Random post

You know what I miss? A watch that comes with a built in timer.



Make no mistakes: I adore analogue watches with their hands moving forever in a circle, contained in their little sealed off world behind a pane of glass. There is something immensely comforting about holding the watch close and hearing the quiet ticks and only being able to hear it when you hold it close. It's one of those things in life -- to be able to go on knowing that something is there, a dependable pattern, easily within reach even if it's not always in your ear. (And I wouldn't want it always in my ear -- the clocks that tick loudly gets on my nerves. I am very like my mother that way and she's once stuffed the new clock under duvets to muffle it, as I think the story goes.)

But: timers. 

(I am well aware that my preference for maps and schedules and control needs no further encouragement, but even so.)

Though should I acquire one it will need to beep at a different frequency than the timers in lab (which all more or less sounds the same and yes it's positively pyschedelic when many of them go off at around the same time -- like the times when you hear a sound both inside and outside of your dream at the same time) because I really don't need to mangle that particular memory circuit in my brain.

......

By the way, the undergrad's (unintentional, I hope) response to Wendy's request for her to put things back where they belong was to leave a box -20C reagents sitting at room temperature while she wandered off to who-knows-where. This student  was the one who wanted -- and did--get into a grad school (it was confirmed at the end of March, after days where she came in crying because she got rejected from...Davis, among other schools) (...that was a really Not Fun week), and one for experimental biology at that so both Wendy and I are sort of worried both for her and her future PI. Oh well -- the way that grad school is structured, however, is that once you got in, so long as you follow exactly the PI says you can more or less complete your degree. No guarantee of how you'd do in the future of course, buuuut you can't guarantee anything anyway, with the current job market and the fact that some of the best people end up tackling just bad projects and so ended up washed out of the field of research. (Or, if you end up with certain PIs, you get your degree actually sooner if you're terrible because the PI wants to get rid of you, whereas if you're like Wendy the PI wants to  keep you forever because grad students are cheap and she's ...really diligent. But this depends a lot on the PI. Tam and I were trying to figure this out the other day.)

Speaking of Tam (classmate), we went out for coffee the other day to catch up from where we've disappeared into our labs for months and months and she was trying to explain to me about women who have predicted date of birth for their baby around a certain time will try to get C-section on that certain day for ...tax. To count as deduction. Apparently babies save money. A lot of money. Though, as Tam reflected, resigned (she has a toddler), it's not a net save and "then you end up with babies". At which point I started laughing hysterically because with the hinting that my relatives (especially grandma) have been doing "And then you end up with babies" would make a very good conclusion to, I think, a number of discussions.

I asked and she said I could quote her.

I also asked Scott and he said I could quote him. Specifically the quote he got from Karen during her PhD, when she was concurrently training in martial arts, that goes "They told me I have to defend my thesis, they didn't say how." (The exact plan, I believe, involved bringing in the...uh...weapon. To her public portion of her oral defense.)

(She didn't, actually. In case you are wondering.)

Right then. Lunch, I think.