Confession

I'm working late tonight. We're finally tackling this (hopefully little) side project that the Queen has been pestering us about for over 2 years now. It could be interesting, but has just never been deemed important enough when we always have so many other experiments that just seem more urgent. We figured now was as good a time as any to devote a couple of days to it, run experiments like crazy, and hopefully be done with it. This is probably wishful and delusional thinking on our part, but that's the goal.

Anyways, doing these experiments means that we vented this morning to modify the instrument. So the afternoon was spent twiddling my thumbs (I may or may not have watched last week's episode of The Bachelorette on Hulu...Confession #1) while the instrument pumped down and the MCPs conditioned. Eventually I left to hit the gym (can't look like a whale in everybody's wedding photos) and have some supper. My labmate stayed to make sure everything works ok and tune the instrument. Everything checked out, so I'm back running at least one sample, hopefully two tonight. We'd rather get the instrument back to its "normal" configuration sooner rather than later, so it's going to be an intense couple of days of running constantly.

Since I don't have family out here working late isn't all that terrible. Sometimes it sucks - many nights I'd certainly rather being hanging out on the couch with my roommate(s) or doing something with friends, but working late definitely has its advantages. One HUGE plus being that hardly anybody else is here, so people aren't pestering me to fix this, help them with that, proofread this, or just talking at me. Don't get me wrong, the random chatting and nonsense that goes on at school during the day is quite possibly the best/most fun part of grad school, but it certainly doesn't help productivity. I think I enjoy the nobody-else-here-to-pester me more as I become a more "senior" student. (Although I think my grad school career has been somewhat warped in that respect - I swear somehow I became a "senior student" sometime around the beginning/middle of my second year. Definitely before my time.)

I think my favorite part of working late though - is that since I'm alone in the lab, I can blast whatever music I want and sing at the top of my lungs if I want. At the moment I happen to be singing along to the mash up of It's My Life and Confessions from Glee. Don't judge.