While walking to the cafeteria in Children’s Hospital yesterday to grab a quick bite for lunch, I ran into this gizmo wandering down the hall. It appears to be an automated cleaning machine with proximity sensors to navigate the hallways, and a smiley face and colorful headlights to attract small children into its path of destruction. In other news, my brutal lab schedule continues to take its toll on my day-to-day life. Last week, I fell asleep while waiting for a pot of pork stew to cook, and for those of you familiar with this Chinese recipe, you can probably guess what happens to hard-boiled eggs when left on the stove unattended – they explode. When I woke up, I beheld the awesome view of pieces of burnt eggs and pig flying in every direction, with splatters along the kitchen walls and ceiling marking the target of their trajectories. It would’ve been a great addition to Glenn’s Believe-It-Or-Not gallery of camera-phone captures (bomb-squad, ducks, etc.), but I was too busy scrubbing the kitchen and cursing myself to have considered such an idea. Adding to the insult, my garbage disposal also decided to conk out last week, which wasted me a good hour before I figured out how to manually turn the flywheel with an allen wrench and remove this doodad, which I can think of no other word to describe, nor imagine how it came to be inside in the first place. In fact, I’ve been spending so little time at home now compared to lab that when I walked out the back door last week to dump the trash, I walked right into a spider web! Stumbling away from what I was sure would have sealed my doom, I left home wondering if that daddy-long-leg we shot at the week before had other eight-legged-friends in high places (high as in the food chain). Gotta keep my eye out for these bloody entrapments in the meantime…

SUNDAY: Slept in late, made myself a large pot of Thai beef curry for dinner while partaking in the joy of doing taxes…   MONDAY: Dropped off my tax returns in the morning along with two fat checks for that blood-sucking organization, had curry for lunch, left lab at midnight, had more curry for dinner, and wrote QBANK questions for Kaplan until 4 in the morning…   TUESDAY: Got a bag of Glenny’s Soy Chips from my roommate which tasted a bit like cardboard and should not be associated with my name in any way, had curry for lunch, edited some stuff for my PI, left lab at 1:30am, and finished off the night with more curry for dinner…   WEDNESDAY: woke up late but squeezed in some curry for lunch, split 50 plates of cells, did a 24-well AP-binding assay, 6 ligations and transformations, 3 maxipreps, 2 minipreps, and dissected DRGs from a chick embryo in a pear tree, left lab at 4:30am and had my last bowl of curry for the week…   THURSDAY: had lunch with Bob who just passed his PQE, had dinner with Jeff who just completed his HST thesis defense, and on the way caught some ducks crossing the road with my camera-phone, left work at 11pm, and tried to shoot down a daddy-long-leg in the apartment, but without success…   FRIDAY: Too early to tell, but the annual MD-PhD revisit weekend guarantees a delicious course of fancy catering, live jazz, welcome speeches, name tags, and smug-sounding roundtable schmoozing, Schmaaaarvard-style … Bon appetit!

Forget my last post. Check out my more recent work hours:

Fri    04/02   11:00am – 03:00am
Sat    04/03   09:00pm – 06:00am
Sun    04/04   07:30pm – 04:30am
Mon    04/05   02:00pm – 03:00am
Tue    04/06   12:00pm – 06:00am

It’s funny looking back at the last sentence of my post from 03/04. I should’ve been more careful of what I wish for. Now if there were only a Lab Ironman competition…