A whole year?!

Seriously, it has been a whole year and then some since I last updated this thing? My goodness. I have been slacking. I remembered this blog because I was at a lecture given by Athene Donald with my MP Meg Munn, who mentioned that Athene does a blog and talks about what scientists actually do all day, and this was very helpful to people who might want to be one. Oops, I thought, I should do that. So I am. Let's see how long this lasts...

Here is a potted update of, er, a whole year:
-We fixed the sample prep equipment, or rather, the fabulous Peter Korgul did
-I did a lot of sample prep and some experiments which are going to produce good science once we sit down and figure stuff out
-The paper I was writing isn't going to get published because somebody else already did exactly the same thing 10 years ago. Damn! But I can put some of it in another paper with actual new stuff in later.
-I went to EMAG 2013 in York, met lots of people, talked lots of science and ate lots of cake
-Our big teamwork paper is...nearly finished...I will probably be saying this about it in March 2015 too...
-I helped a lot of students who are going to get a lot of PhDs and hopefully write a lot of papers so people can see what they found out (and that I helped so my CV doesn't look so bare!)
-The mean people at work took our cats away :( apparently they are living in nice homes now but we are still sad.
-I applied for some funding to go to Denmark and do some tomography, but we didn't get it. Bah. Never mind.
-My job and a lot of other people's in the same centre ran out, then got extended, then got extended again, and now it is about to run out at the end of March and we are waiting to see if it gets extended until summer 2015. (I hope so, fingers crossed)

And in the non-science side, I got one of these of my very own:

and a car, and a slalom kayak. All of these partially explain why I haven't done any blog updates in a long time. Also I got more depressed and was off work quite a lot, but now I am feeling vaguely better and getting on with stuff (cat is helping a lot!).

Au revoir, I will try and update more now. See if I stick to it...!