Well, I went out with my parents.

I'm paying for it now. My head aches and I feel bloated, and more than a little nauseated, not to mention exhausted and horribly thirsty. I took a nap and woke up from it looking like I'd just been exhumed - dead pale with mad starin' eyes, etcetera. Not one of my more auspicious awakenings, and I kind of wish I hadn't got up. My stomach appears not only to hate me, but to be a few minutes away from outright rebellion.

I'm still glad I went out, but what the Hell, world? Can I not even go out to enjoy myself without being mightily smited in return? I guess I'm still not over that bug I caught, and my body doesn't know what to do with OMG FOOD.

You know, a lot of this is my fault. I shouldn't have sat up until the crack of dawn reading about the Cassie Claire Plagiarism Debacle and the Ms. Scribe Story. Actually, I haven't finished the Ms. Scribe Story...

So. I went out with my parents.

It was hot. Actually very hot and somewhat muggy, which meant I didn't want to go back to Kew though Kew is made of love and win, and also I wanted to go to a proper restaurant with them instead of just getting a sandwich, which meant--

Well, in practice it meant that I didn't particularly want to spend the afternoon dragging around a garden, lovely though it is. Too hot. Also, going to the cinema like I do with my dad didn't seem such a great idea when I kind of wanted to speak to my family. So, change of plans, we went to an Indian restaurant in Kensington them spent the afternoon in the Science Museum, which I love, trying to find a gallery that hadn't been kid-friendlied into the ground.

Maybe I'm getting old, but I remember the Science Museum used to be more - well - museum-ish than it seemed today. The upper levels were pretty satisfying, though, as was a temporary exhibition on the discovery of penicillin and the implications of antibiotic resistance that I visited with my brother and fangirled over like an idiot.

*is total medical geek, yo*

The problem with the medical stuff is my father is hellishly squeamish, though, so I couldn't spend too long looking at all the shinies.

We found a new gallery, though, which was clearly designed for adults (which probably explained how come we were alone in it) - it contained a selection of eighteenth-century scientific instruments collected by George III, which should not have been as awesomely shiny as they were. The interesting thing about them was that a lot of them were designed just to demonstrate some scientific principle or another, such as the creation of a vacuum or the creation of an electric charge - it didn't matter if they actually did anything useful as a consequence. Odd, but oddly fascinating all the same.

I've seen paintings with some of those devices in. My father told me who the artist was, but I've totally forgotten again. I hope that gallery stays there for a long time, though - current advances are neat, but I hope the museum doesn't get so caught up with where we're going that it forgets to mention how we got there in the first place.

That said, though, they desperately need to update the 'history of medicine' dioramas.

Their dioramas of ITUs and ORs both date back to the early eighties, and that had the med geek in me pointing out all the technology that had changed since those displays were set up - namely almost everything. Oh, the devices were still the same, but the advent of computers mean that most of the equipment on display there is hopelessly out of date. The ventilator, anesthetist's equipment and ITU bed both looked bizarrely antiquated.

I wouldn't mind so much if it weren't for the fact that people aren't necessarily going to realize how quickly medical technology moves on, and might not even notice that the dioramas are dated 1980: they might just see it and think 'oh, it's modern'.

(Also, the dummy in the ITU bed was surrounded by monitoring equipment but didn't seem to be connected to most of it, and why the fuck was he hooked up to a ventilator anyway when he wasn't intubated and was, in fact, just wearing a standard-issue oxygen mask?)

/geekery.

... yeah, I had a good day. And the meal we had was absolutely fantastic - certainly it was the best Indian restaurant I've been to in a long time. They didn't have the dish I usually order so I tried something new, and that actually paid off for once.

Oh well, back to reality, I guess. Welfare office tomorrow, oh the wow. I hope my adviser is more helpful than he was last time and cards_slash is doing strange things to my turns of phrase...