ick (2008-01-20 - 3:18 p.m.)

My Diaryland Gold Membership thing has run out. This is annoying, as I just got around to posting photos... but so is paying $50 for another year of it. Can't decide if I should suck it up and pay, or defect to Blogger, or what... This is looking like an insanely busy year such that there won't necessarily be much time to post, so I'm having trouble deciding. I'd ask you to vote in the comments but no gold membership = no comments. So much for that idea.

It has been a crazy week and I'm still feeling a little shell-shocked. Our literature reviews were due last Thursday. This is a 3000-word review of all the literature in our field of interest and is supposed to form the introduction to our thesis - and is worth 100% of our thesis module mark for the term. This led to some very stressed-out masters students. Not only this, but the lab is ramping up work as we're starting our testing for the glass project. This is a really cool consumer psychology project looking at the effect of light-weighted bottle glass on peoples' perceptions of wine quality. Very, very interesting stuff.

Then, on top of all this, I started getting mysterious itchy spots - more like bites than a rash, so of course I immediately suspected the new mattress my landlady had brought me. They seemed to be getting worse and worse. My landlady said the mattress was brand-new and the carpets had been cleaned, and told me she thought I was allergic to something in the mattress. (It certainly is the cheapest, crappiest mattress you can imagine, so it doesn't seem entirely unlikely that they used cheap, crappy materials that someone might be allergic to). I spent days itching and upset, not knowing what the problem was. In fact, the first night I ended up sleeping on the couch just in case it was the mattress. This was all during the time I was writing my lit review, so didn't have too much time to devote to trying to solve the problem, though I did go to the pharmacy to see if they could diagnose the bumps as an allergic reaction or an insect bite. They couldn't. They did tell me I probably did not have scabies, though. Which gave me one more thing that it had never occured to me to worry about!

Finally one day I was sitting on the couch and saw a flea leaping. EWWWW, by the way. Then it clicked that the previous residents had cats, which is why the carpet had been so thoroughly cleaned. Looks like they didn't get to the couch, though. So I flea-powdered the whole place and still kept getting bitten. It was horrible and disgusting, not to mention extremely itchy. Eventually someone told me that pet shops sell sprays that handle this kind of thing. After fencing yesterday I made the long trek to Pets at Home on the far side of Bangor and seem to have solved the problem once and for all. THANK HEAVENS. So that was a gross and annoying little incident, and I am so glad it seems to be sorted now.

The landlady did buy me an allergy-resistant mattress cover, though.

backwards ~ onwards

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Missed anything?
moved! - 2008-05-12
Sunday = time to ramble on - 2008-05-11
apparently I'm doing monthly updates these days. Sorry. - 2008-05-04
watershed - 2008-04-06
end of trip - 2008-03-31

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