A case of the Monday's

Today is Monday and I have a serious case of the Monday's. I have no desire to do any of the million things on my to do list, hence the writing of this at the moment. Oh well I mean it will all work itself out, but let's just say that I am going to be in real trouble if I don't get a move on. I am using this post as a reward for doing good work so far today but there is still more to do.

My big defense is in three weeks and one day... 22 days. I mean that is enough to get my heart rate up. I still have two chapters to start and 6 chapters to finish up. I am not sure how this is going to all get finished but I am going to give it my best. I currently have 4 chapters 95% done, 2 chapters 90%, and the other 2 chapters don't really have word documents yet... ooops. I think one will be hard, chapter 5, and the introduction will be slightly easier.. maybe. This is an adventure, I remember long ago I thought that I would be able to relax the last few weeks and sail through the end. That was a bald faced lie I told myself, I remember someone laughing when I told them my idea. I now see why that happened, at least I am somewhat honest with myself.

Well off to work on my introduction... gotta love what is going on around here. I love ion channels (more about this great passion of mine at a later date).

H

PS. graduate school is not for the weak

References...

Another long day in the office today working on my dissertation. Some parts are relatively easy, the part where you write down your thoughts, that is easy. Supporting your thoughts with references, that is f-ing hard. I have spent the last hour maybe even two trying to support these wild claims that my boss is making. Now let's be clear, I did it. I found the papers that I wasn't even sure existed. You would think there is a good way to go about doing this, but you would be wrong. To find a reference you go to this site called pubmed and put in search terms (think Google but for super nerds) and then you sort through the many different references it gives you for the one you need. Occasionally you get lucky and it is one of the early ones OR you get even luckier in that you can find where someone else has cited it and just use their hard work. But no matter what it seems a little silly that my cool 30 references has to be closer to 50 and I still have many left to find.... AHHHH I hate finding references.

Oh well, at least now that I have them I can just look in my folders to find them. There are few things that make me real irritated but this has got to be one of them. It might just be that I am looking for references about things I don't know if I believe. Oh well this is just part of grad school... the part where you do what your boss tells you. I cannot wait to be the boss to just tell my student what I heard today 'yeah I have no idea if that paper exists but I am sure you will find it'. Seriously, that was the entire lead in I had. What a chump... well my boss is pretty cool but in this moment I want to put legos in his shoes... That is right I am using Legos as a threat.

Well back to the references... they won't find themselves.

H

Weevils in my flour…

You know that moment when you are tired and decide the best thing to do is to knock something irrelevant but yet still very important off your to-do list and it all goes to pot? Well let me tell you about the weevils I just found. I got home from work at 9 on a Friday night and decided that I just had to bake the banana muffins (this had to happen soon or the bananas would have rotted on the banana hanger). So I start mixing away and all is going according to plan. THEN, I get out the flour to measure up 3 cups to finish the whole process. Yes, that is correct I did NOT measure everything out first and then mix I just went for it. At the top of my sealed plastic container was a little nugget… upon further analysis I realized it was a LIVE bug. This live bug crawled around in my hand, and that is how I found out it was alive. In hysterics I called my mom and wanted to know what was going on. My sweet mother, after having a little snicker about my terror, told me to heat the flour to 200ºC and the bugs will crawl out. I will admit I was more keen to just toss everything and move on. My mom suggested that I just blend up some oats and make oat flour. I have no idea how these are going to turn out, I really hope they are delish seeing as that is what I am having for dinner.

Things I learned in this adventure…

-Weevils are nasty little things.

-Always call mom when cooking goes awry because she might have a way to fix it.

-A sealed container does NOT keep the weevils away.

-You can blend up oats to make oat flour, in hindsight this should have been relatively obvious but you can’t know everything.

-Sometimes you have to know when to throw in the towel.

I’ll let you know how these super oatey muffins turn out, they are pretty good. I mean I am not going to toss them but I am undecided about making these again with only oat flour.

Hannah