Graduate School

In a moment of utter procrastination tonight, I started reading about what I was doing today 3 and 4 years ago when I lived in Japan. It struck me how boring my life has become. When I lived in Japan, and wrote that blog, I felt that life was ordinary, but now, 4 years removed, I see that it wasn't.

Life now feels ordinary as well. I am a graduate student at the Graduate School of Oceanography at URI and I study passive samplers as a new technology to measure organic pollutants. I also take a whole lot of intro classes that eat up every last drop of would-be free time. I work ridiculously long hours and most weekends. I am a busy-bee, but I think I may start up this blog again. The title is a bit odd, but I'm going to run with it.

Today was an exciting day in my research. I finished making my first set of standards to run on the GC/MS (Gas Chromatographer/ Mass Spectrometer) with which I will compare everything I find out in the real world to. Each of my standards A-F have about 15 different compounds in them which are at different concentrations in order to make a "standard curve", or more accurately stated, a nice straight line. I was so excited to have them all made, but when I ran them on the GC/MS, they all seemed to ellute at the same time. Boo. More tweaking and fiddling around will have to be done before I can really start experimenting.

I've been going to Boston every weekend for the past month now. It's about an hour away and I have one friend from every stage of my life there: High School, College, Japan, and California. This past weekend I took my very first Flamenco class with my friend Sarah from the Japan days. It was very stompy, but enjoyable. It made me realize how much I miss tap. Maybe I'll find tap again one day. Sunday was spent at yoga and in the lab till 10pm. I caught up on all of my podcasts while blowing on a little vial watching liquid evaporate for 4 hours. Ah, research.