Why do I do these things?

Yesterday was the honours student's birthday, and I didn't know until I decided to indulge in some Facebooking tonight. Now I feel terrible! We'll have to have a ... what are those thing called? A pinata? I've never seen one before except in weird TV shows... I felt really bad today because a few of his lizards died and he nearly cried.

So anyway today I discovered that the major issue I've been having with my equipment was NOT a hardware fault, but a SOFTWARE problem. I think. so there is hope that I might actually be able to leave, and take all the readings that I need. There is hope!

The masters student also wanted to measure the colours of the paints she's using before I go away (potentially taking the specs with me), so she went off today and bought a ton of different paints. She had tried to go the scientific route and use a paint company that measures their colours that could match it more exactly, but they messed up, so she picked out a whole bunch of colours and then we measured patches of each one and picked out the right colours, or chose which ones to mix and stuff. It was quite fun actually!

So, to get to the actual point of the story, one of the colours was supposed to be a light orange. It turned out to be a super-hectic lumo orange! It practically glows. I was completely in love with it right away (bear in mind, my hair has gone from blue to fire-engine red in less than 2 months, and the last shoes I bought were bright yellow... I like bright colours!) so I decided to make a sign fr the door with it. I ran out of inspiration though and ended up just painting random abstract symbols on a piece of paper (yes, I have two degrees. Your point being?). I also repainted the practice model lizard by adding orange stripes. It looks like he's been outfitted in camo-gear now! with orange eyes and nostrils. He's scary!

So after I'd walked Luke to his car and had enough of fighting with the equipment, and not feeling like playing with the honours student's data yet (I said I'd have a look, because he's totally stuck), so I boiled to kettle for chai tea and then caught sight of the tube of orange paint. If it was a movie there would have been alternating shots of my eyes, the paint, me, paint, me... in quicker and quicker succession. With the music doing a dramatic crescendo.

So while the kettle boiled I found a paintbrush and painted my nails with the bright orange paint.

It was a messy job, but I figured it's just acrylic (or so I thought) and I could just neaten it up with some wet paper towel. When I tried I succeeded in smearing orange paint all over my palms, a lab coat, the sink, my tea-mug my lower arms and possibly my face (no mirror in the lab and the honours students next door were looking at me oddly, but I have no way of figuring out if that was a result of paint on my face, or paint all over the rest of me. It's also pretty much indelible. Whoops.

So I went outside and chatted to the honours students, and they were all stressed out,. so I felt all patch adamsish because they couldn't look at me without giggling. The plus side was that I didn't want to touch my keyboard until the paint was totally dry! I'm just hoping I can soak the orange off when I get home. Whoops. Oh well, live and learn I guess! and it is a VERY funky orange, so maybe if I paint over it with clear nail polish when I get home. Actually I have clear nail polish here, from the skeleton-reconstruction it ended up in my dissecting kit... I'm going to go and do that now!

Fun times!