No gorillas

Slept for about ten hours last night and had a dream about discussion section (TAing eats your brain, I swear), one about my mom and I having The Conversation (ended well, which made me a little sad because this is literally of the "dream on" category), and one about earthquake (possibly due to the very large truck driving past). I have been bouncing between moods so fast this past week that by Friday I was starting to feel vaguely bipolar. When my PI asked me how I was doing late Friday afternoon (I warned him to not expect anything from me in terms of data production this week) I stared at him blankly for a moment before replying "...I'm not sure."

I mean, if you take the average I suppose this is an okay week?

At the very least, I got everything that needed to be done this week done on time and done to the best of my abilities. Whether that is good enough or not remains to be seen (I found out Thursday evening that my current genetics course instructor does give out Cs and if you get one you fail the course. As in you have to retake it) (then take into account that I've been getting 3/5 on my paper reviews since I've been using the standards that I've been taught my freshman year & in my other classes and that is apparently too tough and detail-oriented for this class -- which I have no way of amending now because the teacher didn't start passing back our one-per-week reviews until last week). Grading the midterm turned out took only five hours, instead of six. Either way I was feeling a tad brain-dead near the end. On the plus side, the students who are coming to my sections are now doing fairly well on their problem sets which totally made my day when I tallied up their score. The point is: I made it through this week, therefore I won this battle, at least.

The program director's gone and decided that everyone on the training grant (four students per year) needs to present a poster at our June 3rd retreat. I have just finished the SfN abstract on Monday (am now waiting to hear back from two people about co-authorship) and was properly horrified to find out that I have four weeks (counting the next two weeks with a presentation/project due each week) to sort through 2Gb of data into some semblance of publication worthy figures. It's doable, which is one of the reasons why I didn't say "no" right off the bat, so I suppose I'll be working on that as soon as my presentations are done. (Guys, what software do you use to put together a poster? Wendy said she used Powerpoint. I use Open Office, which allows you to work on .ppt files, but which means if I give them the .ppt file and they open it in Powerpoint I'll lose part of the format.)(Maybe I'll borrow the lab comp/lounge comp?)

Finally, one of the post-docs (the one who saved me from the weird guy at the bus stop the other week) has gone AWOL these two weeks and now I finally have all the information AND can tell people about it. (Also, what's with all this thing where people tell me things I'm not supposed to know and then ask me to keep the fact that they've told me and the fact that I know a secret AND the situations where people ask me things that don't need to be kept secret and then asking me to keep the fact that they asked a secret? It's getting kind of hard to keep track of what I'm supposed to know, what I'm supposed to tell, who I'm not supposed to know knows and who was supposed to know but doesn't want to be known that they know straight.) (Gah. I can keep a secret, but this is getting to be a bit much.) What has happened with the post-doc is that his wife is pregnant (we were very surprised since she always gave off the air that she didn't want kids), and that the morning sickness got so bad with her that she got admitted to the hospital for severe dehydration. (She couldn't stop throwing up, and so he ended up spending a lot of time at the hospital.) She's just gotten better later this week and was allowed home, having lost around 24 pounds in mass due to morning sickness. (For the record? I met her before at lab outings and she's about my size. 24 pounds is a LOT in terms of percentage of body mass.) We all signed a get-well card for her and are twitchily hoping that everything will be okay.

And now: tea.