I have been watching C-SPAN 2 for over 3 hours.

They're debatting an ammendment on cutting some of the upper 1% taxes (10%) to make sure Veteran Affairs is fully funded.

In the meantime, I've been going over my inbox looking for a few people I want to meet over in Detroit. What surprised me was how many people I've lost touched with over the months. I was curious what'd been going on with them, so I just sent out half a dozen e-mails.

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But I'm getting ahead of myself.

This past week at Discordia compensated for the great trip to Winsconsin, at least at the beginning.

Now, if you've followed along for awhile, you might get the impression that Dr. Zivago occasionally throws new curve balls at the very last second. He did this during finals week last quarter.

This past week, Dr. Ziv decided that we absolutely HAD to do my 48-hour Reserpine study AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. This is right on the brink of me going on vacation to Detroit.

I'd been telling him for three weeks that I needed to get our equipment down there, and that without it I couldn't go forward. I told him I needed our swim tank so I could test rats in our depression-scale swim task. At the time, he told me that Midget's project NEEDED that and I needed to make a new one.

So, why couldn't we do this study 2-3 weeks ago? Well, I was working to get Midget's project off the ground, showing people how to do cranial surgery to implant direct-to-brain tubes for drugs. Then there was our sudden shift to learning about electrical engineering, which I had to take up so I could make a circuit board with a timer chip, to help with Attila's project.

That last for a week and a half. Why didn't Dr. Ziv listen to me about getting supplies and just let me use what we already had, to do a study we SHOULD have done back then?

As it is, the rats are mostly too fat for the studies..but we've passed right underneath the guillotine wire of not being able to do the study at all.

Originally, I thought I'd have to finish this 30 rat study up from last wednesday to this wednesday. That would have included 5 minutes of injections per rat and 25 minutes of testing per rat. Just totalling up the minutes, you could see why this sudden policy shift right before my vacation time would piss me right the hell off.

Strangely, though, Dr. Ziv became motivated this past thursday when I wasn't in the lab. Without consulting me about my (alleged) project, he set up the design of the experiment, and got Cat and Hideyoshi to start it on Saturday. I object to his doing this because, on thursday, I'd called him to talk with him and plan stuff out. He told me that'd we'd just talk on Friday about it.

Maybe he didn't mean to go around my back, but even so Hideyoshi didn't know what was going on. Thankfully, Cat accidentally locked the room with the rats down in Snifter Hall, after they'd already injected 9 rats.

Why is that important? They wanted to inject all the rats in the study and then test them in one day. I tried telling Hideyoshi that was utterly fucking preposterous and impossible, but he didn't seem to understand why at the time.

So to make a long story short, I finally got a handle on the experimental design, got Dr. Ziv to listen to me about what we need to do, and people are in the process of getting stuff done in a sane manner.

I'm just glad it all worked out. Dr. Ziv was annoyed enough at me because the circuit board (based off of his design) isn't working.

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And, very thankfully, I haven't got the chuck-wagon o' crap on my plate that I thought I'd have today.

Aside from packing for my 2 weeks off in Detroit, I'm meeting a friend of mine who's from Ohio. She's in to see a friend of hers and, since she's local, we figured that we could meet for a group dinner. This has extended to something of a mini-diaryland meet in the Los Angeles area. We've got at least another two people coming, one of which is a Science geek like me. I'm especially interested in meeting her and talking shop. We seem to have many common interests.

That happens at 7:30 and I'll (hopefully) get word out about that sometime tomorrow before I leave.

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Finally, I'm still debatting whether or not to take the Wisconsin position. Well, let me clarify that:

I'm trying to figure out reasons for not going so that Dr. Crisco is completely comfortable with my decision. I don't want him to have any reservations about my dedication or commitment. I plan on getting some articles tomorrow that talk about interactions between the immune system and clinical disorders, seeing what types of studies have been done in rhesus monkeys (since those are the guys that'd I'd be working with).

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So for now, I've got a load of laundry on, am enjoying C-SPAN 2 way too much and looking forward to meeting complete--but very friendly--strangers at 7:30pm.

Fun shall be had by all, I think.