Tons of Stuff

I ordered a lot of supplies recently, in particular from Ben Meadows, which is a good supplier. Almost all of them showed up on the same day, and over the next few days the rest showed up. They're all sitting in my office right now, need to start moving them over to a new lab prep-room.

The inlaws also went to India for two weeks recently and just got back the other day. They were visiting their parents. They seemed to have had a good time. Luckily their state seemed to be spared the recent anti-christian riots in Orissa, which is a little far from Kerala, and Karnataka, which actually borders it. Infact, the city of Mangalore, which apparently is right near the border with Kerala, was the site of some of the more recent rioting.

We are all planning on going here in February of 2009. That should be interesting. It will be my first time in the country and the first time meeting the grandparents. I speak no Malayalum, they speak no English. My father-in-law's dad (his only remaining parent) had said that the only thing English he knows is a salute, and he jokes that that's what he'll have to do when he meets me. My mother-in-law says that when he stood to demonstrate this that he seemed to still be effected by chickungunya, of which there was an outbreak in Kerala earlier this summer. He had caught it but generally recovered from it. Apparently it is a mosquito borne sickness that started in Uganda and spread to the rest of the world from there.