I'm outta here....

Well, for once it's actually been a while since I last flew anywhere (April in fact, a record for the last few years!), but the trauma of so many flights last year is still with me, and i'm not totally looking forward to getting on a plane tomorrow. That said, I am very very excited about seeing all my Hole-ians again, I really miss my friends out there. 

So what am I up to? Well for the next week I will be in Woods Hole on Cape Cod, MA. I'll be seeing my friend Kate defend her thesis and become Dr Kate, and then spend the rest of the week in meetings and catching up with people. 

And then i'm off to Thunder Bay in Canada. Going way back in memory lane, nearly two years ago it's from Thunder Bay that I started this blog, while in the wind up to moving to Hawaii. I have a project running to develop a method to get DNA out of really old corals (10,000-40,000 years old) using methods they use for mummies and mammoths, so we can look at past distribution patterns of corals in the deep ocean, when the climate was different, and maybe even make predictions about what will happen in the future. It's a cool project, but a hard one, the method is developed (and published), but it takes a really long time to get very very little data. Too long in fact. It's the kind of project that is going to be running for the rest of my career i'm sure. It takes that long to get good data. 

I've also been getting back to my original reproduction research and moving away from genetics so much in the last few years, and to be honest, i've been loving it. I'm an okay molecular biologist, i'm a great reproductive biologist, and though I like the former, I love doing the later. Directing my own research has been so fabulous. So although I am looking forward to seeing some old friends in Thunder Bay, and to doing some lab work, I also kind of see it as looking into my past rather than my future. I'm sure i'll be more excited about it when I get in the lab, I usually do....:0)

So my lack of pictures again today, means the below - I found my old ID card from Saudi Arabia! Me at 5! A number of people now have said they can see a little of me in the photos of my niece Lucy - really?