Levity

Now for lighter happenings in the lab.

1. For reasons that will take too much talking to explain, a grad student blew a raspberry at another lab member today. Afterwards, whenever I talk to either of the two, I had to refrain from laughing. It was surprisingly difficult*.

2. I was reminding the PI about some administrivia, and mentioned that since a particular machine is down, I have really incomplete datasets for my report. He complained - "You're making my life so complicated" - but then actually got out of his office to haul out a potential substitute machine for me. Sadly, said machine won't work (otherwise an enterprising grad student/postdoc would've cobbled it together already) but still, it was really nice of him.

3. Another machine was behaving unusually well today. I gave it a hug ('cuz I'm sentimental like that). *Someone* started a run with said machine using a crappy sample**, and the machine was good enough to run it anyway. At least I was around often enough to avert dumb mistakes like forgetting to turn on coolant flow. (To machine: Aww, I'm so proud of you! To *someone*: please, please, please don't start the machine unless someone who knows what s/he is doing is around. And it'd be really nice of you if you'll get the data off the computer yourself, although it's probably too much to hope for that.)

On the down side, I spent my evening running calculations for people instead of writing my report...again. Dammit. Must. Write. Report! (One grad student totally owes me a coffee now. The school's copy of The-Program-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named does not export fractional coordinates (not even copy/paste), which means...I have to copy them all down. Manually. Given over 50 atoms, this is something of a chore. I am not looking forward to the >100-atom case.)

It's also unfortunate that right now, I'm still sleepy despite 500 mL of coffee. Sigh. To reiterate: Must. Write. Report! (zzz)

*It's probably one of those things that's funny only when one is physically present.
**Almost everything with the sample was wrong; it didn't even fit the sample holder properly. Frankly, it was amazing that the machine got anything out of the sample at all.