One month later...

Phew, my last post was exactly one month ago today. It's been a pretty bust month. I had this huge deadline in the lab during the first week of February and that kept me busy. By busy, I meant working 7 days a week busy. Yuck. Once a year my advisers need to fly to DC to meet with the folks from the Department of Defense that funded the project I'm working on. They have to give a presentation about the progress we've made so far. The money started coming in over the summer, but in reality it wasn't until January that we started in earnest. Not for lack of wanting to, but this work is just complicated, to say the least.

We had both of the laptops connected to the PCR machines fry. One wouldn't even turn on again. They're what we like to call "dinosaurs." That's the technical term. The connect to our equipment via parallel ports. No laptop even comes with parallel ports anymore. Working with the IT department (his name is Jim) here to get such issues resolved is painfully slow. The one guy is we have in the entire department and he's stretched so thin we can't even see him anymore. He's see-through. We jerry-rigged a desktop into place while waiting for a permanent solution, but then the camera on the PCR machines weren't aligned. Someone must have knocked the machines. That took a while to trouble shoot. And on top of it all, we didn't even get in the supplies we needed until a month before the deadline. Anyway, I managed to pull it off and have some data to present, but it was exhausting.

Other than work, I started playing disc golf a little more often. Played a tournament called "Festivus" in the pouring rain. I've never been so miserable golfing in my life. No more winter rain golf for me. But I won the tournament, so at least I didn't walk away wet, cold, and empty handed.

With the weather getting nicer and nicer by the day, I'm looking forward to getting out more and hiking and golfing and running. And with the deadline passed, hopefully I'll be able to make plenty of time for all those things.