I was all by myself

For those who have never been here, my desk is in a “pod.” The pod consists of one large room that is divided by desks with large cabinets so that each of the six graduate students in the pod has a relatively enclosed area. Into this large room, open the doors of three professors’ offices. And if the professors are in, the doors are open. So basically there are six of us who sit around and watch each other work and three who have doors to block the rest of us out (and themselves in) but do not choose to use them. Normally, there are strict (but unspoken) rules about being quiet, but today I am all alone. I am the only one of the nine people who share this pod who is not on a cruise, catching up on lab work, or rehearsing for a musical today. And it’s a good thing too. I took the test from hell this morning, and as a reward for not dying in the middle of it as I considered doing after reading the first question, I planned a day of relaxed study for comps, punctuated frequently by blog reading, talking to Dorian, and other unauthorized internet activity. So when I ran out of new blogs to read, I started reading the archives of the knitting blog that I like (your grandma jokes have no effect on me!). Dorian will attest that what I read was not all that funny, but it made me laugh uncontrollably for several minutes with tears streaming down my face. So what was my point? 1.) It’s a really good thing I’m all alone today because 2.) my mind is obviously so addled from this morning’s grilling about the nitrogen cycle that I should go home immediately.

But not until I finish this post.

I will press on because this weekend was the National Outdoor Show, and that deserves my attention. I gave a tour of the lab to a bunch of muskrat skinners from Louisiana on Friday afternoon. Pretty sure they taught me a lot more about Louisianan (?) wetlands than I taught them about the ones in Maryland, but you can’t win them all. Quite an interesting bunch those muskrat skinners. So Saturday when I should have been studying for the afore mentioned grilling, I was instead cleaning my house from top to bottom, cooking dinner for a bunch of people that I did not invite to my house, and going to see the skinning. I’d be a lot more bitter about all that, but I ended up having a really good time. Of course there was some betting. I lost miserably in the women’s division, but my pick beat the rest of the field by at least 10 seconds in the men’s contest. Yesterday my study efforts were once again thwarted by snow. The flakes were the biggest I’ve ever seen. Now I know you’re thinking “Maggie, how many snowflakes have you actually seen?” And that’s a great argument, but the Alaskans, and Canadians, and Minnesotans are backing me up on this. They were HUGE. I couldn’t look away.