Throwing Out the Sea Anchor

It's been too long since last I wrote in this thing, three months at least, and I have been seriously adrift. This austral city is beautiful, friendly, and well-cultured. We really like it here (we keep saying that, I know), and little by little, we are feeling more settled. Recently, I found a job and that is making this feel much more like home than a hideously extended vacation.

Today I go in for my first lab meeting with the research groups of Dr. Jenny Stow and Dr. Rohan Teasdale. I am back to being a microscopist. I have been meeting with anyone who will take time out of their day to talk to me about microscopy in Brisbane. Most of the folks I've spoken with have been at the University of Queensland, and they all seemed to be connected to Dr. Stow in one way or another. So I guess word got back to her that a high-falutin' microscopist from the U. S. of A. was looking for employment rather seriously and, from what I can telll, she and Dr. Teasdale cobbled a position together for me.

"So, what will you be doing?" I hear you ask. That's a good question, and I guess I'll have a better answer to that question by lunchtime. Right now my understanding is that I'll be fixing microscopes, taking pictures, making time-lapse movies, learning to use new high-throughput systems, training other researchers how best to use micrographic techniques and working with them to develop samples that will yield high-quality data, and working with computational biologists who are developing bioinformatic approaches to micrographic data, among other things. Whew! That's a lot, but that's part of what makes this new position so exciting.