Knackered

I know it's been a while since I updated my blog. But I've been pretty busy, at least the last few days. The beginning of last week wasn't too interesting to report on, just working, watching a film in the evening, chatting away a bit etc etc. On Friday we (the MITCH team) organised the first CATCH meeting at Naturalis. Hell, I didn't know that organising a symposium was so much work! But thankfully it all went well, we had managed to get two excellent speakers to talk about their fields of research, Dr. Eduard Hovy from the Information Sciences Institute of the University of Southern California to talk about computational linguistics and Dr. Malcolm Scoble from the London Natural History Museum to explain to a bunch of computer scientists the difficulties of updating and making accessible taxonomic data. After the talks there were tours of the museum or the collection tower. The collection tower is usually not accessible because it contains all the vulnerable specimens that wouldn't survive displaying in the museum but that are so vital to taxonomic research. Even though the programme ran a bit late the tour guides still made sure they could tell everyone what they wanted to tell (which resulted in some groups returning from the tour half an hour later than scheduled, but everyone seemed happy). I'm happy that all went well.

On Sunday I went climbing with Mandy, Katie and Alerk. I borrowed my brother Frank's climbing harness, which is a very nice one and we climbed until we were really exhausted. I should definitely learn how to use my legs more, because I only feel it in my arms and shoulders right now. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, because I got where I wanted to go (to the top ;) ) and upper body strength is good, but I think I might get ever further if I use more different muscles. Oh and if I get some stickies, because my feet were moving too much inside my trainers...

Anyway, I could do with doing nothing for a while, luckily I'm going on holiday next week. Leaving the wet, grey weather behind for a bit to go to sunny Formentera, woohoo!