If today were a Covenant game

Motifs: "Torrential rain", "Windowless spaces", "Grey", Emergency vehicles".

Conventions: "If I keep doing stuff, I'll make it through to bedtime", "Laughter makes life bearable", "Tomorrow will be better".

I think my character has a story level consequence of "Makes bad choices".

"I don't think 9 billion [people] is better than 1 billion"

James Lovelock, the scientist who originated the Gaia theory has written a new book (The Vanishing Face of Gaia) and New Scientist has an interview with him.

Read it... It's pretty extreme stuff:

"I think it's wrong to assume we'll survive 2 °C of warming: there are already too many people on Earth. At 4 °C we could not survive with even one-tenth of our current population. The reason is we would not find enough food, unless we synthesised it. Because of this, the cull during this century is going to be huge, up to 90 per cent. The number of people remaining at the end of the century will probably be a billion or less."

I don't really have enough background to assess this at the moment, and I'm very sure my values differ from his a whole heap, but if this was a marketing ploy, it was effective, because I definitely want to read the book now!

A bit bitter

There are lies we live by. One of mine has been that if I work hard at the things I believe in, if I am true to my morality and as brave and strong and honest as I know how to be, if I share my passion and enthusiasm for my goals, then the people around me will come to share my goals and somehow everything will turn out okay. This wasn't true in my marriage, it sure as heck ain't true for my politics, and it turns out not to be true in my career either.

Gut-wrenchingly, heart-breakingly, it is starting to look like my career as a research scientist is ending. My contract was due to end (spookily) on Halloween, but they were "pleased to be able to offer an extension to our employment relationship"... 20 hours a week until Christmas (how great is that?)... With redundancies pending, I am not anticipating a reprieve.

On the up side, I've got an interview next week for a job managing one of the lab facilities to facilitate other scientists' research... so hey, I might be given the opportunity to observe science. I can't say I'm entirely sure how this will feel...

Keeping the pharmaceutical companies in business...

3/3 on antibiotics... but all at work/childcare today in our various states of disrepair.

Perpetual plague pit

At least one person in our household has been on antibiotics for a chest infection at any given time for the last month or so. At the moment it is my turn and T's... and I forgot to tell the doc I am still breastfeeding, so have been given doxycyclin which can affect bone and tooth development in nursing infants... going back to the doctor tomorrow to get my dodgy-mole-removal-stitches out and will make sure I take my drugs after I feed T tonight and in the morning and ask if I should change meds tomorrow...

Still nothing definite on the long-term contract front, but will probably now be extended until Christmas... who'd be a scientist?

And of course, the weather totally sucks, here too... the power keeps flickering and one of my colleagues is stuck at home because road from Tokomaru is closed and wind was lifting the roof of the school...

Still and all, the early magnolias are flowering, I have seen blossom and early-cheer and even the odd brave daffodil, so spring is coming... And I have more peptides in my samples now than LC-MS-MS can resolve, and another iteration of troubleshooting left to come... so may yet get the resolution I actually need for my project...