Today started very nicely: sitting in the train and when coming closer to Roskilde, the surroundings were white 
It was a nice small surprise shortly before Christmas!
At work, turning on the computer and checking e-mails: I found two small surprises in my post box: i) an answer that an external professor likes a small project idea and that it could be nice to conduct the experiment together. That would solve my problems with the required external stay and also gives a nice opportunity to do some nice work on “priming”.ii) and that was an even bigger surprise: I’ve gotten a 100 € amazon gift coupon!!! Isn’t that amazing??!! It’s the prize for the best sesion presentation of a conference I attended in September this year. It’s quite late but totally fitting for the coming Christmas.
And… that was not all for today I had the last small meeting with my supervisor today and he mentioned that there might be a PostDoc position in 2013 on carbon cycling and isotope labelling – basically the same things I am doing right now. And that would mean that I would be a perfect candidate for that. Nothing is settled and due to the institute fusion, nobody knows about the money next year nor the year after, but this position is already in the budget for the running experiment. So… there might be the possibility 
And the important and nice thing is – he thought of me and mentioned it to me even before something is known. And even though it could be that this position never comes up, it is a very nice feeling to be considered for upcoming work
Btw: we are approaching Christmas and the institute becomes dead – almost nobody was at work today and tomorrow it will be even worse… and I don’t want to mention Friday… But I hope I can finish up my work tomorrow so that I may have time to do some more Christmas shopping on Friday – that would actually be very very necessary
PS: “priming” is a scientific term that came up when increased CO2 releases from the soil were measured and the ecological function of this occurences was investigated. For more detailed information – just asked or try to google it
