The first interior designer

It was a tiring day. It was just one of those days where you just want to get out and go somewhere else but if you left, everything else down the line would suffer. Besides, I had a few days I took off early, I guess I should just endure it through.

I cleared my backlog of chlorophyll in the morning at a comfortable pace. I was also glad that Kai Wei suggested we go for an early lunch. More specifically before the business update. Which would mean that I would not have to eat alone as I had already intended to skip it.

Went straight back to the lab and the setting up took rather long as the culture was declining. This made it much more difficult to find females. After everything was in, it was followed by the usual process of filtering. It was at this point that I suddenly had a energy crash. I started to just work on muscle memory. I managed to concentrate on cleaning the tanks but things started to go downhill from there, right at that moment when I dropped the plastic jug and saw that it had cracked. I was upset. I seem to be the one breaking all the things that had been around for a while. I decided to leave the lab momentarily as a breather and maybe ask around on my way out if there were new ones to replace it. If not, I'll just pop by and tell Jon about it, which did eventually happen.

Tired, I kept repeating the things I had to do in sequence.
1. Wash the carboy
2. Make asw
3. Bleach the machine
4. Flush the machine
5. Fill the machine with fsw
6. Prime the aperture

I had to rethink task 3 a few times. Do I drain the system first? Yes. No. Fill it back up. No... I should drain it and heat the diluent vessel with freshwater and bleach. Which I did, only to realise I should have put diluted bleach into the sampling glass to run counts with the aperture before all of that. Never mind, let's do it at the same time. I think it worked out fine, I just didn't  get to priming.

I left and met baby at clementi to head to beauty world to see the interior designer. The mood wasn't pleasant, I felt we were both tired and it wasn't the place we wanted to be going at that point in time. A big part of me felt like I had dug my own grave and jumped into it. Why did I think this would be exciting?

The meeting went well I guess. It was out first meeting with an ID and we didn't know what to expect. There were a few points of tension but we managed to rein it in. He didn't show us any pictures, which on hindsight is a good idea, so we don't get influenced. So it was just talking and a bit of drawing on the floor plan.

We went for dinner and then went our separate ways as we just wanted to head home to rest. It was such a relief to be apart, it just felt rather oppressive being together. It's times like this I just feel like going out to do something on my own, without having to tell anyone anything. Like watch a movie, go for a walk, take the bus somewhere, go out for a meal on my own.

I have this small vision that I will be happier.

Confusion

What do I want? Nowadays, my physical needs betray my emotional needs. I don't know what this means at all. I have, what seems like, this constant need to cry. Thing is, I don't know what for.

First quarter

Well this is long overdue, seeing as the first quarter is half a month over.

The first quarter of the year was an emotional rollercoaster . Like rollercoaster of death ups and downs. Only to be disappointed at the end of the ride that there was nothing to come out of it. The data had no trends and my TAC was a bit disappointed because like me, no one knew the reason behind the lack of a trend. Was it really like this? I wasn't too convinced and neither were they. The progress of my fieldwork analysis wasn't going too well also. Having to drop analysing my replicates to finish in time. It just wasn't ideal. The only comfort was that the copepod local cultures were doing well.

After much thought, and discussion it was hypothesised that the copepods might need to be sexed and a trial proved that females ate two times more. A little bit of (^o^) cos we might have found the cause... But also :-[ because everything needs to be repeated. I've come to terms with it. I'm not joyously doing it.. But I think there is a bit of joy as slowly go through everything again. Because I think there's a bit of hope that changing something that has proved to have a difference might make all the difference to the results I got.

I worry everyday that this bubble will disappear and I feel a bit guilty because that means I don't fully trust in God's hand in my life. But as I work on that I always feel thankful that it has been working out so far.