Last weekend of work for a while?

I ended the week having only two more lectures to prepare. One would be Monday at noon, so fairly soon. I knew it would mean another weekend of work. But this time it wouldn't be so bad!

I could do a fair amount on Saturday at home. I only got to the office in the afternoon, and to my surprise, it wasn't so cold there. I didn't need the electric heater! And by Sunday I was making good progress on the next lecture along. That would be the last. That one was entirely my idea; the lectures so far focussed on climate change at particular time scales, and I focussed on the processes that influences climate change at the time scales involved. That meant, though, that there wasn't much time to go into how we know about these things. So I decided to add another lecture with just that. How do we know about the amount of weathering in the Himalayas? How do we know how big the continental ice sheets were at any given time? How do we know about temperature, ocean stratification, iceberg rafting, sea ice, wind strength, cloudiness etc etc? So I made a new lecture with all of that.

I have my last lecture in this series on the next Thursday at four. Immediately afterwards I'll go underground. The next day I have my tutees first, and a lunch seminar later (not given mby me, but attended by me), and then in the afternoon there's James' and Paul's official School of Ocean Sciences goodbye do. I have to sneak away for another lecture given by someone else, but then at 5PM I can go and join James and Paul in the pub they will have ended in by then, I assume. And then I should finally have a weekend to myself! I don't have anything the week after that can't be sorted in that very week. I look forward to it!

Strangely enough, there is sufficient emphasis on foraminifera in my lectures. These are some SEM pictures produced by the USGS.