Thesis is due in six days, oh my.

Zoidberg understands me.

You know things are getting real when PubMed has edged out Facebook on my 'Most frequently visited' sites.  Makes me feel like a scientist though.  Boom.

I have been working on a commissioned pair of gloves for what feels like a million years.  They're nearly finished, and I'm looking forward to new projects (and thesis free time to work on them a bit more)!  My brother's 30th is on Thursday, so I'm going to make him this scarf.  (It will be late.  Thesis.  My excuse and reason for everything these days.)  I've loved it since I came across it, and was considering making one for myself, but as a geneticist I think he'll appreciate it.  Family of nerds.

Now, do basal receptors play a role in transducing mechanical signals and initiating intracellular responses?  LET'S FIND OUT!

I have seen seven or eight Missing Person posters since the start of the year.

As searches progress and leads peter out and it becomes more and more apparent that the person is probably not going to be found, I start hoping that they don't want to be found.  That this was their decision, that subjecting their family and friends to days and weeks of waiting and not knowing, never knowing, was a necessary evil for the sake of them escaping.  That they don't have to be afraid of whatever it was anymore, and that they can be free and happy.

I don't know if that's an optimistic or messed-up way of looking at it.  Certainly it's not the best case scenario so much as it is a different kind of tragedy.  This way one person comes out of it better, at least.

FO: TARDIS: I couldn't choose a witty title.

Do I make a joke about how it took way more stuffing than I thought it would, because it's bigger on the inside? Or the fact that it took way longer than it should have, and something something time?  Do I go with a quote?  I don't know how I'm expected to make that kind of decision.

Pattern

The thumbnails on my camera led me to believe this wasn't so blurry, and I've already given it away.  Oh well!

Blurrier and before I managed to punch it into some sort of rectangular shape.  Wibbly-wobbly etc.

This taken a ridiculous and kind of shameful length of time to finish.  The extent to which I was relieved when I sewed up the last seam is kind of silly.  Mostly Brown Sheep Lamb's Pride Worsted, and the white is Cygnet DK, which is probably why the light is a bit small.

But it's done, and now I can get back to gloves!  I've also been making speedy neckwarmers in lectures and while out and about, but I don't have the light in my room in college to take nice photos, or the confidence to stand around campus taking photos of myself.

-

Dublin Zoo's youngest elephant learning not to grab.  But she got bored
and left to eat different food and probably did not benefit from the lesson.

In unrelated news, on Thursday I got to go to the zoo, and go into the elephant house, nominally as part of my course.  (I don't do the module to which the trip was connected, but the lecturer got tickets for everyone in the class anyway.)  I think zoos are ethically problematic, and their nature puts them in a bind (have to have animals that'll draw people so they can fund breeding and conservation programmes for the animals in need of them, even if there's no conservational merit to holding them), but I do like the route that Dublin Zoo is taking with the new elephant enclosure, and now the new gorilla area.

-

Also also, my thesis is due in less than a month.  Um.