Fish and the Big Freeze

It is Cold. Every ten years or so a particularly hard winter comes along. Or it is yet another manifestation of climate change and the intensification of extreme weather. Or the Gulf Stream has reversed (although I fail to see very badly CGed wolves running around our frozen streets a la The Day After Tomorrow). Or whatever. At any rate, it is Cold, it has been Cold for two weeks now and it is only getting Colder. Yesterday Cambridge saw its first flakes of snow, while lots of people had to abandon their cars on some moor somewhere else in England which got rather more snow. Pretty, but it needs to snow a hell of a lot more before it is worth this Cold!

I went into the lab today to do a couple of hours of fishy work (it's back to the spiky sticklebacks!) and discovered that I made a mistake on Friday, so I have to re-do another couple of hours of videoing, so I am going back into the lab early tomorrow morning (Sunday!) to do it. All I could think at the point was, I have too much scientific integrity for my own good. At least I was in a good mood today and therefore didn't swear at the fish concerned (which I did do on Monday although I thought I never would, the stress of final year work and PhD applications and all is making me go slightly insane, and why wouldn't these bloody fish eat the bloody bloodworms I was charmingly pippetting right onto their noses), but rather just amusedly thought myself a bit of a git.

Went for dinner tonight with CL and neither of our cards got accepted, so he very charmingly legged it out into the Cold to get money from an ATM (which turned out to have run out of cash so he had to nick some off a passing friend) while I sat in the restaurant and deleted old messages on my phone and pretended that I do in fact have good credit. Haha. Odd really, card's never been rejected before.

Might have had to do with rather large deposit for an Operation Wallacea expedition I am trying to go on next summer. Operation Wallacea is a group of several hundred UK scientists and students who have established field sites in Indonesia, Honduras, Egypt and Cuba, to which they go every summer for 10 weeks to survey biodiversity, plan, implement and monitor conservation schemes, and generally study reef and forest systems. I am planning to go to the Indonesian marine site (the island of Hoga off Sulawesi), to act as a Research Assistant. I hope also to get my Dive Master qualification, and subsequently provide DM cover for hard coral and reef fish survey teams and students doing dissertations on cleaner wrasse behaviour, which I would also be interested in investigating myself. This is all very pertinent to my future career as I am hoping to do a PhD working on coral reef fish behaviour, linking it to population structure and conservation implications. The expedition will cost me GBP1750 and I am going to be actively fundraising so that I can go on it -- if I don't raise a significant portion of this money I'm simply not going to be able to afford to go, although I would love to! As a small portion of my personal fundraising effort I am hereby announcing a Present Amnesty: for Christmas this year and my 21st birthday next May, do NOT give me presents if you were going to -- contribute to my Operation Wallacea fund instead! Any little is really appreciated.

Submitting the Princeton application tonight if I have the guts (and my credit is no longer shot). Fingers crossed. May they invite me to interview in the midst of the New England winter, I can chat to them about the Meaning of Cold.