What the F*$@!

Here's how my day has gone so far:

4 AM - Wake up, am unable to go back to sleep
6 AM - I finally give in and get up and take a shower since sleep is impossible
7 AM - Get to the office. On the plus side, I got a great parking space
11 AM - Meet with Karen Wishner (committee head). Realize I need to add at least one more graph to my thesis
12 PM - Call my dad in Cooperstown. Find out that my Mom is upset because I have not officially asked if I can live with them in Huntsville. Apparently she's upset that I"m just taking it for granted. Really? Mike's lived with Mom and Dad at BOTH houses, Mom knows I'm super stressed about money, and she knows how incredibly stressful and up in the air everything has been lately. I asked if I could stay in Cooperstown, but apparently was not supposed to assume that I could stay in Huntsville. Now I need to call my Mom and strategically ask her if I can stay, without her knowing that Dad tipped me off.
1:15 PM - Randomly walk by the -80 C freezer on the way to the bathroom and discover that the freezer was accidentally turned off and that all the samples are completely thawed out or on their way to being thawed out. Alert rest of lab. Call other lab members and move samples to other freezer. Words cannot describe how relieved I am that 1) I have nothing in the freezers and 2) there is absolutely no way this is my fault.
1:45 PM - Return to computer to work on thesis, only to find that the computer has completely frozen up and will need to be shut down and restarted.
NOW - Going home to throw a few more things in the suitcase, then it's off to the airport, and then Milwaukee. Considering how my day has gone so far, I'm expecting delays......

Breaking the 6-week Silence

Hey gang (or, you know, Caitlin, who's probably the only person left who checks this). Sorry for the lack of posts for the last 6 weeks. Life has been very busy and stressful, and many things have changed. To sum up: I am now defending in late September. My lease is up in late August, so I'll probably drive to Cooperstown and then drive back to RI about a week and a half before the defense to practice and make any last minute changes. I"m hoping to get the actual presentation done in August before I go. I've visited Cooperstown a couple of times (in fact I just got back from there) and that's been good and helpful with keeping my sanity. It's always nice to see family, and no one talks about science stuff in Cooperstown, and I can do laundry for free, and someone else cooks nice, wholesome dinners. Mmmmm.....

What else? I sent off another draft of my thesis to Brad (he's reviewing it today). With any luck, maybe I can finish/make all my revisions before I go to Milwaukee on Wednesday afternoon? Maybe...I'm hopeful, but also realistic to know that that will only work if I have a few minor corrections to make. Also, I think I lost my memory stick. Which isn't the end of the world, I can still recover my thesis from the email I sent, and I have most of the data worksheets saved to my computer, but I may have lost some odds and ends I"ll have to do over....Hmm....nothing much else going on. The last 6 weeks has pretty much been dominated by my thesis. Probably why it never occurred to me to update my blog. Same shit, different day kinda thing. Anyways, I"m really looking forward to the Milwaukee trip, and then I'm dogsitting when I get back, fixing thesis stuff, moving out of my apt and writing my defense presentation. So I will be a busy girl. But I'll try to update more often, if anything interesting is going on.