Changing of the seasons

Once again I must apologise for the lack of posts, things have been busy and its been a struggle coming up with interesting topics. For now just to give you a bit of an update I've been busy with my PhD (as always!). Managed to get the work on one of the species I'm working on completed and written up so we are waiting to hear back from the independent reviewers to see if there are any changes that need to be made before it is published. I've moved onto the next of my species and I have to say it is good to be back doing lab work again and feeling productive, that said since I'm only really doing lab work at the minute its rather tiring. Days when I'm doing DNA extractions along with other things are rather long and involve a fair amount of time standing but I guess it will be good for my health in the long run!. This week I had to do a presentation along with other second year PhD students from my research cluster at the university. This lasted 15 minutes along with 5 minutes for questioning. As I've mentioned before on this blog presentations make me nervous, I'm much better than I was when I was younger but still get anxious. One of the reasons that I get nervous is that I'm not sure whether or not people will understand me. This was made worse whenever I recorded myself and what I heard was a lot different to what I hear when I speak. That said there isn't really anything I can do about it other than practice and make sure I speak at a normal pace and as clearly as possible. One of my supervisors had me give the presentation in front of him to practice and he was able to give me some tips. Whatever way the presentations were organised I ended up having to go first...at 9am. Thankfully people did show up and I thought it went pretty well although I may have rushed it slightly.

In other news I've started drum lessons! As much as I love guitar I have always wanted to have a go at the drums and now that I have a bit more time on my hands and now that I can drive myself about it seemed like a good time to start. I've had four lessons so far and I have to admit its been quite challenging. You have to think about what both hands are doing as well as what your feet are doing and it may be that your left hand is playing double beats but your right foot is meant to be playing single beats. Often times it seems like you need to repeat certain things over and over before they finally click and then you wonder why it was so difficult in the first place. The definite highlight so far was when my teacher taught me a simple version of the drums for Muse's Time is Running Out and I played along with the actual song.

Speaking of Muse I was able to go see them live on the 6th March in Belfast which was awesome, you can actually read a review of it here:
Muse Wednesday 6th April 2016 – SSE Arena, Belfast

*The title of this update is a Two Door Cinema Club who I was lucky enough to get to see this week. They put on a fantastic show and I'm looking forward to their new material. You can find my brother's review on the website here

Ironically despite the lack of updates to my own blog I've been in a bit of a writing mood lately, I also wrote an article for  my university newspaper about my love of The Flash tv show:
The Flash-setting-the-standard-for-superhero-storytelling

I also keep forgetting to share the articles that I've written for the university blog, so here they are:
Biodiversity offsetting-a fool's errand
Wonderful Woodland Walks
Perseverance for Preservation

Hope this goes to some way make up for the lack of updates, I'll leave you with some pictures (taken on my not so great phone camera) from the Muse concert. Thanks for reading!

The stage was set in the middle of the arena with two walkways either side

These are the drones, large inflatable ball things which floated around the arena

The opening band Nothing but Thieves were pretty good

Projection of the drummer on one of the screens which hung down