Yay (and the same old)!

I just visited Danielle and she just planned a vacation! ME TOO! Actually, I feel like I have my whole summer planned out already. June brings the end of my roommate's parents' visit from Germany, a conference in the area, my brother in town for a week (and his new girlfriend for half of that!), a bachelorette party, a beer fest with the entire family (my family is a little crazy), a friend coming in from the West Coast for a week and then a friend's wedding at the end of the week (for which this West Coast friend is coming as well). WOW!

July is pretty quiet, actually. That will apparently be when I do all of the research I need to do this summer.

August brings a week long course in MONTANA. I am a wee-bit excited to see Montana. Not sure why, except that I expect it to be BEAUTIFUL (as long as the forest fires are kept to a minimum with all their smoke). THEN, because I will be half way across the country anyway, I am going to visit my brother on the West Coast and probably the friend mentioned above as well. At the conference in June there are a couple of researchers who are from Oregon near my brother, so if I like what they do, I may even start the job search while I am out there. My brother said if I were to end up out there, he knows a place where I could get a deal on a room (i.e. his house).

PHEW. Then my advisor still sucks. But that's old news and I managed to get rid of the headache (with a few advil halfway through the day) and it has yet to come back {knock on wood}. So we won't talk about the day to day developments about how she sucks. I was ACTUALLY trying to come up with good things about her today to feel better about life in grad school and had a few and then she managed to f*&% it up by telling me it is MY responsibility to figure out who will cover the animal facility over the HOLIDAY weekend when they shut down the power because SHE will be out of town. IT'S NOT MY LAB. I AM NOT LAB MANAGER. Okay...on to better things.

Good news! My experiments that were sucking for the last month are TOTALLY going to work. I have tried two different mixes for the flourescent part of the experiment and it worked. On the first try. With no optimization! Now I have been going back and forth with the company to get a replacement and they keep trying to figure out how to blame their product not working on me. Admittedly, sometimes a user is dumb. I have tried a billion things in the last month and consulted at least 5 people who run similar experiments and NOTHING WORKED. I finally told the woman on the phone that it does not work. That I have tried a million things (I may have exaggerated with the billion things) for a month to no avail and I just wanted her to replace the reagent. Period. I am beginning to take my horoscope to heart.

I am going to use my force to finish grad school now.
...and go pack for a weekend in New York!

P.S. Did anyone else notice that new rating thing at the bottom of each post on blogspot???