Benoît Grelier

This year, there appear to be many more poppies than I had noticed in previous years in Toulouse. And flowering chicory, where once I had wondered where on earth Ricoré (become a morning person!) had found their primary material. California poppies as well. And fluffy purple things, some of which are clover, others thistles, and others have fragile petals like the chicory. It’s all quite lovely.

[When I write or hear the word, poppies, I think of Happy-Go-Lucky (inexplicably entitled “Be Happy” – in English – in French theatres), and the rather loathsome “102 Dalmations” in which a minor villain, played by Gerard Depardieu, utters his absolute love for fur clothing derived from lovely “poppy” skin.]

There is thus a full palette of color in the no-man’s-land in front of the hospital, where the new tramway is being built. But showing it to you requires thinking to pack my camera with a recharged battery, stopping my car in a crazy intersection that is shifted all the time, taking the photo, and extracting the next car following from my trunk (boot, for some of you) before continuing on my way. And I just got the latch repaired this week.

I seem doomed to dwell or work amidst construction projects: first, the tramway around Paris along the boulevards des maréchaux, then the slowly snowballing reconstruction of the entire site of the Necker Children’s Hospital, and, since I have lived in Toulouse, the entire distance between my children’s school and my current workplace has been taken up with roadwork around installing this tram. Which apparently had existed once, less than a century ago. What goes around, comes around.

Monday is another holiday originally consecrated to a Catholic festival. On Tuesday, I will head up to Paris again, but will bring a suitcase, a mattress and sleeping bag, and will camp out in our once and future apartment. I think I can get the water going again, but I am less sure about the electricity. Probably a bit more administration to do, before next week.

Meanwhile, I’ve been writing elsewhere than in the blog, and not sleeping enough. Students and colleagues are wrapping up the academic year, conference and thesis preparations abound. My initial joy at getting back to the bench has taken quite a few hits lately, as the other obligations have not abated. It’s the blog that bears the brunt of this. I am sure the presumably fabulous MT4 which will be installed on Nature Network will be a great incentive. It’s sobering, though, to see on my old blog (on which I have stopped writing) that my “hits” are still as active as when I was writing. A few seem to be vaguely relevant to the subject matter, but all the others of those hundreds of hits a day are spam attempts and bots, given that I haven’t posted anything over there since I made the full break upon entering the new year in 2009.

My, that does seem truly ages ago.

Looking at my stats, as is not yet possible on these NN blogs, is very much like looking at the Western blot my student finished yesterday and today. A discrete number of interesting-looking lovely fluorescent bands in poppy-ish reds and greens, but none of them actually specific and present in all lanes under all treatment regimens. This is otherwise known as high background, and ultimately disappointing.

I am dismayed to discover that “high color” no longer refers to carbon but rather now to silicon.