Come Saturday Morning....

GetUpAndGo
TheE'sAndMeVille

So.

I spent a good chunk of the week in the No-Longer-Center-Of-The-Universe.

Which, of course, is also known as Toronto-The-Formerly-Good.

Or, as I like to call it 'The New Cleveland'.

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For most of the 72 hours I was in downtown T.O. amongst the rusting hulks of Canuckistan's financial and manufacturing sectors, I was locked in a below ground hotel bunker with a bunch of other science geeks fighting over a quickly shrinking grant-dollar pie.

Just to be clear, we weren't fighting for money for our own labs.

Instead, we were fighting for money for projects we had deemed scientifically worthy.

Or not.

And the number of really, really good grants we can realistically fight for is rapidly plummetting.

Because, apparently, there is no room to fit science into the stimulus.

Or the stimulus packages.*

Despite the fact that science supports good paying, truly green jobs for smart people with tons of innovative upside.

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Anyway.

That's all behind me now for awhile (although I must confess to being scared crapless, especially given that one of my own grants that three people who work with me are paid from** will be heading back to the peer review bloodbath, head bowed, hand-extended, next time around).....

And it's time to take a day off.

So Bigger E. and I are getting ready to hit the road.

On our bikes.....we're going all the way across town....she has an optometrist appointment and then she wants to by a new pair of Converse Hi-Tops.

Me, I need a pair of walking shoes.....What can I say....I'm an old guy.

littler e. is off skiing with her old friend M. (may seem funny for a kid to have an 'old friend' when she's nine, but in this case it's true).....C. has gone to Victoria to help our friend K. buy a car from our other friends M. and T....

Which means that Rosie, the whack-a-doodle, will have to stay home for awhile....she's just not quite ready to ride in the pannier.

Bye.


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*This is a purely Harpoonista phenomenom. Down south Mr. Obama has made science part of the solution. Gotta love that LibConCoaltion.
**And that grant pays everybody's entire salary.....it's amazing what we can do with $120K/yr which also pays for all the consumables we need to actually do experiments as well....and don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining about the numbers because the kind of work I do, which is biomedical, means that I can apply for considerably larger grants than the real drivers of the innovator engine, the folks who do the real basic fundamental eureka!-type stuff.

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