Clock gazing

Life is not work. Work is not life. It works both ways ...

It was depressing to see the wall clock yet again at 9pm. If this is going to be my weekly (dear God please, not a DAILY one!) routine, I will have to find new reserves of energy I don't know if I have. More ominous is whether the data i am getting is real and proper or not. Minor quirks here and there can add up to cause a lotta trouble.

Frustration

It is so horribly frustrating to do days of labwork (preparing tens of plates of growth medium and streamlining the worm population), only to realise you forgot something very important ... the frustration was just biting. All the time, materials and effort down the drain. Worse, the fact haunts myself that the $$ I have from the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Technology is TAX-PAYER $$!! ughh ... Getting harder to sleep as the problems mount and worries plague.

And looks like I'll have to miss/cut short my church youth camp (6-8 Dec). I had it all planned out just nice, ending my 1st round of tests right before it ... dreamt of afternoons at Port Dickson beach ... until my own mistakes and lack of foresight tripped me over. I'm backlogged for 2 weeks now ... no way, unless I lend someone car to drive up to KL on Sunday afternoon. Sheesh ... Too bad I don't have much hair to pull out.

Long nights

My eyes were stunned when I looked at the clock on the wall and it showed 9.00pm. I had started at 4pm and had been working non-stop, in spite of my protesting tummy. But 5 hours just to make 48 measly 6-cm plates of agar for my worms to live on? .....

Getting home at 11pm after waiting in the dark for a taxi and enduring the longer intervals between LRT trains isn't exactly fun. Maybe I should have gotten a car after all ... but I don't know if I can find any part time work to finance it (e.g. home tuition), as I don't have the discipline to full-time study AND work part-time!

Arghhh ... I begin to grasp what my fellow researchers told me about
late nights - it's common; some stay till 9pm, others 11pm and still others overnight in the sofa area. And to do this for months on end; ouch ... I want to have a life other than just sitting in front of a Biosafety Cabinet Class IIB, please ...

Tired

It is getting tiring ...

Everyday get up by 6am, rush off to Uni via LRT & taxi at 7am, reach at 8am, work in lab or write-up till 5pm, then back and reach home by 7pm. Soooo tired ... that I have fallen asleep just by lying down on my bed! Did that at around 8pm and then found myself up again at 10.30 ...
Dunno if tired because of the LRT - i take Putra from Kelana to Masjid Jamek, then STAR to Bandar Tun Razak, and then taxi to HUKM - or due to my labwork - media preparation, worm handling.

How to do 2 years like this ...?

Another twist

During my proposal presentation last Friday, I was queried by one of the research fellows about a blind spot I overlooked - since I'm giving bacteria as food to my darling worms, perhaps the tocotrienols I'm supplementing will be eaten up by the bacteria as well? Yeouch ... managed to evade the question. I was hoping it'll slip away ... I had enough parameters to go bonkers over. But over the weekend, it nagged my mind that my co-supervisor was seated next to that research fellow. Then when I met her today, I was hoping she wouldn't say anything...

She did.
"Measure the absorption by the bacteria as well"

Arghhhhh ...
I want to graduate early, can or not ...

By myself

Too bad I can't even afford the cake, much less the flowers ...