To Do. NOW.

I've been rather frustrated and overwhelmed at work the past few days. Coming back from the holidays is always hard enough, but coming back and realizing you have a massive amount of mostly unpleasant work to do just sucks any will I have to get out of bed and go to work right down the drain. Actually, I've been ridiculously tired lately, but I'm not sure if it's because I've spent the past two days on my knees in the lab rearranging turbo pumps, an actual aversion to going to work, or something else.

At the moment the "pile" (partially figurative and partially literal) consists of:

• My labmate's oral proposal that she asked me to read/edit/critique - The request was of course accompanied by the appropriate "I value and trust your opinion the most" sort of flattery.
• A lengthy and dense paper to help my advisor review
• My own paper to rework and submit
• Analyze a large set of data - all the data has been worked up and plotted, but now I have to figure out what to do with it and what it means
• Experiments (unrelated to the above data set of course) for an abstract that's due in 4 weeks
• Come up with some snazzy, exciting new data for my advisor to send NSF (they've asked for something exciting to help convince the powers that be to keep this particular funding program) and use in a talk she's giving in 2 weeks
• Figure out what's wrong with my instrument's vacuum system and fix it

That last one is why I've been on my knees in the lab for the past two days. This morning the labmate that's been working with me was unavailable, so I went to see who else from my group was around, and go figure, the only labmates I could find were the pregnant ones. In other words, the ones that probably shouldn't be on the floor manipulating 15 lb turbo pumps. "Fortunately" I don't technically need this instrument for any of the items on the above list, however a couple of my labmates need it pretty badly. And the "joy" of being a senior student is being the most qualified to put out fires...

Back to instrument trouble shooting...