Transferred from my old blog: snow etc.

January 9, 2004

I have spent the last two days at a conference for Occupational and Environmental Hygiene in Semiahmoo, Washington. Karen, one of my post-doc supervisors, kindly volunteered me to talk about the outbreak of Cryptococcal infection on Vancouver Island, as an expert in the molecular epidemiology of the wonderful fungus. I was worried because I only had a 15 min time slot, but my presentation goes for 20 min. I had already cut it back from 25 min. But there was nothing else I could cut out of the talk without running the risk of completely losing my audience. Some conferences are strict about time limits, and others not so much. I figured that I was talking at the end of a session, with a 90 minute break afterwards, so nobody would mind if I talked a few minutes over my limit.
Anyway it turned out not to matter at all. Because in the end the talk went for exactly 15 min. I'm not sure how that happened. I wasn't talking any faster than normal. I said everything I was meant to say. I even stumbled a couple of times while I treid to remember what I was supposed to be saying. Clearly, I managed to subconcsiously cut out the waffle and get to the point.
Anyway the presentation was very well received and I got lots of compliments on it. I was even approached by a woman afterwards who wanted to know if I thought it would be safe for her to move to Vancouver Island. She was a physician and should have known better than to get caught up in the media frenzy surrounding the outbreak. I told her she had a better chance of winning the lottery than vecoming infected, and even if she did it was treatable.

I got home about an hour ago, and when I checked my messages, there was one from my Dad who said the official letter about passing my Ph.D. had arrived at their place, as well as a letter telling me that I'm due to graduate April 16th. So I'm busy looking into flights now, and wondering how much time off work I can get away with, considering I've pretty much used up my holiday for the year already.

We had massive snowfall in Vancouver this week, and it caused huge problems, because Van is just not geared up to dealing with snow. There was a snow day on Tuesday and lots of people took Wednesday off too. Since I live on campus, I had no excuse for not getting into the lab. Then I found that people who lived far away from campus were asking me to do lots of little tasks for them. So while everyone else enjoyed the snow, I was in fact quite busy in the lab!
The snow has pretty much gone now. The temperature is above zero. There's a small little pile in the courtyard that used to be a snowman, and there are big piles of gross brown gritty snow on the sides of roads, left there by the snowploughs. The icicles that were hanging over my window are long gone.