2 posts in 2 days? I spoil you!

I know, twice in one week, its more than you can handle, but i just had to put up some pictures of the garden project. We spent the afternoon working on it, and the progress is amazing! We might actually have a space to put chairs and a table soon.... 

This is the view through the door - note the missing piles of rubbish!

This is a new view, from standing in the far corner which we couldn't reach until this afternoon. You can sort of see how deep the garden is now. 

And this is what it looks like standing half way down the garden looking back! We can get half way down are garden!! We will be having a BBQ out here in no time! 

A busy week

Its been a long week since i last blogged anything. Last weekend i went on a trip north to Aberdeenshire to see some family with my sister and her boyfriend, Matt. Its been far too long since i last visited, so it was amazing to see them. Also first time Matt has met the closest thing our family has to a matriarch, Granny, which was great fun to watch. All in all a very good trip. Here is a picture of Matt and Emma playing on one of the many parks we visited, proving just how grown up they have become.

Now is the end of Easter Weekend, which just so happened to coincide with Jonis first pay-day, so went on a trip to Edinburgh to celebrate and spent his whole pay cheque. But its ok, he gets another one next week! hurra! Being paid weekly is going to be so dangerous! It was a fantastic trip - we went to see the Scottish National Ballet do Alice, an adaptation of Alice in Wonderland. It was very, very good, turns out i love the ballet. The music was  fantastic and the dancing we beautiful. We also saw a brilliant show in the Fruitmarket Gallery (which is rapidly becoming my favourite gallery in Edinburgh) about the Narcissus myth throughout modern  art. I got to see the Dali painting Metamorphosis of Narcissus, along with a poem Dali wrote to accompany the painting. This is the picture. You will almost certainly have seen it before. 

Its amazing, iv seen that image so many times on posters and on screens, but to see the picture for real, in the flesh up close and personal was just majical. There are some things a replica just can't convey. The exhibition as a whole was fascinating, all thought i would say not brilliantly curated. I think some of the images could have been displayed better. On the whole however, if you are in Edinburgh in the next month i would highly recommend it. 

Easter Weekend has also seen the start of a Grand New Project for myself and Joni. This Grand New Project requires some explaining...

As everyone knows, the weather this last few weeks has be wonderful, and myself and Joni have been lamenting the fact we have no garden in our rented flat. There is a bit of space behind out flat, but when i say bit i mean you can stretch your arms and touch both sides. Our bins live here and a lot of weeds, and thats about it. However, we have noticed that next to this little scrub land is the ruins of a long-derelict house. It has 4 standing walls and a few blocked up windows and only one access door - from our "back garden". We have decided to turn this space into a little squatters garden for ourselves. We have literally no idea who owns it, but they don't seem to care much about it. The place has clearly been used as a dumping ground for years. Here a picture to try and show the space, but it is very hard to photograph fully. 

As you can see, this is mostly just a landfill site, but we have decided to clean it up, and make it into our own little place. So on friday Joni bought 2 pairs of heavy duty gardening gloves and some black bags. We haven't spent long on it this weekend, but I think we have managed i surprising amount of progress. At first only one of us could get in the entrance, and we have had to drag out so much rubbish. Mostly we have just been stacking it in the bit that does belong to our house, making a right mess. Heres hoping the landlord doesn't come round in the next few weeks because we have no idea how we are going to get rid of all this stuff. We have already filled our bin, and then 10 bin bags with rubbish but, ta da...

We made a big pile of mud! Yay! Well done us!

Seriously though, we have made a lot of progress and everyone is invited to our BBQ celebration party when we finish it around September!

Off home to Notts for the long weekend next weekend. VERY excited. Can't wait to see everyone!

Before & After photos of the flat plus My First Conference - Some closing thoughts

Last Saturday the flat was (nearly) finished, so me and Joni spent the day madly cleaning it. I took some before and after photos for you to enjoy.

Firstly the hall, which I would like to point i had already hoovered when i took the "before" photo! I love my new mirror! So glad to have it up on the wall finally. 

You can't really see the dust in this picture, but trust me, it was horrific. It took me and joni 3 hours, 3 cloths and 2 large buckets of water to just clean up the dust! Took a further 3 hours to move all the stuff back in. And during the cleaning i managed to totally take all the skin off one of my hands, so iv been all flaky and gross at the conference, and looked like a crazy moisturiser-obsessive. Another point to note is our landlord has replaced the nice tile floor with cheap and nasty lino, which has been laid badly. Not very happy about that. 

 This is the state our "kitchenet" was in by the time we were finished with it. By this point our beautiful "zen" living room had been totally taken over by almost every other room in the house. So much so in fact, that it felt quite empty once we were done, its taken a few days to get used to it.

Its so nice to have the flat back, looking fantastic. Although when we were cleaning we did notice the builders have kind-of trashed our shiny new kitchen which is a bit of a shame. They have broken a shelf and damaged the work tops, so it no longer looks new. We did tell our landlord, but sadly he doesn't seem to care. Maybe he will care more after the valuer has been round tomorrow and tells him how much a "5 year old kitchen" is worth compared to a 6 month old kitchen! The more we think about it, the more we realise those builders really were crap. The reason i keep saying finished (nearly) is because they still haven't finished the spare room! They came round today, rolled out the carpet which has been scrunched up in a corner for the last month and decided that, because it has been rolled up, it has become creased and needs to just lie for a few days before they can lay it properly. They will be back after Easter to sort that..... I'm sorry but, HELLO, YOU COULD HAVE DONE THAT A FORTNIGHT AGO WHEN YOU FINISHED PAINTING THE WALLS!!!! I think they are damned lucky Joni wasn't in today, and i only walked threw the door as they were leaving, because otherwise there would have been shouting. Lots of shouting. Think im going to have to stay home tomorrow morning, so i can see our landlord, and maybe do my shouting then.

So, moving on from the flat...

The last three days i have been at my first ever conference. It was the annual meeting of the British Zeolite Association, and it was in Edinburgh ( i know, exotic location!). It had its highs, and its lows but over all i would say a very fun experience. I'm note sure i networked as much as you are supposed to at these things - having 7 other members of my group there kind of made it less necessary. I did meet a few new people, which was very nice. Always good to talk to other people in the same (well, vaguely related) field. I say vaguely related because while the conference now covers a wide range of zeolites, MOFs and other porous materials, i think at least 30 of the 35 talks focused on putting things in the pores of these things in one way or another. Speaking as someone who doesn't do that, i feel there is a lot more to these materials than pore sizes and cage volumes, which perhaps wasn't explored as much as it could have been.

There were quite a few "key notes" speakers - some successful, some not so much. I felt the guy (sorry, i forgot his name and my program is out of reach at this moment) who talked about carbon capture just before dinner got the mood just right - not too much science, lots of slagging-off the media, which is exactly what you need at 5:30pm when everyone's attention is wavering. I also felt Norbert Stock did very well to give such an interesting talk at 9am the morning after the conference dinner. I watched him dance at the Ceilidh the night before and i was quite impressed he was awake, let alone animated, so early the next day.

I do have 2, possibly a little controversial, points i would like to make. The first is a simple observation. While there were approximately equal numbers of female to male students there, there can only have been a handful of female postdocs and lecturers. And on this point, i don't think i have ever met a female professor. While i believe historically, this makes sense, i hope that by the time i reach this point the audience will have become a little more equal. I say hope because i also observed that of 6 student prizes handed out, only one went to a woman.

The second point is much harder to put into words, but considering how much it was mentioned at the conference i feel i would like to try. There were a number of talks which i found, along with most of the audience i think, very hard to keep up with because the speaker was not a native English speaker. I feel this is something of a taboo subject really - people don't like to stand around saying "I couldn't understand a word of what that last guy was saying", except in their own little work groups, which i think is possibly wrong. It is fantastic that speakers travel so far to talk at conferences like the BZA, especially for students like myself who struggle to get funding to travel far to foreign conferences, so it seems a shame that when they get here their talks can go largely unnoticed because the audience couldn't understand them. While i have no solution for this problem, i do think we should perhaps talk about it more openly, in the hope of coming up with some method of keeping talks engaging for an audience, when perhaps the speaker is less confident in the language the are speaking.

So that was all a little serious, sorry about that. Also that was a very long post, so well done if you made it to the end of it! All there is left to say is i very much enjoyed my first conference, and my first Ceilidh, and have come away with some... everlasting memories!

A happy end to a long week

Its been a long week, it has been a long month, in fact it has been a long quarter of a year, but finally our flat is fixed (apart from the fridge being put back, the blinds going up and the carpet in the spare room going back down, but thats all small stuff)!!! Hurra! Finally we can get back to normal, and enjoy our lovely flat again. Pictures soon to follow, after we have spent the next 2 days cleaning up the dust. Annoyingly our landlord cheaped-out in the end, and replaced what was a fairly nice tile floor before it had to be ripped up for the repairs, with nasty lino. Bit of a shame considering how lovely the rest of our kitchen is, but never mind.

Even more good news, as some of you may have noticed through the medium of my slightly drunken Facebooking, this week ended with Joni getting a job! Hurra! Not a particularly exciting job - a call centre in Dundee, for BT. But a job is a job! And in true Fiona style i have already mentally spent Jonis entire first pay-cheque. In fact I was pricing up a trip to Paris before the job was even confirmed! Sadly this won't be happening, but we can afford to relax a little now, and maybe I can get some new shoes :-D

On a slightly more serious note, I would like to say a very personal thank you to everyone who has supported us, financially and emotionally for the last 7 months. This has been the hardest period Joni and I have ever had to live through, harder than any one person will ever know I think, and it would have been much harder without so many people there to listen to me, given me a shoulder to cry on, and just generally supported us both. So thank you very much, to so many friends, old and new.

I coulds say a lot more right now, about the value of money and the horrific state of the job market, but it can wait. Now is time to celebrate, to the shops.....!

A small Fiona rant concerning.... Religion

"Because we had burned the Koran, and the guy that was out there blasting us for doing the right thing, burning the Koran, showing its proper respect that it deserves, because its an idolatrous piece of trash. His wife died the next week and we picketed her funeral..... in part yes, thats the judgement of God falling on his head, he ought not to have ever opened his mouth and he ought to have been burning the Koran with us. Thats the righteous judgement of God and you can dispute that but you are on the wrong side of that."

I watched Louis Theroux's Most Hate Family in America tonight, about the Westboro Baptist Church in Texas and oh my god. Is that not the most offensive and disgusting rant you ever heard? Seriously, there are so many things wrong with that statement it wouldn't even know where to begin. And it came from the mouth of a young American woman who genuinely believes Barack Obama is the anti-Christ. 

Now lets not go getting ourselves confused, i am not religious in any way, in fact i have been known to be quite anti-religious. However, i do believe that everyone has the right to worship whoever they want in the privacy of there own homes, as long as they don't offend others or remove others liberties. But this sort of thing is just so wrong, and it just reminds me of everything that is wrong with religious across the world. Why things so based in generosity and kindness can invoke such extreme hate-rid and extremism is beyond me. 

These people regularly picket soldiers funerals and colleges. The whole show left me somewhere between intense anger, a desperate desire to laugh and completely speechless. I am very glad to Louis Theroux for making this show. And also i guess this is why i also love the BBC and quite happily pay my Licence Fee (or will quite happily pay it when i get a TV). If this had been made my anyone else it would have had to have been sensationalised or interspersed with images of dying soldiers. As it was, it didn't need sensationalising at all, it was just interesting, thought provoking and just a little bit scary to think there are, in 21st century America, people living who actually think all gay people are going to hell. And me to for living in sin. 

Ahh well, all the best people are in hell.....

(P.S. I feel i should mention Joni decided to follow up this by watching the first series of Rev, another amazing show about religion, from a totally different angle)

An Update with Some Photos

Joni says blogging is all about photos and linking to things, so here is an update of what I have been up to, with some photos which I like. My regular stalkers will probably have seen a lot of these photos already. In fact you might even notice one or two of these pictures wasn't even taken by me.

First up a few pictures from my birthday, as I get really over excited by birthdays and totally haven't gone on about this one enough yet. This is a picture from the restaurant, Hendersons where i had lunch with Joni, M&D, and around about this moment they sang a quiet, but enthusiastic round of "Happy Birthday".

 Next up a picture of Joni and Me outside what we are unofficially calling "Our Next House" aka Holyrood Palace. What? Can't a girl dream?

This is a picture of my fabulous Lemon and Blueberry Work Birthday Cake hand crafted by John (and he claims his wife hardly helped at all!). This picture should have gone on Facebook on the day, my apologies for my memory laps. 

And the final birthday related photos - a little birthday present to myself. Bought within 7 days of my actual birthday, they definitely count! The plan is to wear them to the conference next week for that "Yes I am a sensible student, but there something a little bit different about me.." look. Also going to wear them to see Granny and family the week after, to remind them studying science doesn't make me boring!

Now on to an update on the flat situation. All this week the decorators and some other people have been working hard on our flat. This Friday we broke in again to take a few pictures. The walls are all done and painted (yes, they are staying that miserable grey colour!) and this wooden flood has been lain. Supposedly the cabinets were going back up on Friday, but that doesn't seem to have happened. Still, definite progress has been made and there is now 2 lovely new light fittings in the ceiling, and the spare room seems just about finished.

Disappointingly, we got home on Friday to find the mess which has taken over the corridor outside our flat, has now spread into our hall. Seriously not impressed, and whoever shows up on Monday had better sort it out sharpish, or I might have to get angry at them.

Still, all in all, a good week. The building work still looks set to finish next Friday as planned. Next week I might email the landlord to ask about a cleaner, since the rest of our flat is now coated in dust, again.

The defining feature of this week has been Louise's animals, so last photo of the day here are the bunnies playing "find the carrot". They were crap at it, but they were quite fun to play with for 10 days. Having Louise's kitchen for the last 10 days really has been a God-send, I don't know what we would have done without it. I really can't wait to get our kitchen back now, I'm very fed up of being surrounded by builders and dust and mess.