A whole pile of work

Why does everything happen at once? I mean you’re minding your own business and bam, suddenly you have a million things to get done. One minute you’re on top of things, the next you don’t know how you’re going to get it all done. I’m somewhere in the middle of all that right now. I’ve managed to get most/all the things I needed to get done, but not without some new things popping up.

First let’s get the good stuff out of the way. Data processed, we found differences, things are looking up for my super secret technique and my Co-PI is slowly starting to get on board with the idea. In fact, he’s proposed our next exploratory experiment to further test this technique, essentially to see if it’s useful or not in a particular use case. We’re a neuromodulation lab, but that doesn’t mean we don’t also develop tools for different uses and this could be one of those tools if it works in that way.

I’ve also got a different set of experiments that I’m “required” to get done. My original source of funding was dependant on getting these experiments done and when COVID hit they had to take a back seat. We started doing them again, but part of the equipment broke and I didn’t have a spare. Thankfully I got the spare, which was far more work than I had expected.

Now, we’re back on track and we have 4 people of the 5 needed for the study, so that is handy and we’ve eliminated the MRI/fMRI portion of the study due to COVID which I’m thankful for because I would’ve been left to process that data and I would never use that skill ever again so I really didn’t want to spend the time learning how to do it. I’m not sure if that makes me a bad student, but I honestly didn’t see the point in learning it when I would never use it. If I was going to do a lot of MRI studies, then sure why not, but I have so much other stuff I want to learn that I will use it just seemed like a waste.

Unfortunately that brings us to the bad stuff…. the water in my home for example. Sure it could’ve been worse, but it could’ve been better too. I’ve managed to carve out some time to call an engineer in to look at the foundation and tell me what needs to happen next to keep it from happening again. It all sounds very expensive on paper, but thankfully the estimate is free and the work shouldn’t be too bad assuming the foundation is in good shape, but I have no reason to believe it isn’t. I mean I’m an engineer, but not that kind of engineer, so that’s best guess until they can inspect it.

I’ve gotten pressure from my main PI to finish my rough draft for my grant proposal. It’s been a work in progress and it’s rough, really rough. We did a thing that I personally hate, but he loves. We reviewed my proposal in real-time with the rest of the lab, as in editing in real-time. It’s not fun and you forget how to spell and type suddenly, or at least I do. The worst part was it wasn’t ready, I had barely finished the other proposal and sent it off before the water in my home happened so there just wasn’t time to do the writing. Today I’m planning on spending a significant amount of time on it, but that could change considering all the stuff that’s happened recently.

Takeaway from today’s post, the best laid plans of mice and men… with that, it’s back to work I go!