Lab retreat

Today was the biannual lab retreat. Basically as many people from the lab as are available all drive an hour out of time to the Institute cottage and we present our current projects/results to each other. Both as practice for upcoming conferences, and to keep each other up to date on the different projects. It also serves as the opportunity to help with brainstorming and so on.

I was the second one to present, and it went well. I’m starting to be rather used to presenting this particular format, so the preparation for this one was rather minimal. It’s gotten that Simon and I can prepare an oral presentation in about 30 minutes (yay recycling of power points) and a poster presentation takes about 1 hour (the extra time is due to having to print out the individual slides and having to do arts and crafts on the title banner). We figure if this degree doesn’t pan out, we could hire out our banner services to helpless students and help them save on large size poster fees 😛  But I digress.

So, the presentations went well, had some nice chats with the two directors, apparently projects are going well. Discovered that I may be able to go to the conference in Edmunton, but probably only if I managed to get one of the travel awards, as flights are damn expensive. So I’ll definitely submit the abstract, my resume is getting to be pretty interesting now, so hopefully… On a less happy note, sounds like I’ll be extending my master’s by an extra semester as those extra classes I had to take due to going into nutrition rather than biomedical has caused me to delay on my cell experiments. Although the human studies are going generally well, I’m also going to need to get more men recruited in order to get some decent data for the comparison…

So the morning was the presentations, and the afternoon was free. We pulled out skates and went to play on the river. I only lasted about 10 or s minutes, which is about par for me. My feet cramped up within minutes. Annie had lent me a pair of skates she had at home but they were much too narrow and also kind of dull, so I eventually pulled them off and just put my boots back on. We watched Yannick, Simon, Virginie and Catherine play hockey for a while, using boots and shoes as goal posts and calling out car everytime someone skated by.

After about an hour, I started getting too cold so I joined the people who had already gone inside. A few of us sat around and watched Ahmad do a few magic tricks. Apparently a group of four girls is too tough of a crowd, we figured out his three tricks. We taught him to play a$$hole and played a few rounds of that while the rest of the group lounged on the sofas and chairs in front of the fireplace.

We finally took off around 5 or so and headed back. I was feeling kind of sick on the way home, and since we got back a little after 6 pm, I didn’t end up going to my swing class, I just watched a little tv and took a bath. I feel bad about the class as it’s the one I’m meant to be helping out with as they were short of follows, but I thought I might be coming down with my roommate’s bout of stomach flu. Also I wasn’t so keen on the idea of driving down only for the class, usually I like to stick around for the Friday night dance, but most people are in Québec City for Swing-A-Dance, so it would have been a dead crowd tonight anyway. Best to try to get some rest and avoid getting sick (and potentially getting others sick as well).

I’ve been browsing quite a few diaries tonight, hoping to get some inspiration on things to write about. I used to have more to talk about than just my day, but I’m guessing it’s something I’ll have to work my way around to doing. The huge downside to my masters is the fact that now I have trouble finding myself confronted with an empty page. I feel like I really have to have something important to write in order to put words on paper. I’m kind of hoping that by getting myself back to writing, I’ll stop feeling so much pressure to have everything perfectly phrased in my head before I write. I miss the ease with which I was able to express myself a few years ago… damn science classes, you have turned me into a scientific writer… all logic and fact… must break out!