Week 34: Happy New Year!

Happy 2015!!

Considering that this week was a holiday week, I really didn't get up to very much exciting stuff. I got some work done in the lab. I slept in a bit, which was very nice. I read a book and played some video games. I did a bit of snowboarding when the weather was right, but most days were too warm and it was like trying to snowboard through wet oatmeal. 

Part of why the week was quiet is that my friend's kid has the mumps!! Apparently in Japan they don't vaccinate against the mumps at all. There was an outbreak in my friend's kid's class, and even though my friend's kid had been vaccinated, she still caught it. I visited her on the first day of her symptoms (when she had been diagnosed with an ear infection by a doctor who apparently can't recognize the symptoms of mumps...) so maybe I will get the mumps too! Also her parents have been living in close quarters with her (as our rooms are less than 5m x 5m) so they enjoyed a fun week of quarantine, too. That made for a quiet week! I barely saw another soul in the lab during the week, too, despite much rending of garments over our upcoming lab progress meeting and subsequent dramatics about staying in town for the holidays. I think it's good that people are taking time off - nobody should feel like they are being forced to work during a week off!! And I think we all need a break. I am glad that I worked at a pretty lazy pace to get through the things that I couldn't put off.

There is a last gap of holiday-ness in another week, because Monday the 12th is a day off. And now that people will be around again, a few folks in the lab have been talking about a ski / snowboard trip to the small hill here in the city, which will be a fun step up from my little hill!

There is quite a lot of snow on the ground. It's hard to get a good guess of how much has really accumulated, because there are big piles where it has fallen off roofs or been scraped up by plows, but I would conservatively estimate that a metre of snow has fallen, and is probably sitting at a depth of at least half a metre in most places (after squishing down due to melty temperatures). There is a shortcut across a field that I like to use, and if there aren't fresh footprints to step in I can easily go in up to my knee. The other day I made a fresh path through about a foot of new snow, and when I came back the next day I saw that the fox had used my path! I guess he was glad that he didn't need to forge a path in snow up to his chin.