Merry Christmas New Year Dude it's next year already

Hello everybody, I hope you had a nice break. I have utterly forgotten to do any blogging at all for ages.

What I have been doing is this:
[pictures of me looking like a dork eating Christmas pudding, hopefully my mum has lost these]
[pictures of me looking dopey and staying in bed all day before I went back to work in January]
and this:

 I tidied my desk and sorted out all the little bottles of samples suspended in isopropyl alcohol. Now my desk looks like less of a bomb site and more of a desk. *looks around* ok, well it did, now it looks like a bomb site again but the little bottles of chemicals are all in one place and organised. And in case anybody is worried: they were completely sealed and I don't open them except in the lab, and certainly not around food. Or cups. Or bowls.

 I installed some new software to do simulations of what electron energy loss spectra should look like. Or rather I tried to install it but it didn't quite work so I have to do a bit of messing about to make it work.

I have also done a lot of things where the view looks a lot like that:
-Writing proposals to ask people at other universities if I can use their microscope for a day, because our big low-noise very accurate microscope is broken and will be hard to fix, and I need my results ever
- Sending emails to try and get somebody to fix broken bits of sample prep equipment, and trying to resist phoning them up and telling them to hurry up and answer already we need to do some work here
-Writing a paper which I hope will get published sometime this year! And there is another paper that I will be on but somebody else is writing his bit first.