Kelley Bromley

I’ve decided you cannot curl into a ball small enough to make exams go away. I hate exams. HATE THEM. They cause stress, and headaches, and indigestion, and overall unpleasentness. I have to get an A in this course so that my PhD comprehensive isn’t on any and every topic in neuroscience - the process leading up to writing an A paper on Monday morning at 8:30am is a long, agonizing one equivalent in torture to slowly boiling yourself alive… sorry to be so gory =/ I just really hate exams… I never did like them, but in undergrad I could suck in information quite quickly, and as I’m getting older it’s harder and harder to do, heh. And it’s not just that - I’m dead tired to boot. As you can tell from my previous posts, I haven’t been getting much sleep lately, heh. Lionel and I watched “Fantastic Four” last night (good movie by the way) to take a break, but it doesn’t help the impending doom feeling… nothing can prevent the inevitable MONDAY from coming, and time only gets shorter *sigh*. I don’t imagine anything else in life could be so stressful as this… I mean, my PhD defence is going to be on research I’ve worked on for years and I’m the expert in what I did, because I did it, lol. This is entirely different. I don’t even like neurodevelopment!! It is VERY difficult to study something you don’t like… grrr… I hate exams :(

I just want to go to sleep and wake up with all my courses done so I can research like a good little grad student… I think I’m going to be sick =/

Well, for the last assignment, I worked on it on Tuesday until 10:15pm, went to bed till 4am, got up at 4 and worked on it until 8am, went to class at 8:30am, came home and had a mental break, a nap, and then got all my notes for NRSC 500 collected together, hunted down the papers I needed to study, etc, went to bed at 11pm. This brings us to Thursday, some studying, and AN INSANE AMOUNT OF LAUNDRY! I haven’t done laundry in over a month, so times that by two people and that’s the amount of laundry I have done today, heh. Got some studying in while it was in the wash, although the laundry room is quite noisy. It took me an hour to fold it all! I shrunk some of Lionel’s clothes… it was quite upsetting, but Lionel being the wonderful man he is didn’t mind, heh. *Sigh* - I just want some holidays… my weekend will be a constant mass of studying, but then the hard part will be over, and only one assignment will remain… the days are going by in a blur and everything is mushing together, so it feels like it’s passing quickly.

And I believe it was done quite well even, lol. I only had 85 references, but I found out in class on Monday that the 100 references thing was only a joke… oi, heh. I stayed up all Sunday night until 5:30am, decided screw it I’ll pass it in Tuesday, slept till 7:30am, got ready and went to class… came home and took a nap till 5pm, took a mental break, worked on the assignment till 8:30am this morning, passed it in, went to Safeway, did the ebay thing till noon, went to bed until 5pm, got up and made supper (sweet potato, corn, spinach, thawed pork roast, gravy, mmmm), watched some telli, and now here I am, 9:30pm and working on the journal critique which is due tomorrow. I can’t believe it’s Tuesday! Everything from the last few days is a blur… then I have to start studying for my NRSC 500 final on Monday! Oi!

Still plodding away at the CIHR… although let me tell you, at 2:30am I am really starting to get tired, lol. I just had an iced tea though, so hopefully that’ll perk me up. I have 69 references now :) I honestly don’t think I’ll have 100 when I’m done because I almost have all my experiments described - oh well.

Once again, on the up side I won an ebay auction! LOL. I got the kickass set of zigs I was talking about earlier - 55 of them for $40!! That’s $0.73 a pen! Booo ya!! (They sell for $3.50 each :) ). Can’t wait to get them! Now if only I could make a living at this scrapbooking thing I wouldn’t have to worry about CIHR grants, lol.

53 references down and only 47 left to go! Will she make it? Stay tuned!!

On the up side, I won the archival mist auction! A $40 product for $9, not bad :)

I think it’s going ok…. I’m learning a lot and the experimental section is going fairly quickly. Not sure if I’ll break 100 references, but we’ll see! On the plus side, there is a tantalizing auction on ebay right now… zig archival, acid free, fade resistant, water proof, smear proof, light fast pens which are opaque! The original pens couldn’t write on dark papers, but these can! It’s almost all the colors and 3 different tips in most of them - 6mm, 1mm, and 0.5mm! The 0.5mm will be perfect for journaling, the 1mm for outlining, and the 6mm for lettering! I’m drooling here.. only one other bidder against me so far… 55 pens, they normally sell for $3 USD each, but getting them for MUCH less! I’m so paranoid about this auction that I don’t want to post this post for fear someone else will discover it, LOL, but that’s just silly - what am I thinking? No one reads my blog! LOL ;)

* misc/phd/phd120105s.jpg NOT FOUND *I just love PhD comics… I find myself going to the PhD website every day waiting for a new one, heh. It’s very true to life! I thought the Dec 1/05 one was really good, so I decided to start an album with my favorite ones. I was saying to Lionel that since the comic is so great and popular, that maybe a TV show about grad students would be good too - then he said it would just be people studying, LOL.

Well, I have 48 of my required 100 references done. I’m convinced the intro is the hardest part to write… all the researching and citations… at least that’s what I’m hoping, cause I have to be able to finish it up tomorrow and I only have the background done! Well, that’s not true… I have all my experiments laid out, and all the thoughts on those… Just need to flush it out with some references as to why the techniques are good and get more specific on the methods. It’s gonna be a long day tomorrow, but for now… bed!

Well, ok, a few days later than I wanted to have it done, but it is DONE and PASSED IN! Now I need to let my little nurtured paper go out into the world on its own - hopefully it will impress, heh. I learned a lot doing the paper though - I feel like a semi-competent geneticist now! Now, to apply these newly found skills to the CIHR grant… I’m just thinking how lovely it’s going to be on Monday when I finally get that kahuna off my shoulders - then I can start my journal critique which is due on Wednesday, and then study for exams! Joy!

Of course, all this course work and no play means only one thing… shopping sprees on ebay!! Great coping mechanism :D

Ok, so I ended up reading more papers than writing my own, but I was very pleased with my findings. I actually found a paper on a different promoter which did the same experiments I was proposing! So I know I’m on the right track.

Lionel’s finding this semester really rough - he’s doing his take home final now and is quite stressed about it. Soon it will all be over though and we can both get a much needed break - during which time I will write a review paper on Notch signalling and Lionel will learn string theory, LOL.