Today's exercise in not being a scientist was to prepare the holding room for inspection by a vet. We have to repaint and refinish the whole thing and get the vet go-ahead in order to officially have animals in there..and also make the room come into official existence. It's a funny thing about bureaucracy, where for 15 years you can have a space in your lab that's a nether region of uncreation, but accessible by a door that's a bitch to close.

The first step in our home & garden decoration spree was to strip the paint off this recess in one of the walls. I had a putty knife. It was more of a metal spatula with a midget kung-fu grip. The process was slow and eggregious, like a bad marriage microwrapped into two hours.

Eventually I got to divorce that whore, though, and re-discovered fun with finger-painting. Dr. Ziv explained that after you strip something down, you apply spackle. I didn't have any painting experience growing up. Somehow I recognized the white goopy stuff. He slopped some on to demonstrate. Pretty soon I was bordering on obsessive-compulsive tendencies, smoothing, re-smoothing, and re-applying, trying to work out just what the goal of all this was. Dr. Ziv came around and said that we'd be spackling the recess about 5 times and sanding down after each attempt. So begins the spackle epic.

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In the world of grad schools, I've been communicating with a prof. over at U of Wisconsin. We'll call him Dr. Jergens. In his own words, Dr. J becoming more and more impressed with my background and how my interests mesh well with his. He helps run a huge primate facility and does research involving monkies and humans.

In this last email he invited me to fly out to the school and meet with him; I'd cover the airfare, he'd cover the hotel. It's a shame I don't have the 500 USD to get a flight to Wisconsin then over to Detroit. Everyone I know seems to live about 5 hours from Detroit. I could hit up my estranged father for some cash, or Gran, or both, but I have enough expenses as is with all these application fees. 60 bucks for an office clerk to read over your stuff and send it over to the review panel. They make about 30k a year off of graduate applications alone. Personally I need the 60 bucks a hell of alot more than they do.

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Speaking of money, it doesn't look like Dr. Ziv is going to be getting a grant any time soon. It probably surprises you about as much as it surprised me. Getting paid would be way too convenient for my state of affairs.

Well, I'll stick around at least until he sends out my letters of recommendation. After that I can stay or go depending on if we actually get anything resembling real research results. You'd think that out of four different researchers I'd happen on one that was doing successful research.

Then again, getting real results would be way too convenient for my state of affairs.

[/bitching]

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