Poor neglected blog

Okay, okay, so I haven't been updating much lately. Well, at all. It's just that I don't have a lot to talk about. Well, there's news, but for various reasons I'm not able to talk about it here yet. Maybe more soon.

I can say that I've been very busy lately. At the start of October I took over the coordinator role for my group and it's meant quite a bit of extra work behind the scenes, on top of my normal project load. Some of it is boring, but some of it is quite interesting as well.

It's hard to believe that we're almost in November already and that MLX is only just around the corner. It's a strange feeling not to have to worry about how the registrations are going, or to attend volunteer meetings at every spare moment.

The labyrinthitis continues, unfortunately, and on Monday I went in for an MRI, which was actually a much more greuling experience than I had imagined. Nothing at all like a CT Scan, which was pretty easy. The main difference is that the whole machine shudders and makes a huge racket, which makes you feel like you have your head inside a jet engine while it's starting up. It's very offputting.

I also wasn't prepared for the strange feeling of the magnet sort of scanning around... it's a very odd sensation and sort of made me think of weird science fiction brain probing experiments. The stragest feeling was my eyeballs sort of jiggling around as though they were being buffeted by an invisible force (which they probably were). I thought magnets only had an effect on metal! Perhaps it was just the vibrations of the machinery as it clunks around.

Whatever it was, I finished up with a king sized headache and my eyes were watering from movement. The funniest thing was they ask you to bring along a CD of your favourite music, which I did, but you can't hear a bloody thing. First they shove huge earplugs in your ears, and then they turn up the volume so you can just hear it. But as soon as the scanning starts, you can't hear anything else at all. I got up to find the medicos talking about what great dance music I'd chosen and smiling broadly, so at least someone was happy.