petulant_kitten

moved

2006-12-19T16:15:01Z

I have moved proceedings to myspace
http://www.myspace.com/amycapes

see you there :)

Back in the lab

2006-10-20T12:00:33Z

Well... I'm back at Uni properly now, and am in the middle of my honours project. Its organic sythesis - and if you don't have any idea of what that means, it's like playing with molecular lego. I am attempting (with the help of my supervisor) to make rings and things. I may have the first one by some time next week. Oooh exciting :) Things are a little less hectic than last year, fortunately, so I am contemplating if I should go along to the ChemSoc halloween ball, and if so what crazy thing should I dress up as. I think nil points for anyone wearing a white coat and pretending to be a mad scientist. Not a mummy as that might be flammable. A black cat is a cliche... suggestions on a postcard please. Back off now to see my precious precious reaction. Mwa ha ha ha.

slovenia, austria, germany, belguim, home

2006-09-21T12:58:28Z

Well.... I'm back in bonny Scotland now after a busy month and a half.

I had my holiday in Slovenia with Brek - it was great to spend some proper time together, and the places we saw were absolutely stunning. The two lakes, canoeing, boating, the gorge, the cave system with the incredible underground canyon (think mines of moria), the cats, the pizza! It was generally pretty good, although Brek did get attacked by a nutty drunk on one of the trains, and the mountain biking, ahem, didn't suit me at all.

I travelled back through Austria, Germany and Belgium on the train, stopping in Bruges (a beautiful if expensive city), and then back to Scotland on the ferry. I love boat travel, although I was travelling in one of the cheap airline style seats and there were several loud snorers on this crossing so sleep was pretty much impossible.

Well, back home my parents had moved up to Montrose, so I spent some time up there, mostly helping to decorate their new flat. The last people had pink wallpaper, a yellow ceiling and woodwork and terracotta decorative plasterwork which added up to visual vomit on the eye. I can only hope they were colourblind. It is now beautiful pale blue and white.

Finally, finally now I am back home and back at Uni. Thats been a whole load of hassle in itself. The things for enrolment and timetable and hons project book didn't arrive in the post (hallelujah for the royal 'mail') so this week has been a big rush and a bit of a firefighting exercise to put stuff right. But hey. I'm looking forward to having my brain back in gear, although its time for job and PhD applications which are very unfun.

petulant_kitten @ 2006-07-14T09:26:00

2006-07-14T07:43:34Z

The last day at work!

Well... I am very very tired at the minute - went out last night for a farewell drink, missed the electric cello gig that we were supposed to see, saw 2 jazz bands instead and drank in a weird bar resembling a dungeon (a real dungeon, not a fake theme pub dungeon) actually *in* the banks of the river. Whew. And then had to pack and wrap presents and get up at 5:45am. I now have to get to the hotel before 7 tonight - lots of lugging heavy bags accross town, but I will have a private room and bathroom with unlimited hot water to luxuriate in!
Brek will be arriving on Sunday, and I can't tell you how much I'm looking forward to that. It's been pretty lonely and hard despite all the great food and sunshine which can only cheer you up so far if you're really missing someone.

I've spent a good deal of time shopping for farewell presents for people. It's pretty difficult here, as there are loads of clothes and shoe shops, but not much else. There is no equivalent to HMV or Virgin so finding DVDs is *difficult*.

In fact, it's been bloody impossible to get a copy of Blade Runner on DVD here - no shops, the places in the US won't deliver overseas if the billing address isn't the same as the delivery address, and the only place in the UK (which isn't ebay - I don't know my paypal account stuff off by heart!) which *has* Blade Runner - Amazon - won't deliver to Slovenia either as it's 'not in their payment regions'. Bastards. So I got my flat mate a copy of 'Man in the Moon' instead, which is a fine film indeed.

I bought my supervisor a nice blue glass vase and posy of dried flowers in the Sunday flea market - all fine, until she turned up on Monday morning with a tall clear glass vase with lillies in that someone had given her. I could feel my present wilt. But she seemed to like it when I gave her it this morning.

Rain and Thunder

2006-07-07T12:20:11Z

Rain and thunder again today - but still pretty hot at 30C.
Not much to do in the lab again as TLC (thin layer chromatography, not tender loving care) takes time.
I got paid (finally) after having to make a bit of a fuss, but it feels good getting an envelope stuffed with 5000 notes (5000SIT = 14GBP) and I think a beer and pizza dinner is in order to celebrate. Last night I had a bit of a 'bottom of the fridge' meal of a tin of beans, some fried courgettes and cottage cheese :-/ It kind of worked. But would rather not repeat it.

Zagreb and the Dungeon

2006-07-06T09:27:44Z

Well, it's been a long and fairly busy week here, hence the not writing in my livejournal. On Saturday, one of my flatmates left to go back home to Vienna, which was a real pity as she's really nice. The flat now seems a little bit lonlier :(

On Sunday, I went over to Zagreb (capital of Croatia for people who don't know geography). The city has some amazing buildings - in better condition than the ones in Ljubljana, so it really is a fantastic place to just walk around. Which is just about all I could do as the city is shut on a Sunday. Having said that, I had a gorgeous meal in a pretty decent restaurant - roast goose with this weird layered pancake and cream thing. Back home this would mean a small piece of goose breast and a little scoop of pancake-stuff with maybe a leaf or two of salad. In Croatia this means a breast and a leg (geese are big animals) with a giant half plate of pancakes plus a large bowl of juicy tomato salad. Mmmm. Plus the beer was great and cheaper than coke. Later I tried pear icecream which was also delicious. On the downside, there were clearly quite a lot of people who were very, very poor, trying to scratch a living around the centre.

On Monday, work was non-existant. I came in and put a TLC plate in a tank, went out for lunch with my supervisor (delicious beef and caper risotto) came back, took the plate out of the tank then went for ice cream as it had been her birthday and then when we got back it was time to go home anyway. Not that I'm complaining like!

The bugger was Wednesday - in at 8am and not away again until 5:30. Plus I was learning how to do ultrafiltration of proteins which is done in a cross between a horror film dungeon and a walk-in fridge. It's kept at 4C and is exceedingly unpleasant. Is it the water dripping down the peeling walls or the fact there's no seat to at least ease the pain of horrible low temperatures? Or is it the ants? Who knows. Don't make me go back, please.

Today, well, not much is happening again, as you might have guessed :)

petulant_kitten @ 2006-06-29T14:57:00

2006-06-29T13:18:44Z

Well, this week has been incredibly hot - the temperature getting up to nearly 40C on Wednesday. Other places in the world with similar weather included the south of India. However at the minute there's another thunder storm going on so it will be a bit cooler.

On Saturday, I went out with a group of friends to this amazing place called 'Metelkova' which is a kind of hippy-ish alternative squat place in a deserted army barracks. Lots of artists live there, and they have decorated the buildings with crazy pictures and mosaics, as well as putting up more weird buildings. We sat and drank beer and listened to the music - there are five separate venues there all with a different theme. Unfortuately, it's in danger of being demolished by a shitty right wing government - here's the website if anyone is interested:

http://www.metelkova.org/indexe.htm

I then cooked for Britain on Monday - there was a cook-off between international students/ people working at the embassies here, where we all had to make different dishes from our respective countries. I made a crumble which was going to be apple, but since there aren't good apples around at the moment it turned into peach and cherry. It was quite tasty, and the bowl came back empty. Hooray for British food :)

Work has been progressing slowly as usual, and this week I have been mainly poisoning my microorganisms. The cultivation turned black and started foaming so it looked a bit like guiness. Mmmm.
And today we had to make a dark room for a UV light box, so we were knee deep in scissors, sticky tape and aluminium foil which made pretty happy, and regress to the age of about 6, as it turned out we had accidentally made a kick-ass robot costume. It was impossible not to put it on my head ;)

Tonight, a meal with one of my flatmates who is sadly moving back to Vienna on Saturday.

Giants Moving Furniture About

2006-06-23T09:15:50Z

Just before I was going to leave work yesterday afternoon, there was the most amazing thunderstorm. Sheets of rain, then hail like pebbles which tore at the trees and dented cars, then sheet lightning flashes and huge gusts of wind. It brought down a lot of the fruit thats ripening on the trees, so the pavements were littered with half formed apples, almonds and cherries everwhere, as well as broken branches and leaves. Then it was incredibly humid and damp as the water steamed away from the hot pavements.
Hooray for freak weather!

Today, no dramatic metereological events as yet, but the experiments appear to be working again :) Phew - I thought it was me, but it seems that one of the chemicals we were working with was really old, and was messing up the readings by being crap.

A Word of Warning

2006-06-22T12:40:59Z

Hello people, just a quick one today. If you leave a comment, don't put your phone number in it - anyone can read it.
Today - experiments doing weird, stupid stuff and it's pouring down outside. I'm sure I'll be in a better mood tomorrow. Maybe.

Evil Pixies

2006-06-21T08:25:54Z

Well, the last two days have been fun.
Oh yes. First, I dropped my phone in my cup of tea in the morning, It didn't work for a while, then it worked, but with all the key functions swapped round, and then when it dried out it kept everything fine EXCEPT MY ADDRESS BOOK. I only have a couple of numbers that I can remember so if you want me to ring you, then send me your number!

Then my experiment went tits up (evil pixies drinking it I believe), and we had a power cut which screwed something else I was doing which might take a week or so to put right.

On the other hand, I did have nice evening sitting out in the park with my flatmate, drinking beer and enjoying the weather and I met a very nice cat who lives in one of the bio-tech departments - a little unexpected because that is not where cats normally live.

Anyway, there is nothing more I can do today as there is going to be another power outage this evening which would screw any experiment up. I am going to get some ice cream and cherries and sit outside with a good book.

Why I'm Here

2006-06-16T11:54:41Z

Well...
I've just completed the third year of a chemistry degree at Edinburgh Uni, and I was lucky enough to get a placment on the IAESTE international science exchange scheme. I'm working with a research group in Lubljana, Slovenia for six weeks, prodding, poking, poisoning and generally torturing a particular microorganism. It's one of the weird 'extremophiles' which live around volcanic undersea vents at temperatures which usually boil other creatures. Our aim is to find out what makes it so tough.
And instead of writing endless group emails, I thought - no, Stu thought for me - that a live journal would be much better. So there.

Today it's around 30C again (yesterday peaked at 36C), so weather for sippin' cool lemonade and settin' on the porch. Which I will do after 3 - when I pack up for the day.
The morning was, by Slovenian standards, busy. Now I have two hours to wait for stuff to be boiled and baked, and then I'm off for the weekend! Food! Beer! Ice cream! No posts until monday.

Hard Work

2006-06-15T09:55:57Z

Well, it's another very hot and sunny day here in Slovenia.
I was in work at 9, finished work at half past, and have spent the morning setting up this live journal to while away the terrible hours. It looks like nearly lunch time and I am going to bugger off to the park for a picnic, and read my book in the sunshine for the rest of the afternoon. Maybe eat cherries or something... ahhh the luxury of the 'working' day here.

Tomorrow, I'll write a proper introduction and explanation of why I am here and what I'm doing.