Claire's blog

It’s a slightly worrying place, applying for new jobs.  I’m lucky, in that I have family to support me, but it’s still a bit dispiriting sending job applications into the ether and keeping your fingers crossed.  But today I got an invitation to interview in just over a weeks time – lovely to know that […]

Back in March I went to North Carolina for a conference and gave a talk, and following that I got invited to talk at a conference in Nancy.  They offered to pay my expenses while I was there and provide money towards the travel (and it looks good on my CV!) so I’ve just got […]

So here I am, at the beginning of my last week working for the NCBES!  Strange feeling, as I got up and came into work today same as any other day for the last two years, but this is it.  My last Monday as an employee here. Here’s hoping one of the jobs I’ve been […]

My work computer is now fully fixed and running at full speed (hooray!), so I’m staying at work to finally finish going through ALL of my emails.  I’ve been skimming them, and trying to keep on top of stuff, but quite a few have piled up.  I’m also hanging around because it’s summer student season […]

Daventry was fantastic.  Learnt some new things, met up with old friends, made new friends, spent FAR too much money, promised to write an article for the Journal, and got some work for the Guild done (mostly working on proposed new things for the website).  I didn’t actually finish anything in the two classes I […]

It’s been quiet on here as I’ve been very busy for the last few weeks (months!).  My contract finishes at the end of this month, so I’m frantically working to try and squeeze all the experiments I can into the remaining time.  Of course I’m not helped by the fact that the FACS machine has been […]

I’ve had a nice suprise this week, as it turns out I was supposed to get a pay rise ages ago, and I’ve just been given the rise, along with the missing back pay!  My credit card is going to heave a huge sigh of relief. Our poor cat is getting a lot of hassle […]

I’ve been holed up for the last week or so, desperately trying to finish a grant proposal so I still have a job after May.  The deadline is 5pm today, and I’ve just submitted it!!!  My boss is currently off work (due to have her baby any day now), but she’s been amazingly helpful, reading […]

I’ve been beading like a fiend this weekend, making items for the Christmas exhibition at Patchings, and managed to completely forget that I’m giving a lecture to Masters students tomorrow morning! Thankfully I lectured on this topic last year, so I’ve just got to update and review my slides. And I’ve been looking at the […]

So Wilbeary and Mum might be exited about the people they see, but I had my own brush with fame yesterday when I went for lunch with a couple of workmates and Martin Sheen walked in. He’s currently taking some courses at NUI Galway, so he’s seen around campus quite a lot.

I love lists. I really enjoy organising things into lists, putting them into categories, arranging them in order of importance. It’s why my books are in alphabetical (ish) order on my bookshelves (and divided by category), why I love boxes with lots of little compartments, why I’ve catalogued all my books on LibraryThing and it’s […]

I flew back to Galway yesterday, via Leeds Bradford airport. I’m not sure what I think of it – it’s very convenient for me at the Galway end, but the Leeds end is not that easy to find or get to. Even having travelled the route on Friday, we still managed to go wrong again […]

Just to show that you can find anything on the internet – A great cake Although I have to admit that I’ve always been a fan of unusual wedding cakes. There used to be a shop in Liverpool that made great cakes – Rapunzels tower with the groom climbing up the brides hair, a swimming […]

It’s been quite busy here lately, including a trip to Rotterdam for a conference, but I’ve managed to fit in some beading and prove I still know how. I’ve made this from size 11/0 seed beads, following a pattern from Julia Pretl’s ‘Little Boxes’ book.

Got a text late last night to let me know that the roof at work has leaked AGAIN, so I came in this morning to find all my stuff had been moved to various locations around the office to protect it from the minature rainstorm going on above my desk. So I’ve spent today so […]

When I arrived at work this morning it was to find we’d had a bit of a flood in our second floor office – well, more of a shower really. There are air conditioning vents in the ceiling, and everyone who sits under one of these (including me) found our desk dripping wet. Luckily, all […]

It’s a beautiful sunny day over here in Galway, and as far as I can tell there are about 3 other people here at work with me! Not that I blame them – the sun is shining, there’s a gentle breeze, it’s Friday afternoon…. I think I might be heading off soon as well 🙂

Spring has sprung, so I really need to knuckle down and give both the website and this blog a more cheerful theme – hopefully fairly soon. This could be the time when I finally knuckle down and learn enough html to write my own theme for the website – but don’t hold your breath! I’ve […]

I’ve been doing a bit of immunofluorescence staining recently on my cells. This lot are some coronary artery endothelial cells nicely stained for von Willebrand Factor (a protein you find on the cell membrane in endothelial cells). The green is the protein and the blue is the cell nucleus. On the other hand you’ve got […]

It’s just that I’m sitting here waiting for the slides I’m currently staining to incubate so I can look at them, and so I’m surfing the web. Honest! And sometimes I come across things that really make me laugh like finding out that a snake and a hamster that was offered to him as a […]