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.
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!
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