Wow, so on the day the Euro2004 football championships starts, whihc I have been looking forward to since the last football World Cup ended in July 2002, the Olympic Flame is being run through my neck of the woods! I didn't get to see it in the flesh, unnfortunately, but it will undoubtedly be all over the news tonight and so I will get to see bits of it then. In fact, it will be run rright past my office window - well, I have a clear line of sight to the main road, cleverly called Main Road, where they are running with it, but it is about 200 metres away. Still, it was due to go through here an hour ago and still hadn't when I gave up on waiting and headed off to the lab to feed my children. Have I mentioned my children before? I have several batches... my PhD work entails examining antibiotic resistance in malaria, so I have several jars of malaria parasites swimming in human blood and liquid nutrients and th enutrients are replaced once a day by me - hence, feeding my children. The work also entails examining the resistance effect in malaria in mice, so I have a dozen little white mice or so all infected with rodent malaria which the new treamtents are examined in, so the mice are my kids, too. Needless to say, this is a seven days a week type of job, so I'm up here every day, including weekends. In other news, went to watch a Shaolin kung-fu/T'ai Chi/Jeet-chuan-do martial arts event/grading ceremony last night. It was quite poor. The three senseis (called something similar in Chinese which I don't know how to spell, so I'm not going to write it down here) were very impressive, but the oldest one was about 25... a bit of a worry, really, since I can't imagine he holds more than a First Dan (or the Kung-fu equivalent) and is probably not fully versed to be instructing and grading and running his own school of martial arts with his two younger friends... I am now 27 and I hold an IMAA First Dan and I know that there is no way I would be able to teach everything adequately. I do teach a little - our club's new guys spend a few months with me (in conjunction with attending the classes I attend) just to loosen them up and get them used to moving in our style and introducing them to our basic techniques. Our senior instructor holds a 6th Dan and his wife, the other instructor, has a 3rd Dan, so these three sprogs from last night are pushing their luck a little, I thought. Especially since they claim to teach Shaolin kung-fu, Shaolin weapons instruction, T'ai-chi, Chinese boxing (Drunken master type stuff), jeet-chuan-do and a few others to boot... after that, there was a surprise party for one of our karate guys, who's now 20 - everyone else got smashed, dinged the host's car by reversing into the neighbour's front fender, and one unfortunate chap spent two hours puking, two more dry-heaving, then passed out in the toilet and got his eyebrows shaved off and stuff written all over him with a marker pen. There are photos as well... heh. And now, here I am. But now, I'm going home. Claire's not here, either :( have a super weekend Laters