Novel ways of injury

Unexpected injury during martial arts #2:

Foot accidentally gouged by someone else's toe nail. It broke skin and there's a bit of blood and everything.

Also note to self: be extra diligent in trimming nails on all four appendages from now on.

(In case anyone is wondering, #1 was the time where I somehow managed to sprain my toe.)

I need to stop shopping at 99 Ranch early in the morning. I've ran into too many Chinese PIs there, during that time, including the two from my committee. Also I wonder why people looked surprised to see me with groceries and ask me if I'm cooking for myself. I mean you could ask someone to pick up a few things for you at the store, sure, but for the comprehensive week's worth of food items I usually fill my cart with -- usually the person who cooks does that kind of shopping, don't they? Since they're the one who knows what they need and could change their planned recipe because...oh I don't know, the spinach looked iffy. Possibly I don't seem the time who can cook. To be fair I know a fair number of female classmates who can't.

I don't even know.

Didn't see repairman for incubator on Tuesday. Stepped into room one Wednesday to find alarm going off and CO2 level at zero (v. bad news). Felt like I went around crying about the incubator to everybody on Wednesday (seriously I just need this one thing to work out to get my manuscript done) as we tried to figure out whether the repairman actually came or  not and what's wrong with the incubator. Ended up needing to order a new CO2 tank, which came yesterday. Hopefully everything will equilibrate over the weekend and no fresh alarms will be going off on Monday and I can finally start that set of experiments. Again. Because troubleshooting is hell and this is a week long experiment. (Which yes, makes equipment failure that much more frustrating.)

Yvette likes knives. I wonder if people are keeping track of my internet history somewhere and if all people who attempt to write detective stories are marked somewhere as potential terrorists because of the sort of things we google.

I mentioned that I'm applying for a position at UCSF to someone and they said "Whoa, FANCY!" and then I suffered from what I think was an acute attack of insecurity.

It's the darnest thing.

A moment of blinding "holy f*** what the f*** was I thinking????" coupled with thought paralysis. And then it's gone, leaving behind a deeply bemused wonder at the apparently spontaneity of my brain. But this too, according to my classmates, is part of the ritual of graduation.

Seriously, why do we do this to ourselves? (Yes this is very very rhetorical.)

Current schedule has interview in March, martial arts exam in April (?!), public defense in May. Also, as of next Tuesday, all the cell incubators in our lab will be down and I will need to find a neighboring lab who has space for my cells temporarily.

I'm pretty sure I've said "fuck" more times within the past six months than the entirely of my life up to this point.

Also both of the books I finished recently are of the depressing / paranoia-inducing variety, but THAT, at least, I can do something about. I'm picking up Emma Thompson's SENSE AND SENSIBILITY DAIRIES and Dunnett's GAME OF KINGS from the local library today (have learned how the hold system works and figured out how to work around the delays) so that should be more fun.

I have also started drawing my next comic book / graphic novel this week and will be filing my taxes later today. Never a dull moment. Or something like that.

So new and fascinating source of stress:

Our lab had 2 incubators for cell lines. That's right: HAD. The CO2 regulator broke back in October, along with the fan in one of the incubators and taking out the other in the process, causing us to lose our cell lines. Due to the cost and the fact that this has been a really terrible year in terms of funding, we only fixed 1 of the 2 incubators -- meaning all of our current cells for experiments are in one incubator.

Yesterday the fan of our sole remaining incubator started making weird noises.

If I lose all my cells AGAIN this close to finishing my manuscript I may cry.

Hitting a snag in my experiments and everything is frustrating. (Well not literally everything, no matter how much it may feel like it at the time.) The January lab move date is shifted to either March or April, maybe. I'm not entirely sure what's going on with anything else.

On an unrelated note: happy Lunar New Year!