After the boss shoehorned me into the upcoming Brookhaven excursion at the last minute, I broke out my calendar to roughly plot out all of what I need to do to prepare my samples in the next 2 and a half weeks. Working backwards from the date we fly out of Austin, I determined that the latest possible date to begin my “contingency plan,” (in other words, should my synthesis or sample prep for the trip become so utterly fucksored that it leaves me no choice but to remake samples) is Wednesday.

At this point, I need to work straight through the next two weekends. I don’t know what I’ll do if I hit a snag….

Wish me sanity. See you when I get back on October 22.

**(In)sanity update**

Got into lab this morning and hadn’t even dropped my gear off in the office before Susie, one of my co-workers who’s been working on the beamline at Brookhaven for the past 2 years, grabbed me to chat about preparations for the upcoming trip. Apparently, we’re not just doing preliminary runs on a handful of my samples, but most of our time is going to be devoted to my project. It seems that the boss, in a meeting with Susie last week, got excited about the prospects of this little project of mine and came up with a slew of stuff he wants done in-situ. Damn, sure would’ve been nice to be aware-ified of this at the time. Oh, and something screw-tastic happened with communication lines between bossman and the folks who fill our grant at NSLS. The boss thought we had until February 1, 2010, to submit our proposal for more beamline funding. Wrongo. Apparently, that shit is due on Wednesday; we have two days to write a grant proposal.

I’m starting to lose my shpadoinkle.

Whiskey, please. STAT!

**UPDATE number two**

We got the grant proposal submitted 28 minutes before the deadline. Whew! Now back to my regularly scheduled insanity.