The week that was, and is, and is to come

So this has been one of those weeks - and it's only Tuesday!

The last few weeks leading up to now have involved me organising everything for the second NZ synchrotron users' meeting. This was held on Monday and Tuesday this week. Overall it was a success, despite the late withdrawal of support from the Australian Synchrotron people (they were going to send 4 or 5 people across to give talks, and 2 weeks ago announced they would only be sending 2). This meant that I had 2 1/2 hours of speaking slots plus chairing a lot of other speaking sessions and directing discussions. Anyway people seemed to get a lot out of it and made some contacts so you can't ask for much more than that.

Now while I would really like a break following a pretty crammed two days, tomorrow sees me doing some last minute sample prep before flying over to Melbourne in the afternoon. We have two sets of experiments scheduled at the synchrotron from Thursday to Monday, the second of which involves some tricky sample prep that I've had to leave to a student who's never been to the synchrotron before, since I've been flat out with the meeting. So tomorrow it'll be head down to work, pick up all the stuff, come back home, pack, and leave... maybe the following week I'll be able to come up for air!