hey So, on Sunday, Grant flew home from Zurich. Well, technically from Basel, which is outside Zurich, but Basel is about as big as my desk and so does not have an airport which planes fly to South Africa from. Grant flew home for grad - he's Dr. Grant now, Ph.D., thanks for coming, and the third one of our group of 6 guys in the office to get his Ph.D. this year. Me, Justin and Donelly should be getting ours in June; Jason and Chiku got theirs this June gone past. All resplendent in their red Doctoral robes, red Doctoral hoods and goofy black hats, tied with ceremonial red cords - the red cord in this case being for the University's medical faculty. The Science faculty has cooler purple cord; engineers in green, Arts navy blue and other such cool colours. Now Dr Grant is in the pharmacokinetics/preclinical division at Roche Pharmaceuticals; Dr Jason is with Servia Pharmaceuticals in South Africa, Dr Chiku is taking some time out from the medical sciences and trying to plan some humanitarian/business opportunities by putting together an consortium of scientists, architects and engineers to go to help rebuild Sierra Leone after their decades of civil war. At the moment, he's doing that from home - Malawi and the Ivory Coast - and jsut seeing what else is out there in the big wide world. Anyway, Grant's home - we are going out drinking and Euro soccer-watching tonight. This is hot on the heels of Sunday's festivities - a bit of drinking and Euro soccer-watching. He called from the airport and popped into the video store at 9:30pm as I was locking up and we headed out to 4 different watering holes (including the uber-infamous Lion's Head Pub, which had already called last round) looking for a place that a:) had atmosphere and b:) was still serving alcohol and got tanked and eventually crawled into bed at 1:30am (bearing in mind I left home for the video shop at 2:45pm) with my alarm set for 6am and a full day at the office and his set 6:30am with graduation at 10 followed by various Doctoral cocktail functions and larney luncheons and whatnot. I had a bit of a hangover, it must be said. It's good to see him; I think he's quite glad to be escaping the Swiss winter for a week and jetting into African summer. We have Thursday set aside to head out to Clifton for sand, sea and sun. And of course loads of topless women. Justin, sitting in Sweden and freezing his balls off, is muy jealous. -d-