If you go down to the woods today !

If you go down to (crash through)the
woods today :

Last Saturday four of us went for a walk in the woods...
It wasn’t a normal walk though ! We chose to do a bit of exploring off the beaten track.  First of all (it was lucky we all had our lovely wellies !), we decided to walk up a stream, scrambling over slimy rocks and ducking under low lying branches. Two out of four of us got ‘booties’ as the water overflowed our boots, so then it was squelch, squelch as we walked. After that there was a period of crashing through the bushes, followed by sliding down a muddy bank,  then a high speed run (with maximum splashes!) through a series of big, muddy puddles. Boy was it fun !! I love being a Mum as it gives me the excuse to do all sorts of things that most grown ups wouldn’t get a chance to do ! Not sure how many people of my age would genuinely enjoy getting COVERED in mud though?!!

Twilight update :

Here’s a picture of Twilight, looking so cool, calm and collected. Now she is six months old and officially a ‘teenager kitten’ you think she would be calming down.
‘Butter wouldn’t melt ?’ I hear you ask. Yeah right !

So far this week she has :
- Pulled the curtains down while climbing on them.
- Drunk water from the toilet.
- Climbed the laundry rack.
- Scratched ‘S’ as she got carried away playing.
- Put her paw in a cold cup of tea.

More life in the lab :

This week was a great week in 2011, because I got back in the lab, and apart from fieldwork (that comes next week hopefully) it is the thing I love most about my course.

I finally got my hands on the infamous ‘Hornchurch Core’ that I had been waiting on for quite a while. With the help of my (not at all accident prone) lab buddy ‘K.’ We did some sterling work and put over forty soil samples through the first stage of processing, which involved carefully removing them from each little glass phial and leaving them to soak in glass beakers containing Hydrogen Peroxide.

If you work for the Pilkington Cafe, please don’t read this next bit...
In the course of our scientific research we realised that the wooden coffee stirrers were a perfect fit for this purpose, so if the supplies are running a bit low this week... Only joking - it was nothing to do with us ! Honest guv !

For those of you interested in the ‘science bit,’ the purpose of the Hydrogen Peroxide is to disintegrate any residual organic material, leaving behind only the lovely diatoms ! I will have to leave them in that state until I can get to the lab again on Tuesday, but in the meantime, I might just go and check on them over the weekend to make sure they are ok...

J’s record of the week :      
                                              

‘Annie’s  Song’

by

John Denver

I have an impressive reason for choosing this song as my record of the week. It was chosen because my daughter played her flute in a concert this week (in front of about 200 plus people) and decided  to play Annie’s Song. She had been rehearsing and rehearsing for weeks and all her hard work paid off as it sounded beautiful and went without a hitch ! It was definitely a proud mum moment.
Anyway, just a little bit about the song... At thirty-seven years old, it is a bit older than me and was written as a love song by John Denver for his wife Annie Martell.   Jerushah X