything and, two, you just really don't want to do it. At first it was OK because that beautiful sunny weather that made me not want to work went away. We had days and days of endless rain (although it did manage to stop just enough for rugby practices and games). Last week was awful for some reason - we had a long weekend, during which time I did no work and lots of sitting around the house (because it was cold and rainy outside) and for some reason shorter weeks are always less productive because your idea of what day it is gets all messed up.

Luckily I had a nice distraction from work last week - I gave a talk at the aquarium for their 'marine month'. It had absolutely nothing to do with my PhD. I talked about dolphins and how they get caught in fishing nets. There were about a dozen kids there and they were a really good audience, with lots of questions (really clever questions for such small children actually). So that was fun, and I was looking forward to Saturday, when they were going to have a dolphin/whale rescue demonstration, using an inflatable whale to show the public what to do if you come across a stranding. I was asked to come along as a scientist and answer any biology questions that people might have. However, it was cancelled, because they have lost their whale. But that wasn't such a bad thing as it was looking like the weekend was going to be horrible and rainy. Only the next thing you know, Saturday arrived and it was warm and sunny! The weather here changes that quickly, and I had no plans for a nice sunny day, but all my friends were going to the one day festival being put on by Mumford & Sons. Has their music reached NZ yet? They're really popular over here. So a friend of mine had a spare ticket and it had been years since I'd been to a concert of any sort, so I forked out 40 euro and went along. It was good - I think most people would have said that it was really, really great - but I think concerts just aren't really my thing. I like the music but I hate all the people crowding around and pressing into you. There was some stoner half asleep and leaning all over people and somebody in front of me kept farting. Plus there were less than 100 toilets for a crowd of thousands, it was awful. Makes you think it would be easier to be a boy. But even they weren't allowed to avoid the queue - there were security guards standing around to prevent them from peeing wherever they wanted. Which is good, sort of, except that then there are twice as many people in line for the loos and you miss out on all the music while you wait. How terribly inefficient and under-prepared is that!

Well, after such a big Saturday I did very little on Sunday, which is a shame because the weather was nice but there is just not that much to do here and I was tired. I sat around watching movies on tele (Nanny McPhee and E.T. were on) and reading my book instead. It's an historical fiction novel about Charles Darwin. Then I made an awesome dinner for my flatmate and I, and it was still such nice weather that we went out for ice-cream, which involved manoeuvring crowds of people who were out to watch the football. All night I could hear people yelling the 'ole' chant. I guess Ireland must have won or something. I hope it doesn't continue tonight because I really would prefer a good nights sleep. On Wednesday is our Zoology colloquium, at which all of us students give a talk about our research and then we have a departmental BBQ. There are not so many students these days so it should finish early, which means food will be early, which is perfect because I intend to leave early and go to our rugby game, which I'm sure will be far more fun than the departmental BBQ. For my contribution I will be introducing the Irish to lamingtons. Chocolate ones. Should be good. And that is all that is going on in my life at the moment, and there will probably be nothing exciting happening over the next couple of weeks either, because the life of a third year PhD student is terribly tedious. To make matters worse I think I have a bit of an RSI from spending too much time typing, and now I have a very sore wrist. Just goes to show that working hard is not good for you.

PS - sorry, no photos either, like I said, nothing much is happening at the moment...