Naive......

Some silly part of me thought that after I submitted my thesis and started a job with reduced hours (to start) that my life would fall back into place and I would be able to catch my breath. Wrong. So wrong.

In the last post I mentioned that I started my job the same week I submitted my thesis. With all that excitement happening I thought I should celebrate. So, in true workaholic fashion, I took a single day off. No PhD work. No Zoo work. I spent the day wandering around Wellington, sipping an iced coffee drink, perusing books at the bookstore, picking out a pair of Abstract Design earrings and finding the perfect modern style tea cup and saucer. Yes, after nearly four years we have caved and are exploring the bizarre world of tea drinking. :) I toted all my goodies home and bam! I was hit with a double bug that laid me out for over two weeks. I spent my days and nights coughing, unable to sleep for the pain. In short I was a mess and no matter how much I tried to rest and force fluids I wasn't getting any better. I missed an entire week at the job I had just started and eventually visited student health when I had completely lost my voice. Everything is funnier in retrospect but at the time I wasn't laughing when I had to lean over the reception counter and attempt to whisper that I needed to see a doctor, stat. Thankfully, I didn't have strep or bronchitis but I was still laid out for a few more days. Finally, I decided to go to work even though I wasn't completely well. My supervisor and officemate was also sick so for the next few weeks all you heard from our office was silence punctuated by chest rattling coughs. Bleh.

After my protracted recovery I started preparing for a short contract I had secured on campus: a month's worth of post doc level pay to complete molecular analysis of 43 tissue samples. I was already late on completing this work before I got sick so I was experiencing serious guilt. On top of that I knew how long the process, in its entirety, would take. Working every minute and putting in seriously long days I could've finished everything in three weeks. But that didn't account for the fact that for this type of analysis you need to schedule a machine that other people use as well. Additionally, I was also working three days a week at the zoo. So that meant every minute I wasn't at the zoo I was on campus hogging the qPCR machine and running as many samples as possible. It took about two weeks to finish the first two steps of the process for all samples. Then I proceeded to actually run them in the machine. You can run a single 96 well plate in the machine at a time. It takes about three hours to set up a single plate. Then it runs in the machine for two hours. To ensure non contamination in your samples you need to set up each plate in a laminar flow hood: translate that to sitting at a cabinet that blows cold air on you the entire time. Sigh. The best (ahem, worst) part of all of this is that with the primers I was using I could only set up three samples along with all of their controls on a 96 well plate. Double sigh. With that in mind I had to put my game face on and get to it. I tried to take advantage of the weekends because I could hog the machine as no one else was scheduling it on those days. That meant that instead of working delightfully light hours doing fun work at the zoo I was spend everything other minute on campus trying to finish running my samples. It was like being back in the midst of intensive, never ending lab work I experienced during the program. I thought this kind of schedule was behind me! Finally, at the beginning of December I ran the last of the samples!! I then spent a few more days entering, collating and analyzing the data. With great relief I am so happy to say that the work is behind me!!

So in the weeks since finishing with those samples I've been able to enjoy some time away from both jobs and it has been amazing! Now I need to put my game face back on and prepare for my upcoming defense. It was tentatively set for the end of January but I need to confirm the actual date. It is very difficult to imagine that we are approaching this point in time. Miracles do happen. :)