Time for the big finish

Well call me a wizard because not only did I somehow manage to get everything done yesterday that NEEDED to happen, I also somehow managed to make more work for myself. Yeah, the universe hates it when I’m productive apparently. I’m tipping the balance and that’s never a good thing. But seriously, I now have more work to do and a lot of it is due tomorrow. Don’t worry, I’ll explain. Later I’ll probably cry about it too. (not serious) (super serious)

First let me just say, damn it. Yesterday was the second major deadline I had and it went about as smoothly as a hurricane. I did the work, don’t get me wrong. I somehow managed to finish the statistics project I had to finish and made the slides for the class. It was a grueling late night task, but I did it. I would say it feels great, but honestly it feels exhausting. I’m at the point where I added a few things to my to-do list for today and entered the same thing three times because I couldn’t focus. I wish I were kidding. Needless to say you cannot run at 100% all day everyday for very long before other things start going out.

Tomorrow I have the presentation for the statistics class that we all need to do so that should be fun, but on the bright side all the hard work was done and tomorrow should be a comparatively relaxing three hours on a Friday night (seriously, this class was not only awful, it was from 4-7 every Friday) assuming I don’t fall asleep. Still, it’s nice to be done with the major stuff for that class. If I had nothing else due tomorrow I would be celebrating right now, but there’s no time for that since there’s work to be done.

In fact, I was reminded that I had more work to do than I had originally thought! Let me set the stage, yesterday I get an email reminding me that I need to submit my talk and what not to the BRAIN meeting I was awarded a slot for (here). My four minute talk is due tomorrow along with the slide I use for the talk, no problem I’m already working on it. Except upon closer inspection I realize this is a different conference altogether with an incredibly similar name.

Yeah. I’m in trouble.

So realizing that this is due tomorrow (on top of all the other stuff) I reach out to my PI to confirm that I need to submit to this conference. These are the people who funded me for the experiment I did, the one I wasn’t thrilled about doing in the first place (here). Well it turns out that, yes of course I need to submit to this conference and not only that, my main-PI just emailed me (as in as I’m writing these words) letting me know that I now have a surprise meeting with him in less than 5 minutes. Good news? Bad news? Probably bad news, he wouldn’t be meeting with me otherwise. I wonder what I screwed up… Well stay tuned for the exciting conclusion in the next paragraph.

A short time later…

Well that could’ve went better, but it could’ve been worse too I guess. Since I have a new list of things to get done in the next few hours, I’ll keep this short. Basically I have some modifications to make to my slide and talk. Things that need to be addressed before I can record the presentation. This means getting some data processed again in a different way to get the information he’s asking for. With any luck the software (EEGLAB) will have what he wants without me having to do anything fancy. I have yet to be lucky, but hey maybe this time will be different.

For everyone playing at home, I have today and tomorrow to get the work done, but that’s work that would normally take me at least a week to do. If I wasn’t stressed out enough, like it or not after tomorrow I will be done with all this. I got some news which will need my attention afterwards, but for now I plan on taking a break after all this.

Although, I’m not exactly sure when I will get that break since I have some new things to do after this. Funny how that works, right?