An Article of Substance

With the obligatory "welcome" message out of the way I thought I should probably write a proper journal entry...

At the moment I'm just sort of waiting around the office for our weekly lab meeting to start (in about 2 hours). It's been pretty bludgy for me over the past few week - which is both a good and bad thing. Obviously I would like to be doing more work, however, due to circumstances out of my control (i.e. Our fluorescent microscope being out of order) I've only really been able to do a few other things. I'm seriously hoping for the scope to back and running in the next week or two... so once that happens hopefully it'll be GO GO GO on the experimental front. BUT in all honesty... I'm beginning to think that this microscope is cursed!

First off, our 'waterproof' microscope got liquid all the way through it causing the reflector turret to stop moving automatically. We discovered that it wasn't the turret that was causing the problem... but probably the motherboard. Then the lens off the 63x objective managed to come unglued and could only be replaced by a 40x objective. Then the bulb died on the DG-4 wavelength switcher. When the new bulb was installed, the length of the main connector was changed meaning the light reaching the microscope was more than halved... but we didn't discover that until 3 months of crappy results. Now... it seems as if the bulb of the DG-4 has gone again and since we have no spares we've had to order some in from the US. While this allowed "the company" to take the scope away to fix the turret/motherboard problem... and apparently they manage to break something while transporting it back into the lab. *sighs*

Fingers crossed that this is the last problem we have for a long, long, LONG time.

Hmmm I've just looked out the windows and realised it is looking very dark and gloomy at the moment... not good. Tonight, I am (hopefully) going out for dinner with 'The Girls' (and yes I capitalised that on purpose!), however apparently our booking at the Flying Fajita Sisters is for the outside courtyard and I fear dinner may be cancelled if the weather worsens... which I sincerely hope does not happen as I haven't seen a few of them for a few weeks and I'm really looking forward to a good catch up!