The Fog Blog

Actual Fog:

From my deck you can usually see a lovely view of the M2 motorway bridge and green hills of the Ranscombe Farm nature reserve on the other side of the river valley, but this week it’s been foggy everyday in Medway. Interestingly each foggy day has had 0.5mm of moisture in the rain gauge just from air humidity alone! We’ve had some great cobwebs covered with droplets moisture (my daughter asked ‘Are they real?’) and some mysterious misty views as we walked along the Rochester esplanade.

Unfortunately, the down side of all this fog is the scary driving conditions along the motorway from Medway to Avery Hill, I’ve certainly seen more accidents on the road since it started. Everyone seems to have a view, but my favourite quote comes from ‘A’ of the Education Liaison Unit, after travelling down to Medway for the open day last Saturday which went: ‘Really, some people DO NOT know how to drive in fog! The lady in front of me braked so hard you’d have thought she was driving into a brick wall! 

Mental Fog:

I really don’t know what’s happening to me lately, whether the fog has actually infiltrated my brain or if there is some other reason I seem to be forgetting all sorts of things. So far this week I have:

•  Locked myself and the cat (we had just been to the vets) out.

• Left an electric heater with a damp tea towel on top of it and gone off to work in Avery Hill (which meant I had to do a 40 mile round trip at lunch time to make sure the house hadn’t burnt down).
•  Left my USB stick at Avery Hill on Monday and didn’t get it back until Thursday.
•  Left my Lab book in the lab on Friday (honestly it’s got so much important data in it, I never usually let it out of my sight), knowing I wouldn’t be back until Tuesday.
• Forgotten what the GTTR was called, and as a former teacher that is VERY embarrassing!

Life in the Lab:

This week has been a great week in the lab (forgetfulness forgotten for a moment). The core we so painstakingly took from the submerged forest at Erith has been extremely fruitful, with some excellent preliminary results indicating an episode of sea level change – Yay !

This is the stratigraphic holy grail we have been searching  for all year... I’ll put a little bit more detail about it in my next blog, but in celebration I thought I’d share this rather beautiful (even if it is CGI) video clip of some diatoms – Enjoy!

aDiatomea: ColonyIII from MRK on Vimeo.


J’s record of the week :

 

‘Another star’

by

Stevie
Wonder

Due to the theme of the blog, I nearly picked ‘A foggy day in London Town’ by Fred Astaire, but instead I decided to go with Stevie Wonder. It’s not often that Jerushah hears a captivating song by a well known artist that she hasn’t heard before, but this week it happened. The song comes from Stevie’s 1976 album ‘Songs in the Key of Life.’ I heard it as I was driving to Medway, listening to Radio 2 (I know, I know, old people’s radio! I also listen to Radio 4 sometimes too...), when this song came on. It was so heart-rending, it nearly brought a tear to my eye – I almost declared aloud to the radio ‘Don’t worry Stevie; I’ll give you a hug!’ Jerushah x