Busy, Busy, Busy!

[Author’s note: If possible, the title to this post should be read in the voice of the evil magician from Frosty the Snowman, because that’s how it played out in my head when I was writing it.]

You may recall that there was a time at the beginning of last year when I was bemoaning my lack of actual work.  Let me tell you, if that version of myself were sitting here right now, current me would slap past me upside the head.  The past week was mildly exhausting.  I would say it’s a good thing I had a three-day weekend to make up for it, but I spent most of that three-day weekend asleep as I tried to catch up on the lack of sleep that piled up last week.  My (brilliant, yet decidedly unrealistic) plan for the weekend was to get ahead on my work so that this week wasn’t so stressful.  That didn’t really happen (I’m sure this comes as a surprise only to me... hope springs eternal or something like that).

Because I’m still not done with my work for the next week and I need to write something slightly more scientific for tomorrow, I’m going to just give a recap of the week (along with a bit of why I didn’t sleep (it’s completely my own fault/lack of time management)).

As per usual, the vast majority of my week was spent in lab.  Monday was relatively chill, since I was more or less just starting things for the week.  Tuesday was similarly sedate, although it did require a bit of maneuvering as I tried to get everything done to a point where I could leave lab for 15 minutes to go have a meeting with my professors for Project Lab.

Things went downhill on Wednesday.  Or rather, on Tuesday night, I guess.  On Wednesday, I had a Spanish exam, a meeting with a professor to discuss grad school, and I foolishly volunteered to present the paper for 7.31 (which is the class where we just discuss papers).  I spent most of Tuesday night (read: until about 3 am) prepping my presentation of the paper.  This, of course, meant that I had very little time to actually study for my Spanish exam.  My plan was that I would study for it during the 5-10 minute breaks that randomly occur throughout my day in lab.  But then my grad student got sick.  So I ended up having to finish up some of his work for him, and the 5-10 minute breaks kind of evaporated before my eyes.  It ended up okay- I think I was able to cram enough knowledge of the Spanish language into my head for the test to not be a complete failure.  But Wednesday was a day of running around like a crazy person.

Thursday, similarly, was spent running around crazily.  For my class on Thursday, we had to read two scientific papers and comment on the relative merits or downfalls of the way they were written.  Normally, this would be fine, but I was so wiped from running around in lab on Wednesday that I came home and took a two hour nap, meaning that I didn’t get started on critiquing the papers until about 10 pm.  Scientific papers are great in that they impart a lot of information in a relatively short space.  That also makes them completely impossible to skim though, so reading one and really understanding it takes at least an hour, if not more.  And I was tired, so it was definitely taking more. 

I was up until about 3 am critiquing papers, at which point I decided that my spelling had gotten bad enough that it was taking me longer to type the sentence than to actually come up with it, and I should probably sleep for a little bit at least.  I had intended to sleep until 7 am and get up to finish critiquing the papers.  Unbeknownst to me, the cell phone that my sister had handed-down-to-me (just that weekend, so I hadn’t had time to explore it) had special settings for the alarms, so that they would only go off on Mondays and Wednesdays.  As a result, I slept until 8:34. 

I generally try to be in lab by 9 am, meaning that I need to leave by about 8:50 am.  This would have been a totally manageable thing to do, except that Thursday morning was the day that I was taking my senior portraits.  So I had to get up and do my hair rather than pulling it into my usual severe bun, and I had to put on nice clothes rather than my usual jeans and a t-shirt.  Let me tell you, nice clothes always take longer than you think they’re going to take.  I don’t know what it is, maybe they’re magic.  But they always seem to take much longer than they should.

I somehow made it to lab by 9:15 and by some miracle of craziness was able to time everything properly such that I would be able to leave everything running for an hour and a half while I went all the way across campus and back to get my pictures taken and go to my appointment for flow cytometry (the thing that counts the number of fluorescent cells).  And then when flow cytometry was done, I had to come back to complete the protocols that had been running while I was running all over campus doing things.  You may recall that I didn’t finish critiquing my papers because I overslept... that happened in 5 minute spurts while I was waiting for results.  I managed to finish the last critique about a minute before class started, which was cutting it way too close. 

Luckily, I don’t have class on Fridays, so I was able to take a nap on Thursday evening without feeling too guilty about it.  I spent Friday taking care of the utterly ridiculous number of cell samples that I’m growing, and then going to lab meeting.  Lab meeting was something of an adventure because my PI was about 40 minutes late... she was at a birthday luncheon for another professor, and it ran long.  Overall, Friday was much more sedate than any of the other days that week.  I was kind of falling asleep during my 10pm to 1am desk shift, but other than that it was a reasonably doable day.

On Saturday, I went shopping with some friends to try to find some professional clothes.  I was looking for blouses, but didn’t really find anything.  I did find a nice blazer though, which kind of makes up for the lack of blouses.

Sunday was spent alternately napping and trying to do my Spanish homework.  Eventually I gave up on the Spanish homework and just slept, because I was kind of ‘pooped out’ as my grandma would say.  And today, Monday, was Columbus Day, which I spent sleeping and then trying to do homework again.  Which is what I need to go do now- I have a draft of the Introduction to my thesis due tomorrow, and it’s refusing to write itself.  Until next week!