I’m back again

I haven’t blogged for almost a month and it was a crazy one. Not necessarily in a good way. :)

A trip to Harwell that I mentioned in the previous blog was quite useful. I managed to produce a lot of fibres however on the last day I have done SEM and realised that there are a lot of polymer drops. Thus, I won’t be able to use it with Utra uCT, which has 60 nm field of view. That’s quite unfortunate, but I still can use them for other things. Anyway, in a week I am going to Harwell again to hopefully get rid of those drops.

The weekend after I was already preparing for holidays as we would depart on Wednesday. I had a long day of shopping, so was extremely hungry and my boyfriend decided to cook something quite complicated which took almost 4 hours in an oven. He was cooking everything in a metal pan, so when he took the food out of the oven (260C) I was very eager to get it, so I just went and grabbed a freaking pan with my bare hand. It hurt so much, but since I am a Russian I quickly had a shot of vodka to keep my brain working and soon realised that we have a restaurant in front of the house where they should have a burns first aid kit. Went there and they gave me some stuff to cool the burn, but I was really worried as I didn’t know what degree burn I got and I was concerned about the holidays again. So I decided to call 111 and they told me that because it’s a palm, which is quite prone to structures and due to high temperature of a pan I have to go to the A&E. So I had another amazing weekend. In A&E they said it should be fine gave me lots of painkillers and sent me home. The palm is much better now, but I still have a mark, it’s actually quite funny as it gave me the NIKE sign burn.

At this stage, as you can guess I was pretty excited to go on holidays and finally calm down and relax. I won’t tell you much about my trip to Greece as this would make this blog too long, but I will tell you one thing. After the wedding and all that I was snorkelling on Paradise beach in Mykonos island. It has a lovely reef where you can see lots of fish, sea urchins and etc… (are you feeling where it's heading to?) So I snorkeled quite far from the place where I climbed the reef and since it’s quite high, I didn’t want to jump off it, as I didn’t know what’s below it. So I tried to squat a bit to push myself forward and as I did it the wave came and pushed me, so I fell onto my butt and then it dragged me on my butt like a meter through the reef. It hurt as I was bleeding a bit, but I thought it's ok it’s just a scratch. I went to relax on the beach, but the burning kept getting worse (I was still thinking its sea salt plus the scratch). When I decided to have a look I got shocked as I had kind of an allergic reaction and all my butt was getting swollen in places. (by the way, when I say butt I also mean the thigh) The lifeguards were making jokes saying that I shouldn’t look at my butt the next day as it will become black. :D FANTASTIC!!! It didn’t turn black, but it did hurt a lot, especially when we did horse riding few days after :D I still have patched from that too, had to use antibiotics as this was a sting from sea anemone – a poisonous flower apparently or something like that… :P

We came back from holidays last week and I quickly got busy with Uni. Now it’s a new semester and we are going to welcome new CDT students next week. Very excited, but everyone, stay safe. :D