This week the second heat wave peaked and at one point I was told there were 9 places on fire in the north part of our county, but thankfully it was still pretty far north that we didn't have to deal with evacuation. Thursday ended up being so hot that I, being in a top floor apartment without AC, took to sleeping on the floor with both windows open because the bed (and my clothes, and my bag, and anything that is any good at all at retaining heat) was still radiating heat. The weather's going to be dropping around 30F within the next few days, which is the good news. The bad news is the cycle of temperature and being closeted indoors against the heat means that nearly half of our lab building (or so it sounds like) is sick. The tech in our lab came down the day after I returned to work.

Even worse news this week is that I got partially scooped. For those not in the academia, being "scooped" is sort of like the journalism version -- someone reported what you were about to report before you did. The paper came out in NEURON, which is reassuring in a way since it meant that we were not completely off of our heads when we aimed for NEURON as the place to publish my work. I couldn't help but think that if I had managed to convince my PI to submit my work back in January, as I'd originally proposed, my paper and that paper might've came out back-to-back and I'd be DONE by now ---but trying to win an argument against my PI is.... Well no one in lab has managed to date, including the golden boy a few years back, even though the PI admitted after HIS paper was scooped that the students was right. (Basically it's impossible to convince him he's wrong unless you can prove it, which in this case is too late for me.) Mostly it means that I can't publish my work as it is right now and has to add MORE stuff, which my PI wants done (yesterday but even he can acknowledge that's not going to happen) by the end of May. Though it took him an hour to cover all the things he wants done and we're half way through May already, so I'm not sure his plan is entirely plausible either.

In conclusion: it can get worse. PI's still pushing for more data, all the data, done yesterday to the point where this week I flat out told him that I'm ALREADY doing my best. Because I don't think I can spend any more hours on this without completely destroying my mental and physical health and no, just NO. It's not worth it.