Jenny’s comment (will open in new window) got me thinking about that old issue I love to ponder: when and where and how parental limits are defined with regards to responsibility and, yes, money. First, I’m fairly certain I’m over any bitterness I felt towards my parents for their choice to drop college financing on my lap. In part, this is due to the fact that I completely understand their decision (and did even as they made it–it was not a surprise to me), and in part this is because they did, in fact, help me when I needed it during the school year. Second, I don’t think Jenny is…

Things are going well for me. Dr. M has slowed down my work on the organic matter project to a crawl while Jenn runs an experiment. Either that, or I am supposed to be crunching the data already, and I just don’t know it yet. That leaves me with energy to work on the TiON project (the semiconductor), which is good, since P., who is really supposed to be the principal student investigator at Rose, just started his position as a counselor at a Calculus program Rose runs, reducing his hours to maybe three hours a day. He was kind enough to leave me with a botched actinometry experiment I…

…coefficients can be determined by multiplying the measured absorbance of your sample at each wavelength by 2.303 (which comes from a log transformation) and dividing by your pathlength, which is usually 0.0100 m (1.00 cm)… Right. Sorry. Wrong kind of absorption. So I went out for coffee and sno-cones last night with this guy, who I shall call the Cool CS Guy for a lack of imagination, and we’re talking, as most people tend to do when sitting down and drinking chai, and I had a small epiphany about myself: much of the extent of my more pleasant social interactions involve what I’m [now] terming “absorption”. When I meet people…

Today I have my brain split. P., with whom I am to work on the semiconductors project, starts work today. This week, we are supposed to learn how to use the HPLC, whatever gas chromatography equipment is reserved for our use, get our lab area set up in general (we have to keep completely separate glassware, for instance), and set up our lamps for running experiments with the photocatalyst. But I’m not done with the Antartica project yet. Jenn, and I may very well be running a decidedly large experiment this week, doing a photobleaching experiment in triplicate, then basically running three sets of analysis on the samples we draw…

Yeah, so, I don’t have a car. And I’m living off-campus. This, of course, presents problems as soon as my schedule deviates from Jenn’s, and there are few things more annoying than a mooch. First there’s the everyday mooching a ride off Jenn to get to work. This isn’t so bad in terms of convenience since we live together, but we aren’t exactly splitting wear-and-tear on cars between mine and hers. The best I can do is give her gas money and follow her schedule as much as I can. Bumminess #1. And then, Wednesday was social night for the girls at work, but I had a lot of work…