2021 Week 35 and January 2022

Hello again, blog! After a chaotic week at the end of Summer 2021, I decided it was time to write again, and said writing ended up languishing in my drafts until now. Many things have changed since I last posted, including my COVID vaccination status (though not on the official system because I was vaccinated in a clinical trial), the order of my supervisors (my former primary supervisor has started a new job but still holds an honorary position at the university), and the place I call home! In fact, the latter two things only changed in mid-August, so the imposed downtime during the chaotic week in question wasn't wholly unwelcome. 

Things got off to a frustrating start on Monday, when I found out at 08:59 that my 9am lab meeting would not be happening this week, after its Friday-afternoon postponement from two weeks prior. My analysis script was also running extra slowly. I went into the office for a few hours in the afternoon, hoping that a change of scenery would help MATLAB along, and I realised the programme was out of memory. 

Tuesday was more productive with presentation and experiment preparation. It turned out to be a very good idea to prepare in advance because I ended up injuring my hands while bell ringing on Tuesday evening, so had to delegate the actual experimenting on Wednesday to the group technician and animal staff. 

My hands healed enough for me to consider animal work on Thursday, but it wasn't to be, because just as the morning meeting was coming to an end, I found out one of my flatmates tested positive for COVID, meaning I had to go straight home. I was allowed to return to the outside world when my own PCR test came back negative, which it did at the end of the week. Unfortunately, that was not the case