| Hi everyone, This has been a week of sticking to my desk, keeping low, while dealing with a head cold. I had company for dinner on Saturday night and an hour after they left, I felt my head swell up like an allergic reaction. Which I seldom have. Nope, it was a virus and it beat me up for a couple days. Talked to a few people around here who had the same thing; nasty bug that sweeps through real fast but fortunately leaves fast too. So all I could do was mope at my office and go to bed early. Fortunately there was a loto do. My new network User Interface was done and we put it on the system on Monday. This interface taps three different databases at the same time to do union queries. It's a neat trick I learned working on an earlier European project, BioCASE ( www.biocase.org) which later evolved into the much-admired GBIF ( www.gbif.org) which is integrating many thousands of databases. So this interface is minor league but new for my organization. I'm pleased, and it is out in beta form now for staffers to test. So far, it works. Next item, the 50-page report summarizing 2.5 years of my team's work on EBONE. I've been writing that for weeks, did the final polish, sent it off for review. It's one helluva lot of work to summarize, and we aren't done yet. This year will be mostly analysis, which means mostly me. And I need to publish some of this stuff. Unfortunately the head cold caused me to miss the boat, literally, on a department excursion to see a new research vessel used for marine research. I heard about it, though. It's a sexy beast which can cruise the whole Mediterranean, equipped with wet and dry labs, all kinds of sampling equipment, full crew and can accommodate up to 14 researchers. Heavily subsidized, it only costs 600 usd per day to rent for research. Sounds wonderful, and if I get that Mediterranean monitoring grant, I'm going to book it for a fishing trip. The other thing I had to work out was my workplan for 2011-2012. This is interesting because I'm phasing out of database management and back into ecology. The Computer Services department should take responsibility for my database work in two years, so I'm preparing to hand that over, and get more into monitoring, informatics, scenario modeling and other far more interesting stuff. I was hired in 1994 as a database manager and indeed have gotten my fill of that. So the next few years mean more field work, more statistics. That should keep me interested until retirement, especially since it seems likely that the cooperation with Holland will continue. On other fronts: my CRF cat is slowly declining but I try to slow the decline. Took him to the vet yesterday because he had trouble eating. Did some repair work on his mouth (bad teeth) and got some very soft catfood used for recovery patients, which he likes and eats. I suppose at some point I'll have to put him down but I want him happy and comfortable until then. One thing I discovered is that he LIKES the cat carrier. When I took him home he refused to get out of it. I realized he feels warm and safe in there, especially since other cats may bother him. So I made it nice and soft, and it is parked next to my bed, where he feels maximally secure. Poor old guy, he's only 11 years old, but he got FIV as a kitten and had health problems all his life. So he's doing all right, considering. Final item. Thanksgiving approaches. Here the American immigrants and expats celebrate it on Friday night next week. I'm lining up a fresh turkey from Beit Jala, and collecting the other necessaries. Canned cra,nberry sauce doesn't exist here, at least this year. So I'm making it from dried cranberries, which is not terribly complicated. Likewise pumpkin pie filling doesn't come in a can here; you start with the pumpkin.....Same will be true of Christmas fruitcake. We bake our own. It's nicer in some ways, just takes planning. So, I start preparing Thanksgiving dinner this weekend. First I will have to check to see that my oven works! shabbat shalom Linda | 
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