Bad to worse

December 7^th, 2004... a day that will live in suckage...

Yeah, it's been a pretty naff week. Tuesday was, as you've gathered, particularly bad. I drove out to the Coastal Studies Lab to collect some mud shrimp. The waves were considerably higher than I expected, and the tide was high. I spent a couple of hours getting wet and messy and ended up with one small mud shrimp to show for it. Well, one and a half, really, but the half wasn't of much use to me. And that one shrimp didn't manage to make it through the night.

Then, I worked on an ascidian experiment. My student Anna and I went though about ten animals trying to get some eggs and sperm, but they were all pretty much spawned out. That was very depressing, because the species we're working on isn't available year round, and those were the last animals of the season. And we didn't get all the experiments done that we wanted to do. They're not even hard experiments -- but there are just so many other things to do that we didn't get them done in time. Yes, this means that I'm probably going to have to wait nine months or so for the next opportunity to do finish the experiments. Crap.

Even the one thing that was nominally good news was a double edged sword at best. I got a letter in the post from our Office of Sponsored Research informing me that I have been given the opportunity to submit a grant proposal for the NSF's major equipment grant program. This program only accepts a small number of proposals (three, I think) from each institution, so there's an advance selection process to pick which get sent forward. I am trying to get our department a confocal microscope. The downside to all of this is that it means I now have two grant proposals due in January with the deadlines a fairly short period apart from each other. In short, I've been told, "Yes, Zen, please go ahead and do even more work from now until when classes start again in January."

And I was still trying to track down money that people are owed from August.

And there were a few other things. I just generally felt like I sucked on Tuesday.

I'm not sure that getting into the car at 4:00 a.m. this morning to put my S.O. on a plane back to Canada for Christmas is entirely an upbeat development, either. Stupid early flight.