Well that was a week, that was.

More crisis management, and I'm bushed.

We're having to CE mark (register and 'type approve') some of our kits for sale in the EU. Never thought we'd have to because the parent company was going to make their own version, but there have been hiccups. So we've now had to upscale production, having run it to zero.

Then a contractor failed to deliver a reagent on time, and came in 2 weeks late.

Then a reagent that is critical decided that it wasn't going to be manufactured the same as every previous lot. 2 operators, 2 dates a week apart, and they both behave the same, which is different from every lot ever made before. We now have customers jumping up and down and giving us a hard time - fair enough, since they've got patients waiting.

So a series of early mornings and late nights later and we've got a strategy and way to move forward. I've actually really enjoyed the pressure and discipling required to produce a lot of data in a short time. Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday I hardly left the lab, but that was great because I'm really good with assays and assay development, and this was like coming home for a bit. The downside is that my brain won't stop when I leave after a day like that. Wednesday I went to bed at midnight and woke at 4.00am. Just full of thoughts and feelings and ideas.

This (Saturday) morning I forced myself out of bed and we painted the ceilings over our stairs and landings, plus re-doing another wall. I was obviously still on the go a bit because Chris commented that she couldn't believe we'd finished before lunchtime. Shame none of you can see it - like a trip back to the 70s (works though!) with the walls either side of the stairs 'natural saffron' and the main window wall 'toffee apple red'. We're just waiting for replacement stair carpet (the current one was here when we came, 14 years ago) and then we can do the livingroom........