Oh, fizzlesticks

This week started off okay and then things started snowballing somewhere around Wednesday and now I find myself staring at my planner, wondering what on earth I've gotten myself into.

To sum up: Two problem sets next week, one to turn in and one to grade, in addition to another paper to review and a trip over to a neighboring research institute to finish off my first cohort of mouse experiments, which will take at least half a day, in addition to presenting a poster at the genetics retreat, which will take all day. The week after that includes a two hour review session for me to run, a take home final and a in-class final (open and closed book, respectively), a lab presentation, and a final to help make, take, proctor, and grade. (Given that the midterm took us five hours to go through, this will probably take longer.)

These past two days I've been going through the hell that was poster-making, because we're trying out a new sort of account for printing them and the printer system is on a separate network from the school of med system and won't acknowledge that my printing account is valid. I just sorted that bit of fun this afternoon so now the file for my poster is off being British (queuing very patiently). I hope to get it some time on Monday, but I'll settle for anything before Thursday (day of presentation).

Attendance at my discussion section still sucks, and in this past homework one of my students told me that that a prokaryote has a nucleus. Despite of the fact that I know, quite logically, this is more of an intro-to-bio issue and is in no way a topic covered & held responsible for by our upper division genetics class, I can't help but feel like I've failed my students in some small but significant way. After that I gazed morosely at my grading sheet for a while and was cheered somewhat by the fact that the few people who have been coming to my sections seem to have been scoring progressively higher on their problem sets. I can only hope that I've played some small part in that.

Oh right. Thesis committee. I'll let you guys know by the end of next week! (Waiting for one more person....) I might make it on schedule after all. (Remember? My original plan was to have that assembled by the end of spring quarter this year.)

Utterly exhausted. Will sleep now.