...an exam on Monday, a presentation on Wednesday, and another exam on Friday. This next week will be a clusterfuck, but I'm kind of okay with that, because at least having the dates set means that I can see an end ( Read more... )

I've been formulating entries in my head for days but haven't actually had the time to put them down. Let's see...being in a brand new group sucks a lot of the time, doing classes and teaching and research all at once is horrendous, and I've actually considered seeing a therapist again a couple of times about my anxiety, only to think that I don't ( Read more... )

I'm tired all the time. I'm tired of being tired. This semester needs to be taken out back and shot, and it's less than halfway over ( Read more... )

You start getting spam from chemical supply companies. I got an email today from a guy who's trying to sell me gallium arsenide wafers. I mentioned it to my advisor, and he said, "Oh, is that Chris Baker? You're going to be hearing a lot more from him."

So we have serial GaAs spammers. Excellent.

Okay, so I spent the second half of January and maybe the first week of February worried that grad school was the wrong decision and that I was bad at research. Since then I've been learning more about what I'm doing, and I got my first exciting result last week! So that's the long and short of the past month or so. Busy busy busy, but right now ( Read more... )

Just because you're teaching an upper-level class with mostly chemistry majors doesn't mean that your students know anything about particle-wave duality or that they can tell the difference between a d(xy) and a d(x^2 - y^2) orbital. I'm hoping their lab reports are better, or this will be a long semester.

Stupid: deciding to clean the oven when all of the windows in your apartment are shut due to the fact that it's exactly 0 degrees Fahrenheit outside. I opened the kitchen window, since I figured freezing was preferable to asphyxiation, but it's going to be a bit unpleasant for awhile ( Read more... )

After today, I will be done with going to class for all of my classes and completely done with one of them. I have an exam from 7 to 9 tonight for the class which the boyfriend calls "Deathmarch through the Periodic Table" (he's not in the class, needless to say). It's actually a pretty awesome class, but the exams are frustrating because they're ( Read more... )

Classes are cancelled tomorrow because we're supposed to get 12-16 in. of snow tonight and are on a blizzard warning! Apparently, this is very rare. Yay ( Read more... )

Last night, I had a for-real date (i.e. not just going over to someone's house to hang out/cook/watch a movie) with the boyfriend. He took me to an absurdly nice restaurant, and I had tapas and a ridiculously bright blue cocktail. Today I worked on homework and then went out for dinner and icecream with several other inorganic first-years. And ( Read more... )