I am currently staring at this text field, blanking out. There were things I meant to write about, aside from what I've already mentioned, but I suppose I will have to wait for them to come back to me.
Lab was...well I experienced another setback on Saturday, where half of the embryos I needed promptly died. (It happens in biology. Does not make it any more pleasant.) I meant to draw more this weekend, but it got shuffled off into the wee hours of Saturday where I was dragged out of bed by the fire trucks screaming by and then, by someone particularly persistent about catching the attention of someone else by honking their car after which my brain shunted itself off to experiment-planning mode and I was having trouble falling asleep via normal methods. I did get Lucy's note about mini-bottles of alcohol though, and so even though the recommended places were not conveniently close, I took a careful look through the alcohol beverage sections of stores for the first time while grocery shopping and was able to get white wine, probably of some terrible vintage, in tiny glass bottles that I will promptly use to store syrup (I think I figured out how to make syrup from fruit / flowers that can be used in baking & Italian sodas!).
Dreaming lately is a lot more fractured, when I'm not dreaming about lab. There was none that was developed enough to catch interest except one where I was kidnapped (sort of, explaining the entire situation would take too long -- but I got a chance to be inside of a imaginary limo which, upon awakening was both fascinating and entertaining) and the world operated on an utopia / dystopia basis where there are massive carousel-like machines that regulate energy flow in the atmosphere (named after colors but, in my defense, we have quarks with weirder names) and World Peace was achieved because people can be divided into the types of colors and it's all massively creepy.
I don't think I dream when I'm drugged. I may need to start a spreadsheet column to keep track of this.
For my none-work browser I've switched from Chrome to Opera (Firefox is still my favorite by far) due to even more issues I've found with the design (sure the GUI is slicker but where are all the program options I'm used to seeing in Firefox and Opera? Google tells me I can't adjust them) and the apparent shortage of free add-ons (and do no other browser have the "start searching text while typing" option?) that I've come to depend on (like the fact auto-detect proxy just isn't enough and I need to be able to toggle on and off proxy).
Have successfully reached compromise about my return trip from airport, which will be via taxi. Have temporarily given up on Greek declensions to focus solely on the vocabulary, as a nod to the sudden and terrifying need to memorize the common phenotypes associated with the misregulation of every neurotransmitter known to the Purves neuroscience textbook, within the next month. (I don't know if you would count this as "life suddenly got exciting", given that "stress" is not quite the same in terms of connotation as "excitement", but there certainly won't be time to be bored.) My old laser pointer turned out to be too weak to use with the brightness of about half of the projectors in our buildings and so I got one of those green ones with the terrifyingly bright laser that feels like it can burn your retina if you stare at the projected dot too long.
Blogger needs friends-lock, come to think of it. It's one of the features I like about LJ. I am writing about the things I remembered as they come back to me but I can't shake off the feeling that I'm only hitting about 90% recovery.
Oh right: The PI wanted me to write my results up "modularly", meaning that each project of my dissertation gets written as a section that is potentially stand-alone and can be arranged with the other sections in any order as needed, as I go. I am agreeing because I like being able to dot the i's, cross the t's and mark something done. I maintain that it is satisfying for the soul. Well. And also because the nuances of phrasing for pinpoint accuracy in scientific literature is such that I prefer to do my permutations for the most exact way to report a result while all the results and procedures are fresh in my head. Doubtless the PI will forget why we settled on a certain way to phrase things by the time the manuscript is being drafted, but I will keep each draft of the revision for these as we go (he got me a 500G harddrive, afterall) so hopefully this will save some pain and frustration further down the line. In the meantime, I can report that it took me three hours to put together the data and methods sections for a "module" that is ...less than 1/8th of my dissertation. Data and methods sections are supposed to be the easiest to write (either discussion or conclusion the hardest, depending on whom you ask), so my future is looking a bit more daunting. However, I did also discover that when I'm not also trying to run experiments at the same time, writing is a lot less stressful. After the second cup of tea I can reach a state of zen where I alternate between typing like mad and shuffling through digital files for the exact number / name that I need which...okay, doesn't sound very zen-like, but it is definitely a state of mind that one can achieve, however meditative (or not) it may be.
Why do recipe for frosting that comes with the cake always give me nearly twice as much frosting as I need?
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