Iceland Spar

Two items of good news: My submission to the conference aka travel rort in the greek islands was accepted, and our project about cerebrospinal fluid dynamics was just given an extra million or so dollars (AU) from the swedish research council, which means I have plenty of money to stay here if I so choose.

It's getting properly cold now. This afternoon it was around -20 and, wouldn't you know it, our office fire alarm went off and we all had to assemble outside (seems they actually take such things seriously here???).

In the mad-dash every-man-for-himself tread-on-the-wounded rush to get outside, I forgot to bring my beanie and scarf, so I was somewhat underdressed to stand around for half an hour in -20 while waiting for the fire department to come and declare it a false alarm.

The entire bone structure of my skull actually started to ache and vibrate with cold, like a titanic ice-cream headache just from standing there. My front teeth became the temporary home of a small fur seal colony, but even they soon found it too cold and retreated to the warmer waters around my molars. The tip of my nose felt like it was being dragged at high speed along the surface of an ice rink, kind of a tingling, stinging, burning cold combined with a sensation not unlike being rubbed vigorously with fine-grained sandpaper. All because some dickhead was left a soldering iron on or something.

In other news, turns out my local supermarket has meringue bases, thus vastly increasing the probability of pavlova on oz day. I think since I'm cheating on the meringue, I should do proper whipped cream rather than that shitty canned stuff. They also have kiwi fruit and bananas, but not much else, no strawberries or passionfruit. I think it will work okay though.