One Day Experiment

So I've mentioned considering switching my schedule to night shift, just for the next few weeks until the conference at the beginning of June. I'd been thinking arrive at work early-mid afternoon, and work til maybe 2 or 3 am, so I'd still have some face-time with people, and be in bed well before sunrise. There would be a lot of benefits and disadvantages, and since I like (ok, love) lists, we'll consider these in list form. :)

Pros to working some form of night shift:

• Pretty much as much instrument time as I want (more than I could actually use due to time necessary for data analysis)
• More uninterrupted work time (i.e. fewer people asking me to fix their problems)

Cons to working night shift:

• I am most definitely not a late-night person.
• I'd pretty much never eat fresh-made dinner.
• Miscellaneous daytime stuff that requires me to be at school early-ish. Starting with group meeting at noon on Wednesdays. Then add in all the random one-time things.
• Half the fun of grad school is the socializing
• Harder to interact with other people that I actually need/want to interact with, especially my collaborator who is now on the east coast.

I decided to give this a try this week and see how it went. So yesterday I slept in a little (til 8), figuring I'd take my time, go for a run, and be at school around noon. Well, Day 1, and I already knew this isn't going to work, at least for the summer.

I didn't think about the fact that by mid-morning, it's already too hot out to run outside. I HATE running indoors/on a treadmill, and I just don't get as good a workout with other (indoor) forms of cardio. By this time of year in Tucson, you really have to run before about 8 or a bit after dark. But if I'm working nights, I'd still be at work at 9 or 10 pm when it's cool enough to run outside again. And I'm not ok with running at 2 am.

Also, when I get up early to run (6 or 7...or sometimes earlier at the absolute hottest part of the year), I'm not hungry yet and can run without eating breakfast no problem. However...by 8 or 9 I'm hungry. And as I found out this morning, I do not have the energy to work out on that empty of a stomach. And eating shortly before running leaves usually makes me feel sick. Especially anything with milk. Ick.

Working out is not something I'm willing to give up, or relegate to once/week. I don't have a body type that allows me to maintain my weight without a fair amount of effort, I love good food too much to "diet," and I aside from appearances/weight, I feel better when I work out fairly regularly. So, since giving up working out is not an option, I'm gonna go head and consider this experiment a FAIL.

Mint Julep

In honor of the Kentucky Derby Saturday I made these Mint Julep Cupcakes.


Man were they GREEN. If I'd been willing to spend more on the liqueur and had more time I would have searched for non-green creme de menthe, because green cupcakes just seem gross to me. At least they stayed green green rather than turning that brown-ish green upon baking.


The only thing I did differently from the recipe was to brush bourbon on top of the cakes after they cooled. Unfortunately, it wasn't actually enough to be able to taste it. I really don't care for bourbon, but I did want them to taste like they weren't straight up mint cupcakes.

Update - I brushed the spares that I didn't take to the Derby Party with a second coat of bourbon, and now you can taste the bourbon, and most definitely smell the bourbon. Unfortunately this means that I now think they're gross, but I don't like bourbon. They were well received at the party Saturday, and my labmate still thinks they're good with the extra bourbon. The extra brushing if booze did eventually make them a little soggy, so if I make these again I'd probably add just a little bit of bourbon to the frosting rather than the second brushing on the cake.

But they sure are pretty. :)

Flour

I am documenting the fact that after today's grocery store outing, I currently have 25 lbs of flour in my kitchen. Much of it is being stored in the freezer. I'm quite curious to see how long it lasts.

Anticlimactic

So I managed to get the talk done, and it went fairly well. When I finished it felt like it had been only about 10 minutes, when in reality it had been at least 20.

While all the talks were really good (there's usually at least 1 obvious "dud") - the deciding committee copped out big time, deciding that my classmate who won last year and I would be "co-winners," while my two labmates who also presented would be "co-runners up." What nonsense. At least I got some money out of it I guess - although I'm pretty sure we're going to have to split the prize. It's hard to imagine there being any extra money around now. It's still enough money to buy my sister a plane ticket out here. Since Dad has yet to send her out here, even though the she's-not-old-enough-to-fly-by-herself excuse is long gone, I'm thinking I'm just going to buy the ticket and tell Dad she needs a ride to/from the airport whichever days it is.

The other upside is I'm in great shape for my talk at the conference in June. There's always more work to be done, and I'm sure I'll be working hard up until my flight leaves Tucson, but at least I don't have to worry about it. Don't tell my advisor, but I'm pretty sure I'd be just fine giving my talk over the data I have now. There's certainly more information to pull out of the data I collected in the past week than what made it into my talk.

The Queen said she mentioned to another faculty member that all my data was from the past week and s/he replied that s/he couldn't tell at all, so that's good. While I'm glad it wasn't obvious, I really, really wish The Queen wouldn't tell people stuff like that. I feel like it doesn't look good. She's got a really big mouth.

After a couple beers with some friends, I had a glass of wine and spent some quality time with my couch. It's been sorely neglected lately. And now, I'm off to bed - I'm sure my bed has missed me as much as I've missed it.

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.

Uncomfortable.

So the news outlets (understandably so) aren't talking about anything except the death of Osama bin Laden. It's huge that he's dead, and while it's impossible to know what will happen now, hopefully it'll be a huge blow to al Qaeda and a step towards a less violent world.

I understand that he was a horrible, horrible man. Really. I get it. It really isn't possible to comprehend fully the suffering that he has directly or indirectly caused countless people. But at the same time, the rejoicing at his death bothers me. I wouldn't say I'm sorry that he's dead, but it makes me really, really uncomfortable that the collective reaction to a man's death is joy.

Quote of the Day

"A gypsy told me I was gonna marry a guy at least 8 years older than me." ~ Little Sister (duh), in justifying her admiration of Prince Harry