Congratulations!

I would be surprised if they can fire you. That would be against the law, surely? At my uni, PhD students can stop their candidature and scholarship to have a baby, just the same as other employees can. I think the limit is 1 year, but I may be wrong. A friend of mine got pregnant while she was doing her PhD, worked until just before the baby was due (interesting being 8 months pregnant with a labcoat on!), had a few months off after the baby was born, then came back to the lab part-time until she was ready to go full-time again. No dramas.

Obviously if you can't do any work while pregnant, that is another problem all together. Is there really nothing you can do on your project while pregnant?

Ummmm...in my case, make that 5 years.

But the hell on earth part is right!

It is only 8.20pm here (Melbourne) now...and I am proofreading my reference list for my thesis - Giddyup!

Not really freaky weather here, although it is changing with that whole climate change thing. Mind you, our beloved Prime Minister assures us all it is merely media hype so he can get away with wimpy environmental policies and continue logging the crap out of our old-growth forests. The bottom half of the country is in the middle of the worst drought on record - really strict water restrictions in place, rising food costs as farmers can't produce a crop, doom and gloom as far as the eye can see.

Basically, I can't complain if my car gets damaged by hail, because anything falling out of the sky is a novelty at the moment!

But in Darwin (where I grew up, right at the top of Australia) they have so much rain all the dams are breaking their banks and roads are cut to towns as river flood. We can't win.

Tee hee, Jen. I know what that is like. I used to sing "You are my sunshine" to my transformant colonies!

The other sad thing was after watching the movie Love Actually, I started quoting the "Where the f*ck is the f*cking (insert whatever I was looking for)" line around the lab...Where the f*ck is the f*cking parafilm? Where the f*ck is the f*cking citric acid?

But then it got ridiculous and became "Where the f*ck is the f*cking 10-well comb for the big DNA gel that will allow me to load 80 microlitres of sample?"! I knew I had been saying it too much when my supervisor came up to me one day and said "Piglet, where the f*ck is that f*cking paper we were discussing earlier?"!

Is this a UK thing, because I have never heard it .

Oi. You cheeky little monkey. I want to win this thing.

And I am still winning it!

Ah, Better Man. Brings back memories of living in college in 1995 and a fresher who used to play it repeatedly...very loud...all the time....so we could all hear it....all the time.

Sometimes is seen a strange spot in the sky,
A human being that was given to fly. High...flying.

I like your taste in music, insomniac . Sweet Eddie dreams.

Does it snow at your house? I have only seen snow a couple of times in my life - once in New Zealand when I was small and once in France a couple of years ago. I have never been in the snow while it is falling though.

No waves from where I sit. About 15km from the coast, in the middle of suburbia here. If it wasn't dark, could you see waves?

Wishlist would be my favourite. Short and simple .

I used to be crustacean
In an underwater nation
And I surf in celebration
Of a billion adaptations.

I wish I was the radio song, the one that you turned up.

Hi insomniac!

The Christmas tree I wish I was the star that went on top.

It is booked in for early May and it will take about a week to fix .

I may be wrong, but I think it is caused by the huge, long web address that 404 pasted in for the nerdy Nigel Barker picture. I remember it happened once when someone wrote AAAARRRRGGGGHHHHHH for about 500 letters without a space.