In my team's morning standup[1] today, my boss asked us for our "most ridiculous / useless achievement" of the weekend. He offered as his, that he and his wife had looked at their growing stack of papers for shredding, and had a bonfire of them instead.

Another colleague offered up fitting one of those little metal keyhole covers on his front door, and I said that I'd finished the paté in the fridge no-one else was eating before it went off.

What are your tiny achievements of the week?


[1] which is of course actually conducted these days sitting down in our respective homes ...

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• 1 apple, washed (peeled if not organic) ($.60)
• 1 cup mango,chunks, fresh or frozen ($1.00)
• 1 banana, sliced and frozen
• 1 handful kale leaves ($.50)
• 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
• 1 cup ice
• water for blending (more or less depending on how thick you like it)

• 1 cup carrots, cut into chunks
• 1 banana, sliced and frozen
• 1 cup almond milk 
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1/2 teaspoon ginger
• 1/4 teaspoon allspice
• pinch nutmeg
• 1/2 cup chopped dates
• 1/4 cup chopped pecans or other nuts
• 1 cup chopped apples

1. In a high powered blender, puree the carrots, banana, and almond milk until very smooth.
2. Add in the cinnamon, ginger, allspice, and nutmeg and pulse a few times to blend well.
3. Pour into a bowl and add the chopped dates, pecans, and apples. A sprinkle of coconut flakes goes well, too!

• 3 cups chopped romaine (or favorite green) ($1.00)
• 1 cup cubed pineapple, frozen ($2.00)
• 1 banana, sliced and frozen ($.20)
• 2 tablespoons lemon juice (optional) ($.20)
• 1 teaspoon vanilla ($.10)
• 1 cup water
• 10 ice cubes
• stevia to taste (optional)

• In a high powered blender, puree the greens until liquefied and very smooth. 
• Add the rest of the ingredients and puree until smooth.

• 8 cups thinly sliced zucchini rounds ($5.00)
• 1/2 cup agave ($1.00)
• 1/4 cup balsamic vinegar ($.40)
• 1/4 olive oil ($.40)
• 2 tablespoons dried oregano ($.05)
• 2 tablespoons dried basil ($.05)
• 2 tablespoons dried parsley ($.05)
• 1 tablespoon garlic powder ($.05)
• 1 tablespoon onion powder ($.05)
• 1 teaspoon salt (or more to taste)
• 1 teaspoon black pepper
• 1 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes ($.05) 

• Slice the zucchini, pat dry if needed, and place in a large, lidded container. 
• In a small bowl, whisk together the remaining ingredients.
• Pour over the sliced zucchini, cover, and shake (or just stir) until zucchini is evenly coated. 
• Spread the zucchini on lined dehydrator sheets and dry at 145 degrees for about an hour and then at 120 for about another 12 hours or overnight (dehydrating time can vary), until crispy. 
• Store leftovers in an airtight container and pop into dehydrator for a few minutes to crisp them up again if necessary. 

• 1 orange, peeled and frozen ($.50)
• 2 bananas, peeled, sliced, and frozen ($.40)
• 1 cup hemp milk ($1.00)
• 3 tablespoons cacao powder ($.30) 
• 1/2 teaspoon orange extract
• few drops stevia (optional)
• pinch salt
• 6 ice cubes
• water for blending, if necessary

1. In a high speed blender, puree all ingredients until very smooth and creamy. 
2. Add water if needed for ease of blender or if a thinner smoothie is desired. 

So, to break up the all pandemic all the time posts: I spent most of March getting my first big project at work over the line. I and my team have just released a FutureLearn MOOC. Behold: Antimicrobial Resistance in Bacterial Pathogens.

It's not completely unrelated to the pandemic, because it's about using genomics methods to detect and avoid antibiotic resistance, and track outbreaks of infectious diseases, albeit bacterial rather than viral. It turned out the timing was quite fortuitous, because the whole world is under lockdown and lots of people have time for taking online courses and interest in epidemics and outbreaks.

So slightly under halfway through the course, we have 5000 sign-ups, from basically every country in the world except places like North Korea and Turkmenistan that don't let people access the internet. And we got a personal message of congratulations from the head of section for making such an awesome course.

On the other hand the timing was slightly disastrous because two weeks before launch the lead educator had to drop out of working on the course and go off to run the national Covid-19 sequencing effort. The rest of the team pulled together in very trying circumstances, more than just the general lockdown and emergency, they're all more or less directly involved in clinical-related work on the pandemic. But the last few weeks have been intense, to say the least.

You're welcome to have a go if you like. It's completely free as in beer - we're funded by the Wellcome Trust so we pay for everybody to have premium access to the course. It's quite technical though; our target audience was basically people who are already working in the field of antibiotic resistance but want to learn about modern cutting edge techniques. If you have college-level science and a general interest it should be fine, and we do have a bunch of keen secondary school students who are desperate for something to learn while public exams are cancelled.

If you are excited about it but it's a bit too technical, there is a companion course called Disease outbreaks and antimicrobial resistance. Which I didn't really work on directly, it all happened before I joined the institution, but it's still part of the portfolio of courses I manage.

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Not a gratitude practice; I'm really bad at that. Just, in spite of all the awfulness on a global scale, on a personal level my cup runneth over right now.

My extremely wonderful job was made permanent. I had been assured this would happen, but I'm really pleased to have it confirmed.

We finally managed to catch (at least the first act of) one of the many performances currently being made available online in response to the pandemic: the National Theatre's utterly amazing Twelfth Night from 2017. Lots of people have recommended it, so thank you for inspiring me to actually watch. It's on YouTube until 7 pm tomorrow (Thursday), and it's so, so, so good. So many amazing actors, and the set is great, and the direction is great, and I'm in awe, basically. Hope to watch Act II this evening.

We also really loved Knives Out. From publicity it didn't seem like my kind of thing at all, don't care about semi-parodic murder mysteries about awful people, but I saw enough reviews to convince me to give it a try and it's amazing. The comedy is actually funny, and very much punching up.

I have been having some wonderful distanced conversations with people I care about. Phone date with ghoti_mhic_uait. Phone call with hatam_soferet. Video chat with rysmiel, which we hadn't managed to coordinate for ages because of time zones and demanding jobs. Video chat with doseybat, who has been one of my favourite people to talk to for nearly a quarter century, and every extension of that enormous conversation makes my life better. I sympathize with all the people who dislike spending all their leisure time as well as in many cases their work time in calls, but for me, a one-to-one conversation with a friend goes a long way to balance the awfulness of lockdown.

Talking of which, ambyr, who also feels positive towards phonecalls, really kindly agreed to phone me to teach me Mystic Vale. It's a really pretty deck building game I'd heard good things about, but I couldn't make any sense of the interface on Yucata. And now ambyr has explained it to me and I'm really enjoying it. Plus I got to talk to someone I like and had only previously interacted with on DW.

And I have a regular call set up with angelofthenorth, who lives the other side of the country so we always have too much geography even in normal times. She had the brilliant idea of reading through a book about the Old Testament aimed at Christian ministers in training, SCM Studyguide: The Old Testament, by John Holdsworth, which I'm finding really fascinating. Mostly the conversation with angelofthenorth, who brings the perspective of an experienced Christian preacher and mentor of ordinands, whereas I'm a random Jewish person who obviously has a very different approach to the Bible. The book itself is written in a somewhat annoying style, but the content is good.

angelofthenorth, along with my sister, got me back into playing Scrabble using the rather dreadful official app from Electronic Arts. I'm really enjoying being able to ping anagrams back and forth as a minor distraction during the day.

Another friend who is completely wonderful is ewt, who transcribed for me the tune of the Psalm we use for special occasion grace after meals. This is particularly awesome because it's really hard to find any record of the Anglo-Jewish tunes I'm used to. Everything is transmitted within communities and not documented anywhere, and the internet is full of American and Israeli and Chassidic tunes, and I can't teach my own tunes because I'm not musical enough.

The final thing making me happy right now is the disco tardigrade. I have always loved tardigrades, and fluorescence microscopy, and this is just such a lovely image. It's my new 'squee' icon (cos nobody really understood the 'methane on Mars' one), and also my new Zoom background. Turns out, Zoom backgrounds are set per device not per account, so when I tried to put it on my personal account, it ended up showing up on work Zoom calls too. Luckily it's not embarrassing and my equally geeky colleagues love it too. (But in case anyone could stand to learn from my experience, don't put a work-unsuitable background on your Zoom if you use the same physical machine for work and personal calls.)

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