Finally
The short recap will be: Intraoperative testing, house guest, candidacy.
It's been quite an interesting 3 months. First there was the intra-operative human testing for my project that stressed everyone out, especially the boss since "a lot depends on it". From my understanding "a lot" means grants, i.e. everyone's salary, but of course most importantly, my stipend. Understandably I was busy preping for it after new years and I cannot be more nervous about it: the people involved were the surgeons, the patient, my boss and I -> only I can get yelled at for doing something wrong. Making sure that we had everything we needed was important for survival. Thank goodness it went well, despite having a flat tire on our way back from the hospital, boss brought in champagne the next day for celebration. Esther, my house guest for the next month or so who just flew in from Spain, was in time to join us for that.
I thought the flat tire was sufficient to counter our good luck. Of course I cannot be more wrong. Candidacy went terribly. I was ready to be harrassed, but I ended up just being extremely embarrassed. Painful story short, in a world where failling me was almost not allowed, conditional pass. I spent the next month tequila-ing for chinese new year, snowboarding, cooking for my house guest, reading and writing essays. Just after Prof Esther left I had to hand in all my requirements to make it into a "pass". My boss got impatient during that time and told me it was a waste of time. Also, he had been corresponding to express his annoyance. In his own words, "I can understand a little bit of supervisor complex, but all these comments and essays.. I told them to take a step back and think about where they were when they started coz I was their supervisor!!" This department is highly inbred, which is why it would be quite impossible for them to fail my boss's students. Anyways, since that was announced in front of the whole lab, I only managed to mutter a "Em... thanks...". No holes in the ground for me to hide so I ran to library in the name of reading.
The only good thing about screwing up the candidacy was that I get to take more time off my part time job. Obviously I had to celebrate when it was finally over -> 2 days trip up the mountains for more play time. Good news: my tailbone is still intact, bad news: I have to get back to work, full and part time. Need to finish one paper and 2 abstracts. Have an experiment tomorrow, and we're preping for the next important step, human implant.
Other random things that happened during these 3 months include: Ange visiting, someone puking in my washroom because of too much tequila, the surgeon asking if I surf porn at work, Karen moving back to Edmonton (yay!), my birthday, and Yi making me a facebook account as a prank. The last one is still available for entertainment if you are interested.
There might or might not be photos following this post.
It's been quite an interesting 3 months. First there was the intra-operative human testing for my project that stressed everyone out, especially the boss since "a lot depends on it". From my understanding "a lot" means grants, i.e. everyone's salary, but of course most importantly, my stipend. Understandably I was busy preping for it after new years and I cannot be more nervous about it: the people involved were the surgeons, the patient, my boss and I -> only I can get yelled at for doing something wrong. Making sure that we had everything we needed was important for survival. Thank goodness it went well, despite having a flat tire on our way back from the hospital, boss brought in champagne the next day for celebration. Esther, my house guest for the next month or so who just flew in from Spain, was in time to join us for that.
I thought the flat tire was sufficient to counter our good luck. Of course I cannot be more wrong. Candidacy went terribly. I was ready to be harrassed, but I ended up just being extremely embarrassed. Painful story short, in a world where failling me was almost not allowed, conditional pass. I spent the next month tequila-ing for chinese new year, snowboarding, cooking for my house guest, reading and writing essays. Just after Prof Esther left I had to hand in all my requirements to make it into a "pass". My boss got impatient during that time and told me it was a waste of time. Also, he had been corresponding to express his annoyance. In his own words, "I can understand a little bit of supervisor complex, but all these comments and essays.. I told them to take a step back and think about where they were when they started coz I was their supervisor!!" This department is highly inbred, which is why it would be quite impossible for them to fail my boss's students. Anyways, since that was announced in front of the whole lab, I only managed to mutter a "Em... thanks...". No holes in the ground for me to hide so I ran to library in the name of reading.
The only good thing about screwing up the candidacy was that I get to take more time off my part time job. Obviously I had to celebrate when it was finally over -> 2 days trip up the mountains for more play time. Good news: my tailbone is still intact, bad news: I have to get back to work, full and part time. Need to finish one paper and 2 abstracts. Have an experiment tomorrow, and we're preping for the next important step, human implant.
Other random things that happened during these 3 months include: Ange visiting, someone puking in my washroom because of too much tequila, the surgeon asking if I surf porn at work, Karen moving back to Edmonton (yay!), my birthday, and Yi making me a facebook account as a prank. The last one is still available for entertainment if you are interested.
There might or might not be photos following this post.
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