What could Sal possibly have to say?

Hi Darlin's

Its Sal. Nic has been harassing me to prove my existance by writing something on contrabandvegemite. Sorry for the lengthy silence, but as you'll have noticed, Nic has been doing a good job of sharing his extensive thoughts on every topic under the sun. Something he's always been pretty good at now that I come to think of it.

He spent some of this afternoon explaining to my lab mates why he's always wanted to build a solar powered fortress on a subarctic, preferably volcanic island, and then excitedly exclaimed that he was going home to make yoghurt, something he'd been looking forward to doing all day. (When you imagine this, add in a little skip and excited clapping of the hands, and you'll have the general picture of Nic's demeanour at the time). I got the impression that these lab mates think that Nic's more than a little odd, but I suppose they'll get used to him.

Other than zipping in and out of hospital, playing with the new car and being frustrated by an endless round of flat tyres on my bike, life's mostly been full of work work work work work. Not that this is a bad thing, but I guess it doesn't make very exciting reading. So, what have I been thinking about with this work? Well, for a lot of today it was how to relate the critical wavelength of a Turing bifurcation to the diffusion coefficients in the underlying equations, and why this is so much harder to do in a three-variable system than a two variable system. My fear is that I'm going to leave this PhD being essentially a mathematician, which is not something I envisaged!

I'm going to join Nic at SEEDS tomorrow which I'm looking forward to. We're planning on checking out a Chinese photography exhibition in the afternoon before heading to a friends home-brew warming party that evening. I'm hoping that we might get in some walking in the woods on Sunday morning before going to get Timmy from the airport, but we'll see how that goes.

We are full of good burritos from the Mexican Taqueria down the road. I think we're also full from the good but enormous brownie and cookie that we respectively quelled our sugar cravings with mid afternoon.

Its Thanksgiving next week and I'm quite excited to try and understand what that's all about. I like the idea of a big celebration to be happy about the good things in life - seems like a good idea to me - and there are a couple of "refugee" type events for those of us who aren't planning on just popping home for a quick 4 day weekend...

Well, Nic, hope you're satisfied...still alive, head down, ever enlarging bum up...

Smooches cherry pies

Sal