IT WORKED

It actually worked. Those experiments that I've been killing myself over for that talk? They actually worked, and produced results that are coming together to be a really cool story.

Experiments had been going really quite well all along - I'd say a far higher success rate than the average set of experiments, but based on one passing comment I'd seen in a paper I had reason to thing that something was majorly wrong with the numbers I was getting, and that based on that my spectra would be meaningless. Yesterday my labmate helped me submit a calculation that would either support my measurements or send me further into clueless oblivion. I got an email last night saying the calculation was done, but we'd used my labmate's computing account since I haven't used mine in so long that I have no idea how to get into it, so I had to wait til this morning for him to fish the results out for me.

And holy crap. The computational result actually matched incredibly well with my measurements. Meaning I didn't royally muck up my experiments or kill myself all week for naught (well, in a no-good-data sort of way anyways), and all my data makes beauuuutiful sense given the context provided that by that calculation. Hooray!!!

There's one spectrum that I'd reeeeeeally still like to have, but I can live without it for tomorrow at least. Now I just have to get all these spectra into my half made (well, as of this morning, currently it's not missing much besides spectra) talk, and get it to flow right, and figure out what points I need to make on each slide.

So one huge hurdle down. I have data, and data that will make a good story. That in and of itself is a huge accomplishment. Now to finish assembling my presentation, get some sleep, practice it some more, and cross my fingers that I win. It's probably incredibly shallow and arrogant of me to say, but I'm going to be really disappointed, and maybe even a bit angry if/when I don't win. All the ridiculousness leading up to this would just make it all the more frustrating. And knowing that I have AWESOME data would make it even harder to swallow.

Ok, back to powerpoint-ing. I WILL be in bed by midnight.