Travelling: Edinburgh

draconid is someone I know through the support team. To be precise, I'm currently paired with her as a mentor. Now, it turns out that we have quite a lot in common as people, notably that she's my age (considerably older than the average for most volunteers). I happened to see in her journal that she was going to be in Edinburgh this week, so I decided to take a leaf out of redbird's book and suggest meeting up.

( the whole story )

I hadn't actually read draconid's account when I wrote this, mainly because I'm incompetent and managed to remove her journal from my default view by mistake. But you should read what she has to say about the evening also!

Good things

Things that are good about my life just now:

• I have Gmail! Much gratitude is due to 791point43 who is officially the Queen of Cool.
• I have submitted a manuscript to the International Journal of Cancer. This is something I've been working on pretty solidly since April or so, and now it's sent and everything is exciting. Being surrounded by people who are writers or writers-in-training in one way or another, I'm finding it extremely tempting to regard this as a writing sort of achievement. It isn't, really; if this paper gets anywhere it will be because I've done good science rather than because I've written about what I've done with any particular distinction. Anyway it's potentially exciting, but mainly this is great because I no longer have this all-devouring task hanging over me. I've already started on another paper, but I know better what I'm doing this time so it should be less of a struggle.
• In other work news, we're taking preliminary steps towards something that might eventually be a patent application naming me as an inventor. Well, it's only potential yet and may well never happen, so I'm trying to suppress my inclination to get very, very excited about this.
• I've been rereading one of my favourite books, William Horwood's Skallagrigg, and have written a review of it.