I was issued a phone and computer on Thursday, and they also printed up a placard with my name for the office door. They use two surnames in Mexico, the paternal and the maternal. So down here I am officially Marc Crepeau Cull, and that is what it says on my office door. I'm sure my mother is filled with posthumous pride.

The computer is an IBM Thinkpad. I'm no fan of Windows, which I find overly complicated and inelegant compared to the Macintosh operating system. But I'm comfortable using Windows if I have to, and at least it's a nice, new machine. One complicating factor though is that the computer is configured for the Spanish language. All the menus and error messages are in Spanish and It even has a special keyboard with all the special punctuation marks needed to write in Spanish. It's slowing me down a little at this point, but I don't think I'll bother changing it to English because it would probably take me hours just to figure out how, and anyway I need as much Spanish practice as I can get.

I also picked up my first two week's pay yesterday. José kindly arranged for my pay to begin accumulating on August 1st even though I didn't actually start working until Tuesday of this week. The Mexican government deducted about 17% of my salary for taxes. That's not bad I suppose, but it reduces my already modest pay check enough to make things rather tight for us. Oh well. This whole adventure has been ruinous financially right from the start anyway. But you only live once, right? We can catch up when Enid starts school and Robin and I are both working again.

Mostly today I worked on preparing for the lectures I've got to give next week. I hate being unprepared for that sort of thing, so I'm just going to focus on it until it's done. I'm glad I don't have to teach very often. About the only other thing that was going on today was that some representives from the local Roche distributor were working with Alberto (one of our researchers) to demonstrate some Taqman probes on a LightCycler instrument they want us to buy. They extracted RNA from some of Alberto's blood yesterday to test the probes on, and I also loaned them some of the RNA I extracted from mammary cancer tissue in February. They ran the PCR with BRCA2, NOS, and GDPH probes and I was gratified to see that my sample gave a good signal, even after several months in the freezer.

Last night we went to an exhibition of student artworks that José invited us to at the Casa de Cultura de Monterrey. His wife Gladis took a class there and her ceramic pieces were some of the works on display. We arrived about a half hour late, which may have been a good thing because they were giving speeches when we arrived and might have been giving them for the last half hour for all I know ("Mexicans love to give speeches!" José whispered to me, rolling his eyes). But fortunately they stopped not long after we got there and then served refreshments and let everyone look at the art. It was a nice enough affair, and we definitely appreciated the invitation, but the reason we were late was that we had to fight rush hour traffic for nearly an hour to get there. Remind me never to do that again!