Never ever again....

... she said for the nth time. Next time I'll finish my talks at least half an hour before scheduled start of seminar. I'm a freakin' nightmare.

OK, rewind. Got myself to Paris on Saturday, but not before spending two hours at a freezing cold Larger Town train station from 7 to 9.30 in the morning since the train I was supposed to take was cancelled (final strike movement I guess). In Paris there was no problem getting to CDG, and when I got to Terminal 1 it was hardly anyone there. It's usually übercrowded. At the security check there were seven or eight people sitting around with their feet on the table having nothing to do. On the flight to EDI there were 12 passengers in a small Embraer 145. Fantastic sunset in the Western sky (have a look at the banner), so gorgeous that I completely forgot to check for the full moon on the other side of the plane. After a windy, very exciting but perfect landing by the two females in the cockpit, the guy meeting us at EDI said he had basically done nothing the whole day. What's the matter with people? Don't you like travelling? Or is it always this calm on Saturdays? In that case I have clearly found my new weekday of travel.

Yesterday was work all day to finish lecture for Hypoglycemiadude's undergrad course and research seminar talk. Yes, on the same day. Today. Very good planning indeed. I have known about the seminar for four months but still haven't got my head around doing it till the last minute. The lecture unscheduled until two weeks ago when we decided I should give an introduction of my study area to the course. I had hoped that maybe ten people would show up, but there was an impressive 17 undergrads coming to see a lecture that did not contain any exam-question material at all. Very cool. They seemed interested and two of them even showed up at the department seminar I gave a few hours later (of which most of the time was spent frantically trying to figure out what to present). I guess it was allright even though I should have spent some more time preparing. I'm not really sure what to do with myself, I always end up like this...

The most interesting thing was that a female troll was at the lecture. Nobody knew her so she must have come from an other department. She asked a few question, or rather uttered some "concern" about my study system and methods since she had worked with the similar taxon i Australia and there the methods were totally different. It didn't seem like she was interested in my answer that I gave and after the lecture she just disappeared without seeming to be interested in discussing anything at all. Didi she have a point or had she just wasted an hour of her timetelling me that my research was crap? Was there a bit of the old female-female competition going on? I have no clue. Three hours later in retrospect I come up will all kinds of good and snarky comments I should have said at the time, but my brain just doesn't work quickly enough for that.