February

It's a grey weekend, not uncommon in San Diego during this time of year. We call it May grey. A perfect opportunity to try and update the blog! The last post is from February shortly after my paper was rejected. Since then I have obviously worked hard to make it better. We thought we were pretty successful at it but again got a negative response from two different journals. My boss thinks this is a very important issue that has to be published in a top journal so that I am doing more experiments to push our findings further. We will see. At least I have "decided" that I should try and get back to a more normal life as there is always something pressing and I can't do this forever. So here I am back spending weekends outside the lab (mostly) and even writing one or probably several posts. It feels good! I will go chronologically by the pictures in my iPhoto library and break this up into several posts.
The first visitors this year were a Swiss couple, friends of a friend in Basel. Annina and Claudio had contacted us last year when they were planning their bicycle tour from Panama City to Canada. They had a good start until they got robbed on the road in Nicaragua and decided to cut the rest of the time in Central America and instead fly to San Diego and continue in the US. They spent 10 days with us mainly reorganizing their things and doing extended shopping tours. They then spent several weeks in Baja California by bus as the weather in the deserts was still a little too cold to continue their trip. They came back in love with the desert peninsula just south of the border and then went on to continue their trip east into the deserts of Arizona. By now they should be somewhere in Utah. You can follow their journey here:
http://www.strinzla.blogspot.com/