Whole lot of nothing

There's been a whole lot of nothing going on for a week or so. When I say nothing, it's not nothing at all - there's been school, homework, badminton, aerobics, a visit from Lola II and a trip to Manchester to visit Hugh and Bernadette. But nothing notable that seemed worth blogging about.

School and homework has been very busy. I've completed two online assessments, and I'm trying to do as much Psychology coursework as possible before next Wednesday, because there's an issue about handing in coursework. Most lecturers use a sealed box - you stamp the time and date on your work and post it in the box any time. For some reason, the Psychology lecturer wanted us to hand over the work personally at a specified date and time, but I don't want to have to drive for an hour each way just to hand in a piece of work. There will be a way round this, even if I have to ask my lovely tutor to hand it in for me. There will be more options if I get it finished early, and I need to get started on the GMO coursework as well.

I've been to see my tutor a couple of times recently, to get his support for a parking badge for the main campus, and to change my module choices for next term. I checked out the 'Communicating Biosciences' module that I'd signed up for, which contains stuff that I thought I'd like - writing articles, doing a presentation. On closer scrutiny, there's quite a bit I don't like - working in groups, creating a lesson plan - so I checked out what the alternatives were. The timetable is really restricted next semester, and there were actually only two possible options: more biochemistry, which includes quite a lot of lab work, and a computing module. I went to see the computing lecturer, and decided to go for that one.

There have been online assessments in Immunology and Biochemistry. The Immunology one was about different techniques that are used to detect disease (e.g. HIV), pregnancy, allergy, and proteins and cells within biochemical systems. Not bad, except for interpreting the dot plots resulting from flow cytometry. You can look it up if you like, but it's pretty baffling. The Biochemistry one was a set of questions about a published research paper which described two experiments to determine whether the calpain-10 protein plays a part in glucose metabolism. The first time I read the paper I understood about one word in ten; it was quite satisfying by the end of the process when I could just about follow what was going on.

The exam timetable is out, and my exams are spread over the full two weeks in January, so there won't be time for a proper holiday afterwards. I'm having a mini-break with Lola II in the middle, though. She came to Leamington for an optician appointment, and I took the opportunity to choose new frames for my glasses. My current pair has half the coating scraped off on one lens, and the frames themselves are looking much the worse for wear - I've always had metal frames before, and these plastic ones really don't last as long. They're more comfortable on the nose, though.

I'm on tenterhooks because my new laptop is due to be delivered any minute. The DHL website said it was out for delivery yesterday, but it didn't arrive, and at the end of the day the tracking site said there had been nobody to take delivery so they'd left a card. There was no card, and someone was at home all day, so I sent a comment to that effect and suggested that they might not have found the correct address. The site says it's out again for delivery today, but no sign of it so far.

Plants at the SB campus