Castles and Coprolites

Writing this post as quickly as possible to make sure I don't have a month with NO POSTS! Since my merry xmas post  in December, I took a break from anything work related over the holidays, then as soon as the new year happened, I went to Belize for 2 weeks , where I had zero email or internet access. That was quite nice in some ways, and it was especially enlightening to see how long my iPhone battery lasts when it is not connected to anything ( a whole week!). The last few days of the trip we were staying at a rather fancy resort , which of course had wifi, and I spent much of that time going through a huge email backlog, desperately deleting all the 'not important' ones, to try and narrow the list of things that requires a response to something manageable. I have so many things to blog about in relation to my experience in Belize, everything from plant taxonomy to fieldwork and family, to Mayan archaeology and the similarities and differences between different subjects...

Teaching has finished, marking is done! Time to catch up with a last few bits and pieces before relaxing over the Xmas holidays. Looking at my calendar, my holiday time looks so short. In the second week of January I'm heading off to Belize for 2 weeks for a field training course , then it's straight back into teaching as soon as I get back. January also marks the beginning of my membership of the AHRC Peer Review College , and as part of this I will be undertaking training sometime in January. My new PhD student is also scheduled to start next month, though this may vary depending on how long the visa application process takes, and if our funding application is successful, I will also have a new postdoc joining the Wolfson Lab early in the new year. And the Wellcome Seed Award is scheduled to start in January too, which involves recruiting a new lab technician! It's all good though, I like being busy, and am one of those people who works better when I have several tasks t...

Today is the end of the Semester, and I'm definitely ready for a break after an extremely busy few months. Lots of great news this year, with two successful grant applications - the NERC project which I've been posting about, and a new Wellcome seed award which will be starting next year, developing further work at Catalhoyuk in Turkey. I have also had my own assignment deadline this week, for the NERC training course that I am going on in January . Everyone in the group has been assigned a plant family, and we had to do a bit of research on the genera and species that are found in Belize, and write a short information sheet on key characteristics. I think the expedition leader took pity on me as one of the participants without a background in botany, and I was assigned the Asteraecae (Compositae), which happen to be one of the easier families to identify. Or at least, it is one I am familiar with - daisies and sunflowers! Some of the terminology was familiar, ringing bells fro...