Another List, and then some.

Bad echiral. Slackin' off again. So here's a list to keep me on track for the remainder of the weekend.

• Two prelabs*
• Kinetics! Assignment due on Monday (never you mind that the professor hasn't actually taught everything we needed to know yet - textbook time!), midterm this Friday (meep).
• Start writing up two labs: inorganic** and computational. Both are relatively easy.
• Computational proposal. I am worried about the time it will take to run all the calculations I want to run, especially since I have to physically babysit every calculation - can't exactly logoff while the program is running now, can we? The way the software is installed means no parallel calculations, either. Sigh.
• Combinatorics. 'nuff said. Currently not doing particularly well; I don't really understand how they think sometimes.***
• QIP. Due this Friday. Another sigh.
• Last but not the least, marking. Expect a rant on this sooner or later - it's inevitable.

There's also things like organic assignment, more midterm prep, and starting on projects, but I am relegating those to reading week.

(Oh, did I blog about my job search so far? In the running for only one (!) position! Everyone else either cancelled or rejected; isn't this fun?)

*I have Beilstein access now! Yes! It turns out that the university does subscribe to it, but one has to email the right librarian to get all the passwords and such.
**The lab session itself was rather awkward. The TA had trouble with the Schlenk line, but had nobody to turn to - all the other TAs and the lab instructor vanished into thin air. Oops! In the end, we managed to snag an organic lab instructor. Naturally, when we persuaded the organic instructor to come, the original lab instructor came back. Sigh. The procedure is colourful, though. Quantum dots! Also, pyridine is foul stuff. Smells kind of like slightly sweet rotten fish that burns at the back of the throat. Eww. (Next week - 123****! A tedious synthesis; why I am so excited about it?)
***Combinatorics, currently, is a huge hodgepodge of random stuff, loosely related to counting. Not easy counting, either; it's very hard to catch incorrect reasoning, and once that is there, everything is wrong. Mechanistically, everything is done with generating functions, but then the professor make this sideways leap so that his generating functions transform from something easy to write down but hard to solve, into something actually solvable. That being said, combinatorics is kind of fun - too many evil (cool?) tricks to count.
****That's what one of my inorganic professors call it.