Friday, September 01, 2006

I wish I could think of a better title than 'second post!'

I should feel like a loser because I'm sitting typing this on a friday night instead of running around like a maniac with my friends. It is spring Day after all. Although in general it's been a pretty lousy day in terms of Spring-dayness.

Firstly I had to leave the house early this morning to go and breathe in some more noxious chemicals for my experiments. I got in later than I'd planned becasue it was freezing this morning and my bed was just too darn comfortable. Plus if I lie in bed and wait to hear my dad getting up I don't have to wake up all the animals (which is unpleasant because they're all full of energy and I'm not).

So I rushed in to wits and had just enough time to wipe all the tiles with alcohol before I had to run off and meet Linda for coffee. It was nice, although I was a bit worried because lately I had to give up coffee because it made me pass out a lot and combined with all the chemicals it's generally not a good idea. But it was nice to talk to Linda again, and coffee is the non-glue that binds us together. aLthough without Claire it's always a bit wrong to have coffee together. Claire is my friend who was studying Microbiology but she deregistered and now is very happy looking for microbes in consumables before they make the finished product.

Then I went and finished setting up my experiments for tonight. It's a bit annoying because one of the cameras broke literally the day after it was installed, so now my experiments have to be staggered around the available cameras. Which means a lot more work for me.

After all the animal feeding I had to contend with handing out essays to mark which caused some anger when people wanted to know why they got all the stupid/longwinded/annoying people. Which makes me worried about the class when 4 people, each marking 8 essays all think they got the stupid people. Once I'd done that I had a Twilight moment with my supervisor again. It happens regularly. I also got some letters of recommendation from the head of school so I can apply to get scholarships to study overseas next year. I made the stupid mistake of opening one of them. It was... for lack of a better word... glowing. It was all about how fantastic I am, which is great, but it also said he has no doubt I'm better than a masters student and when I get an A for my honours he'll push me to go straight to PhD. NO PRESSURE! Part of me is petrified, but part of me also couldn't stop smiling.

I had a meeting after lunch to plan for the Yebo Gogga exhibition we have every year (http://www.wits.ac.za/yebo if you're interested). It's a lot of fun, but I'm so swamped this year I thought I'd be in the committee to bolster my rather pathetic volunteer work/not studying stuff for my scholarship. So I decided to just sit there and not volunteer to do anything. But somehow I got sucked into the enthusiasm and wound up volunteering to do a whole bunch of stuff.

We were planning to go to the Biosoc Spring Day party, but we got back from the meeting to find out that Biosoc had not only run out of alcohol, but they had no intention of buying any more. I really don't like the new committee, the old people were always running off and coming back with crates of stuff. So my friend Luke and his cousin Duncan and their friend David and I all went off and got cocktails and nachos. And then I came home. The sad part is that I'm exhausted. The sadder part is that all I could think of on my way home is the realisation I had at 4am today that I must redo my stats looking for interactions between my dependent variables, because out of the 20-odd dependent variables, a whole lot of them are related. So I may actually get something significant!

When I got home I found a package on my bed. It's a statue of St Francis that my mom's friend decided to give to me because I like animals. It's hideous. I'll post a picture at some stage. It also came witha long letter all about it. I'll spare you the details, but I'll copy the beginning out because it made me laugh.

"On 12 July 1985 our wanderings brought us to Barcelos in Portugal - famous for the original "flamed" chicken - and the origin of all the red cocks one sees everywhere in the country."
For some reason I thought it said "all the real cocks" so I laughed.


I'm actually so tired I feel sick. Which is bad, because last time I felt like this I ended up in bed for 3 days with a stomach bug. So I'm going to go have some soup and go to bed. The restorative powers of soup really are amazing! At least they'd better be, I have to go breathe in more chemicals first thing in the morning.

This is a picture I took one evening while I was 'helping' Luke and Brian with their fieldwork. I love it because a) it's pretty and b) I laugh when I see it because I remember how we'd always stop and take sunset photos at EXACTLY the same spot every evening. And the one night we stopped about 5 times in the space of 2 minutes to take sunset shots because we were running late and missed the sunset at the usual place. I wound up nearly killing myself in the long grass to get to the right spot by the tree. Then I proceeded to take about 20 pictures of it. I have close tree, far tree, centred tree, tree on the left, tree on the right, and several fuzzy tree shots. I like the tree on the right. Hence the photo.

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