Today was a picture of how life will be if I continue with research after my masters degree, I think. I was constantly late, with so much to do, remember and think of all the time, that sitting down or eating was completely forgotten. To begin with, I didn't have time for breakfast.
After not eating breakfast I met one of my PBL groups for the first time. 5 very shy girls sat there and expected me to...teach them stuff I guess. Well, I think I got them to understand the concept of PBL, and after a while a very careful/nervous discussion about HeLa cells took place.
Then I ran down to my desk and ate some cornflakes before running to the lab to prepare my samples. That went surprisingly smooth, I even remembered to tape up my ice box to keep it from leaking (some one took my box, so I only have this stupid leaky one).
Then I suddenly had time to prepare the ITC solutions for the 24 h exposure I'm going to run. But when I went the get the plants I was going to use, I discovered that I had 12 plates in stead of 10. Very weird, I've no memory of the two extra plates at all...
I took 10 plates and prepared 8 of them for the ITC exposure, as planned. What to do with the extra two?
I exposed them to high concentrations of ITC.
The whole exposure-business took forever, so I was really late for my appointment with the engineer that's teaching me to use the flow cytometer. I ran with my plants to the growth room, made a mess on the way, tried to clean it up and then ran upstairs to the flow cytometer. As the engineer was even later, I decided I could try starting the flow cytometer myself - for the first time. Of course I got error messages that I've never seen before: carousel error, blue laser power error...
Being very wise, I sat down and waited for the engineer (who told me nothing was wrong after all).
The analysis went okay. Now, dying from hunger I ran down to our lunch room and as the master students were having a cake lunch I managed to get... eh, some cake for lunch. It was now 3 hours since I'd left those poor seedlings with high doses of ITC. - They're dead by now, just throw them out, my supervisor told me, and went on: you're evil Signe, killing plants for fun. -Hehe...
The next sequence of events was me trying to get to a work out class on time, having to talk to a speaker I invited to the BUG seminar in stead, then trying to get dinner, running down to a later work out class, playing Zelda for about an hour and then finally, at 11 pm, beginning to prepare for tomorrows experiment. I guess this is what science-days are like (all days from now on then?). You start trying to teach someone something, then you run around in the lab for a few hours, maybe get some cake for lunch (or no lunch at all) and then end up in all kinds of meetings you had no idea were going to take place.
Luckily, a day can still end with a boyfriend making dinner, a bit of Nintendo Wii, work out and sleep.
Oh, how I love the sleep!
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