Monday Monday

I’m sitting here procrastinating again. And freezing my ass off. Eighteen is not a temperature for outside. It is a temperature for ice cream, but not for outside. Unfortunately, that horribly low number does not tell half of the story. The wind chill is two. Even ice cream wouldn’t tolerate that.

Had an interesting weekend. Several of us played hooky on Friday afternoon to go to the Baltimore aquarium. It’s extremely cheap on Fridays after 5 pm. Upon exiting the highway, we quickly discovered that we’ve been on the Eastern Shore too long and are not fit for normal society anymore. The traffic was INFURIATING! Here in Cambridge, we have obstacles. Lots of them. While these obstacles are annoying, they are also kind of entertaining. Like a middle-aged man standing in the middle of the road with a garden hose talking to himself (maybe to the hose?). Or a herd of turkeys crossing the street after sharing breakfast with somebody’s chickens. I can handle obstacles. What we experienced in Baltimore was an extremely large number of rude, selfish people with no regard for obvious street signs with messages like “ABSOLUTELY NO STOPPING.” I’ll stop now. Before I have a stroke over it. Anyways, the aquarium was good. Lots of fun fish, and not too many annoying people. We eventually made it to our favorite Thai restaurant in Annapolis. I *heart* noodles. Enough said. The plan was to sleep extremely late on Saturday, then go to work to make up for all that playing hooky. I was not going to be deterred. Then Des woke me up (in her defense, she did not know the plan) to see if I wanted to go to breakfast at 10:30. I growled at her and probably would have killed her, but it was too damn cold to get out of bed. I settled for rolling over and violently yanking the covers over my head. It was too late. I was awake. So I decided to put the rest of the plan into action a little early. I was about to shower and go to the lab when everyone got back from breakfast. One group was going to the yarn store. The other group was going to Salisbury. I was not going to be deterred. But then they offered to stop at the pet store. So I went to Salisbury with J and C.

The new plan was to buy exactly two fish and nothing else. J decided to have her hair colored in the mall. C wanted to run some other errands while we waited, so I was on my own for a while. When I got back to the salon, I was the proud new owner of really expensive jeans (by my standards anyway) and a pair of designer-knock-off sunglasses. J was only just ready to start “processing”, and she convinced me that I should get my hair cut while we waited. So I chopped it all off. That’s always an extremely liberating feeling, but if people don’t stop touching my hair, somebody’s gonna lose an arm. Finally we picked out fish and headed home. They are a pair of dwarf gouramis and have been named Simon and Garfunkel. So far they have expressed very clearly that one of my plants is offensive and will not be tolerated, but they don’t seem to have traumatized my other fish too badly.

On the drive home, we decided that since J and I both had new cute hairdos, we needed to go out (once again, not part of the original plan, but if you’re gonna deviate, do it right). A lot of people are out of town for one reason or another, so it was just a few of us. The usual bar was pretty empty. We played pool and darts and danced and were informed that we were intimidating to the locals.

Sunday, the plan was to go to work, then the grocery store, then home for the Super Bowl. Work was semi-productive and uneventful. When I got to the grocery store, I discovered that they didn’t have any bell peppers, so I went across the street to the other store. They had exactly two half-rotten ones. Once again, INFURIATING. I proceeded with the rest of my shopping while muttering about how much Cambridge sucks for not having a decent grocery store. This was only worsened by the fact that there were two items that I couldn’t get at the second grocery store and had to go back to the first. I finally made it home to find out that what was supposed to be a quiet gathering of the usual Sunday night knitting circle had turned into a full-blown Super Bowl party without the consent of anyone who lives in my house. The infuriation did not wear off. I scowled and knitted violently through the whole game and then went to bed before everyone left. Somebody else can be stuck involuntarily playing hostess for once.

This morning, I got up for my 8:30 class and discovered that there’s no hot water AGAIN. Luckily, by now my give-a-damn is completely shattered, and it’s going to be a completely anti-productive day.

Experiment Update (if anyone’s made it through all of that and is still reading):

I pitched the “in a perfect world where I have everything I want” version of my experiment to my advisor on Friday. He seems to think we can do most, if not all of what I proposed. Now, I know that back in reality maybe only half of what he gets excited about is actually possible, but it’s a start. I also talked to my dad over the weekend. He always gets excited when my work overlaps with his engineering abilities. He had a few suggestions that might just make the difference.