Badminton etc.

April means (at least in NZ) getting cold, dark, rainy - and badminton season. This year I was really looking forward to being in the Hutt Valley reps again, but unfortunately they did the grading during one of my trips away (the NY/Melbourne one, I think). So this year I'm a reserve.

While I'm naturally disappointed, I'm also trying to look on the bright side: I can still go to training and improve my game, and it won't cost as much. Opportunities to practise singles are few and far between. And I'm not hoping that someone injures themselves, but if they did then I'd get to play in the ties.

On work-related matters, I'm in paper-writing mode at the moment. We have one on the iron carbonate scale formation (experiments done in Melbourne last July) that has come back from the reviewers requiring revision, then another on a computer program I started writing in 2005, and finally a third on some experiments we did at Stanford in January 2009.