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Haiti earthquake appeal and other bits
Just donated £50 (plus Gift Aid) to the Disasters Emergency Committee Haiti Earthquake Appeal – there's a lot of people in need of a lot of help out there right now. For those of a fannish bent who might not have seen it yet, the ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
help_haiti comm is running auctions to help raise money for the various charitable organisations that are involved in the relief effort – you bid on pieces of fic or art or other contributions but any monies are sent directly to the aid organisations. In the interests of getting it there ASAP (and because *cough* I've still not delivered on the larger fic that I put up in the last auction I got involved in!), I'm offering drabbles at a fixed $5 a go or ficlets at $20... though, obviously, higher donations would be lovely. My thread is here if anyone is interested. Be sure to check out the rest of the items on offer as well – there's some good stuff there that could be yours for a small donation to a good cause. :)
In other news, have signed up to Twitter (am aeshna_uk there as well), and am back in actual (albeit part-time) paid employment! I'm working on a feasibility study for a phenology project – basically using the museum collections to look at the emergence/egg-laying/flowering dates of certain British species over the past century or so and comparing those data against the climatic records. So far, this involves seeing just how complete the information in said collections is, so I've spent waaaay too much time in a freezing vault counting pinned butterflies in their tens of thousands, and peering at lots of teeny tiny labels to see how many of them have full dates. So far I've discovered that the butterfly obsessives of yore generally had lousy handwriting and far too much time on their hands, that pinning blocks (which give standard spacings for labels on an entomological pin) are an apparently recent invention, and that the public viewing windows can be a source of great amusement – it freaks the tourists out if they see the scientists staring out at them! And we were only checking to see if it was snowing.... :)
Oh, and I've also found that going in and out of the Entom collection all day means that you go home smelling faintly of mothballs. I can still smell it on me. Next week, the exciting world of Botany calls! *yawn*
The snow is gone again after its brief, unexpected reappearance yesterday – I'm rather missing it as the inevitable rain is rather dull and grey and depressing. Took some good pictures, though, which I'll try to post here at some point. :)
help_haiti comm is running auctions to help raise money for the various charitable organisations that are involved in the relief effort – you bid on pieces of fic or art or other contributions but any monies are sent directly to the aid organisations. In the interests of getting it there ASAP (and because *cough* I've still not delivered on the larger fic that I put up in the last auction I got involved in!), I'm offering drabbles at a fixed $5 a go or ficlets at $20... though, obviously, higher donations would be lovely. My thread is here if anyone is interested. Be sure to check out the rest of the items on offer as well – there's some good stuff there that could be yours for a small donation to a good cause. :)In other news, have signed up to Twitter (am aeshna_uk there as well), and am back in actual (albeit part-time) paid employment! I'm working on a feasibility study for a phenology project – basically using the museum collections to look at the emergence/egg-laying/flowering dates of certain British species over the past century or so and comparing those data against the climatic records. So far, this involves seeing just how complete the information in said collections is, so I've spent waaaay too much time in a freezing vault counting pinned butterflies in their tens of thousands, and peering at lots of teeny tiny labels to see how many of them have full dates. So far I've discovered that the butterfly obsessives of yore generally had lousy handwriting and far too much time on their hands, that pinning blocks (which give standard spacings for labels on an entomological pin) are an apparently recent invention, and that the public viewing windows can be a source of great amusement – it freaks the tourists out if they see the scientists staring out at them! And we were only checking to see if it was snowing.... :)
Oh, and I've also found that going in and out of the Entom collection all day means that you go home smelling faintly of mothballs. I can still smell it on me. Next week, the exciting world of Botany calls! *yawn*
The snow is gone again after its brief, unexpected reappearance yesterday – I'm rather missing it as the inevitable rain is rather dull and grey and depressing. Took some good pictures, though, which I'll try to post here at some point. :)