A Week in the Life of a Ph.D. Student

so, it's been almost a week since my last post. here's what i've been up to.

every (weekday) morning during the sci-fi channel rerun of Passions i work out on the elliptical machine and sometimes the weight machines, too, over in our little gym thingy by the pool. i am very proud of myself for this, since i've been super lazy for quite a while. then i shower, have some breakfast (not eating is not an option), and finally i turn to the day's work around 10 am. i've decided that early mornings are me time.

the department is footing the bill for my supplies this summer, and they use a totally different purchasing system than the one i learned last summer for the sea lab. so i had to get different purchase orders from our dept secretary, who has really been a huge help to me. then she had to give me a bunch of numbers (account #, tax exempt #, etc) that i needed to buy stuff from lowe's. apparently, the university's purchasing system has changed recently, so buying things has become a big pain in the ass. i had no trouble at lowe's or ordering materials from aquatic ecosystems, but fisher scientific was a different story. the university does have an account with them, but the department of marine sciences is not listed specifically, so i spent half an hour finding all this out before realizing that i wouldn't be able to do anything with it. so i left it to our lovely secretary. it took her a while, too (stupid accounts billing people, not the secretary, she's great), but everything i need has finally been ordered. now i'm just waiting for everything to arrive.

friday i bought a butt load of pvc (among other things) from lowe's, and my labmates kindly helped me put most of it away in our storage cage. that was an adventure. see, when i was planning on putting the 130 sticks of 10 ft pvc in there, i didn't take into account the fact that our cage is not 10 ft tall. so the putting the pipe in a corner was not going to happen. so katy had the bright idea of shoving it all up on the rafters. what a great idea! there was only one small problem. we're short. we searched for a step ladder, but to no avail. so, standing on cinder blocks and buckets, katy, charlie, and i struggled and finally found victory over our vertically challenged-ness and the pvc, but not before i got saw dust in my eyes. which sucked. so 110 sticks of pvc are now residing in the rafters of our storage cage (i went ahead and cut the rest of it into the 0.5 m pieces that i need), never to be retrieved. because we're short. we got it up there, but it is not coming down. i shall have to find a very tall person to help me with that. probably dr. v. he's such a tall advisor, but he has such short students... maybe he likes it that way, towering over his tiny subjects.

anyway, i'm meeting with dr. v. in a couple of hours to discuss the revisions on draft 3 of the prospectus. *sigh* good news, though. draft 4 should be the one that goes to the committee. i'm told that i just need to add a bit of detail on one experiment, and it looks like it's ready to go. yay! i guess four drafts isn't so bad. yep. it could definitely be worse.