Odd Bob is back?

Sorry I haven’t blogged in a while...if I blame lack of time then I guess I’d best tell ya what I’ve been up to:

So first off there was Christmas, or at least the build up to Christmas. There were the usual festivities and meals with departments and groups and friends, not to mention fun seminars and mulled wine to fill the time between the general end of year faffing. Added to that there was the Christmas party that I was organising. (I’m still not sure how I wound up with that job!) Amazingly it all went well (I made back my costs and everyone got food, drink and disco so I’m happy) there are even some fun photos available!

Then there was Christmas itself, or my two week holiday bouncing between family and friends with a killer cold. My li’l sister (the one who isn’t engaged) decided that my birthday present this year should be a cold so I was dead for most of the fortnight!!

Now I’m back to work, past the first week slump and into the ‘oh no those months away deadlines are almost here!’ stage. Oh and then I managed to knock several keys off my laptop which were incredibly fiddly to fit back on (thank you to Phil who fixed them and didn’t complain about the amount of fluff and crumbs and chocolate on my poor laptop!)

I’ve also been focusing on my second novel (and yes it really is a novel.) Last year I felt a bit odd saying ‘novel’ in relation to something that I was writing. Then I wrote 80 000 words of story and it’s kind of hard to call in anything but a novel. Admittedly it still needs lots of work (editing and tidying up and generally checking for those little issues like ‘hey weren’t his eyes blue two chapters ago, why are they green now?’ and the like) but I’ve decided that editing can wait for now and moved onto the sequel. I wrote 50 000 words for nano then kinda let it slip over Christmas, but I’m getting on with it again now and the end is in sight, still quite a long way off, but if you squint...

All of which means I’ve completely failed to find anything to blog about recently.

In other news; the science blog I occasionally contribute to has moved. (And no it’s not only BOB that has suffered from my lack of blogging recently, I still haven’t written the cloned meat blog I was going to either!)

But hopefully I’ll be back into the swing of things soon. So I’ll just leave you with these easy routes to becoming a famous blogger:

Odd Bob's Good News...

So I’ve ‘won’ nano! Woo hoo!

That sounds a lot more impressive than it actually is. All it really means is that I've writtn 50 000 words in under 30 days...It was very impressive but slightly overshadowed by some even bigger good news. News that I probably should have started this post with:

My little sister just got engaged!


(Yes that is her actual ring, innit perty! So shiny...)


I have two younger sisters and I can never remember how old they are! I’ve been getting it wrong all day by telling everyone that the newly engaged (middle) one is 21...actually she’s 20! That may be a little young for engagement you may say, but she’s been talking about settling down and having kids probably since before she was even interested in boys! She was always going to be the first of the three of us to get hitched and the lucky (or maybe unlucky) guy who proposed is perfect for her.

But whilst I knew that she would be the first of us down the aisle...I didn’t think that it would be quite so soon! Since I found out I’ve been sling shotting between ‘woo hoo! That’s brilliant!’ and ‘OMG that’s scary!’ and back again. It got worse when she said that I would have to be a bridesmaid and wear a pink dress!

Now you probably don’t know much about me yet if you’re one of those random people who have stumbled on this blog and decided to have a read...so here’s some quick details:

I hate dresses. I will occasionally dress up on very rare occasions but I prefer trousers if possible and jeans are best. If I ever get married I can so imagine strutting down the aisle in Jane Normal Jeans...Classy.

I’m not overly fond of pink either. The majority of my clothes tend towards the black end of the spectrum with occasional forays into red, blue and purple. There’s some white and grey too of course and I have some amazing turquoise cords...but not so much pink...

And yet she has decided that a pink dress is the way to go.

I’ve decided that if she wants me to wear a pink dress she will need to bride me with a lot of chocolate!

I have also decided that it is her special day so if I have to I would even wear this:


Just don’t tell her that!