Things I have discovered upon returning from Peru:

1) The CO2 regulator was not replaced. The incubators are down. All of them. For the cells. 90% of my remaining work involves cells. (The regulator finally got replaced yesterday evening but one of the two incubators are still down and the working one still needs to be calibrated.)

2) There was some issue with temperature regulator in the vivarium last week. May be reason why I lost 2 mice. Does not excuse mistake make by staff where they accidentally switched the cage label so that a cage with four female mice got labeled as a breeder pair. The sex ID mistake I can understand but- did they not realize that the cage contained 4 mice instead of 2?

3) The fan for the camera for the microscope is officially out. As in the camera got shipped off for repair and won't be back for three weeks. There goes the schedule for the cell immunofluorescence experiments.

4) Apparently on Monday there was an issue where they tried to fix the emergency power supply and ended up blowing out the fuses to a bunch of -80C freezers (i.e. where all the bio labs keep their most expensive and delicate samples). Ours is okay. For now. The place is crawling over with electricians though.

5) I still don't know what is wrong with the ventilation in our building. Last week the air pressure got inverted. Starting yesterday it's operating at a dull roar so that I can barely hear my timer going off.

The consequences of which meant that at one point today I sat down on the floor in the mouse room and tried to come up with a new schedule for my experiments because as much effort as I am exerting, trying to graduate, it really does feel like fate is conspiring against me. So much for that nice little bubble of joy that I carried back with me from my vacation.

Friend of mine's gotten the okay from her committee to graduate in December! I'm torn between being deeply jealous (she'll be done!) and nonplussed (she doesn't have a job lined up and announced she's not going to finish her current set of experiments and apparently her committee was okay with it??) and sad (she'll leaving, both the school and from science -- she's going into teaching / writing). Also she will be having a baby soon which seems to me like a whole 'nother sort of stress. But on the other hand I'm also kind of happy for her because she was handling the near-graduation stress even worse than I am (save for July; July was the abyss from which I hope to never return) and was joking about quitting so she'll be done and free at last, free at last -- and I think she'll be happier once she's done.

So, complicated feelings tonight.

Also, I'm presenting in lab meeting tomorrow evening and flying out for Peru the day after all. Just FYI.

Trying to get my stuff approved by my committee as well as my PI and, eventually, peer reviewers. This can only end in tears.

Also, for reasons unknown, my neighbor's left his socks on the communal cacti.

Taxonomy is not for the common English language. For instance, Osteichthyes I'm pretty sure I can just type in as "fish", or possibly "bony fish" if I'm feeling particular -- but what on earth do I call lamprey? "Invertebrate chordate"? That's not exactly common speech....

Universal standard for application of common names fail UTTERLY once you reach the point that the things you're trying to name is no longer something people commonly encounter.

(Though I suspect that most people outside of my niche - most NORMAL people - just consider lamprey to be fish.)

(Yes I'm still working on this bit.)

(Did you know people use the term "worm" for earth worm, round worm, and polychaete worm when there's like more evolutionary divergence across those three categories than between us and like, sea urchins?)

I just spent 30 minutes confusing myself with the past tense of the verb, "to spread". Why English WHY?

I have discovered madeleine cookies and they go well with earl grey, except we're in the middle of a "heat wave" (meaning 80s F where I am) so I'm mostly sticking with making a large pot of caffeine free ice tea and drinking it throughout the day, because I live on the top floor and there is no air conditioning and also - computers get hot when you use them for a long time.

Also discovered? Lentil snaps / Snapea crisps. They are as bad as Pockys in how addictive they are.

In the meantime I have to go and finish updating the accession IDs for my supplemental table #2. There are 97 species I have to go through across 4 different databases and a lot of the information got updated / merged so it is a tad painful to wade through. I am in the 70s, however. I WILL PREVAIL.

There are only so many scientifically acceptable ways to say "statistically significant" and "not statistically significant". Also: I think my committee disagrees with my PI on what the main focus of my paper should be on. WHY.

Has any one of my acquaintances ever found what they learned in high school geometry useful?

Trying to write for a Nature publication from scratch is painful. (And you know what? I don't think my manuscript will even make it because it's not a hot topic or, as some of my co-workers like to say "it's not sexy enough for Nature".) (I know right?)

As someone who likes to finish 24hrs before the actual deadline, the feeling of being perpetually late and in need of catching up is deeply unsettling. And exhausting.

In other news my brain decided to pipe "Oh My Darling Clementine" at me for over an hour this afternoon, for no reason I can discern. It was especially annoying since I don't actually know the lyrics but, since Annie introduced it to me during my undergrad years, I was well aware that it involves some lady dying and her lover pairing up with her sister. Which lead to a round of "why brain, WHY?" It's admittedly no worse than all those sailor songs about drowning but even so, WHY BRAIN?

And update to clarify:
I am more or less fine. Meaning that, after comparing notes with my classmates, we all realized that we are all more or less in the same boat of stressed and overworked. Which no doubt contributed to some of my dithering but the exact question is HOW MUCH.

But you know me, I'll keep soldiering on and keep you all updated on my progress whoo.

Warning: long unhappy post, but not that much existential ennui

Today I spent some time huddled in the restroom while waiting for the last 200mg of motrin to kick in. It's gotten worse recently. 600mg and I was still in enough pain that I could not effectively function in lab -- a lingering, unnecessary reminder that I've been going through one of the rougher patches in life. That and the fact that it was actually the wrong day for Shark Week, which would make the upcoming Peru trip -- yes the one that's I'd mentioned last year, with the tickets for everything ordered and paid for months ago-- very interesting. (I was considering canceling, last month, but my mother persuaded me not to. Since February this year she's taken a more "as few regrets as possible" approach to life, which she's trying to extend to me, whenever possible. With dubious results.) It's perhaps telling that I have had enough experiences to know what happened and how long it'll take my body to recover. Human bodies are complicated and full of regulatory mechanisms, most of which, thankfully, I do NOT have to know off of the top of my head. (Read: committee meetings. Ugh.)

Dear blogger why won't you let me publish this this is my THIRD TRY

A temporary end to the "BRB off dying" post a while back (yeah a while back, I am aware) as I have just had my committee meeting this afternoon and am going to take a few weekends off before I go insane. In the meantime I would like to announce that:

1) This is the first committee meeting that did NOT end with directions for me to go and edit my slides. (Though of course my PI told me how to improve my slides anyway -- there's no "go edit these or I will not sign your eval" from the other PIs, praised be.)

2) I am scheduled for another meeting at the end of November to  a) serve as progress check and b) set a defense date. DEFENSE DATE.

3) I got more experiments suggested to me, even though I'm supposed to be WRITING NOW and it's supposed to take me around 6 months to put together a manuscript, so I'm not entirely sure how this is going to fall out so OH GOD. (Does this mean it's a pre-defense meeting? I'm not entirely clear. The PI claims that the pre-defense meeting is not an official thing but just a thing to make sure that the student is ready to defense so I guess????)

4) I have apparently started the process of completing my doctorate. Yet somehow I don't feel any smarter than when I started this journey. If anything I feel stupider. I feel like I should write very indignant and cuttingly worded letters to somebody.

5) I want tea and a chocolate cupcake, rather badly.

Have accidentally swept up a harvest spider in the kitchen. Have just accidentally apologized to the spider as it scurried away.

I'm exhausted and there is, fascinatingly enough, aggressively upbeat pop song coming up THROUGH MY KITCHEN FLOOR, from, I believe, the new neighbor that moved in recently. Am rapidly approaching the state of "Why is it still June I HATE EVERYTHING" and reveling in the sheer irrationality of my aimless hatred. Also, Ivy's battery died (as in laptop thinks it's not present and will not charge or withdraw charge from it) and I haven't the faintest idea WHY.

Hey guys,

Still not dead. Recent activities have been pretty hard on my wrist but there's no way to protect it without severely limiting my range of motion, so I've mostly resorted to wrapping it up when I get home, which means that doing stuff outside of work takes a lot longer than usual. Typing is okay except I can't really reach for backspace easily and kept hitting "=" instead and drawing is...interesting but at least I know how to ctr-z like a pro. It's more of an extra support for my wrist at this point than anything else and if my experiment goes well this week hopefully that's all it'll be needed for.

Honestly, the things I do for science.

Found an extra old thing of tea and tried to brew it and found that it's sufficiently aged to go all crumbly and escape from the tea strainer. Ewww. I need an extra fine strainer or possibly cheesecloth for the size of particles. This is what I get for being cheap.

Cleaning the kitchen while making lunch. Making a note of the fact that my parents and I have progressed in our relationship to the point that when they bring food that I don't eat I'm comfortable telling them I probably won't eat it and they'll insist that I just keep it "for now" and if it's still there when they next come they'll pick it up but won't insist that I try it, and because I always feel bad that they brought it all this way I'll keep it, so now I always have this bag of aging snacks sitting in the bottom shelf of the fridge waiting for pick up. It's "love, as demonstrated by food", episode "how to compromise". It's also a mark of where we are that the sight of a bag of food I won't touch makes me feel all fond inside. A little annoyed still, because that's what family inspires in me, but fond.

Hi blog,

I am indeed still alive. Just write a quick note (until I have more time later to write more short posts -- they are all most likely to be short due to time constraints and if I try to make them into one post it'll sound like I have the attention span of a gnat -- which, to be sure, is an accurate representation of how I feel but I swear my long term memory is still functioning) (REALLY) (though I do get more easily distracted these days) (case in point) (what was I saying?) (oh right) to mention that someone passed on a ziplock bag of bread starter to me, which she's named "the Aikido Friendship Bread" (since it's going around the dojo) and I find it helplessly adorable. It's basically Amish friendship bread-- i.e. chain letters, but with baking. I'm on day 2, with the bag mashing, and kind of wish I have more friends around who bakes to pass this on, as I don't think this will mail well.

My presence online will most likely decrease for the reminder of the month because I am a fifth year graduate student being poked with far too many deadlines and one of my cell lines developed an issue with contamination and I am presenting in another symposium in two weeks.