The hours of living and the hours of aliveness

I enjoy my lab work in every way except the hours.

For the past month, I’ve been arriving at the lab on an average of 6:30am, which ranges from 5:00am to 7:30am the latest. This week I've come to lab at 5am everyday except today where I got there just past 7:00am. The better end of the deal is that by doing this I could go home at an average of 5:30pm, and could squeeze in about 75% of my spanish tutes. That explains why I've been just a bit too tired to write proper, more frequent blogs, despite there are actually some interesting things happening around.

I'm mainly working with mice and T cells straight out of a mouse, rather than cell lines, which is good since I don't know how many lines I'll contaminate with my clumsiness. Right now, and probably from now til China in mid-November, I'm coming in every weekend to inject mice with peptide, or doing post-injection monitoring, or finishing up unfininshed work. One "round" of injection is 14 days, and since I would need to repeat the experiment at least 3 times for replicability, September to November really isn't that long in this regard. (Too long, otherwise...) So what we've decided to do is start up a fresh group with fresh round of injections while the first group is in its last days of injection, so that leaves a week-long window where I could assay the T cells from the first group and do my results analysis, then my next group would be ready... and so the ball rolls on.

And so I'm rolling on as well. But in until the end of last week my body seemed unable to cope with the hours and slightly different circadian rhythm (i.e. getting up at 3:50am) and there are times when I was walking from Dept of Micro and Immuno to Redmond Berry I thought I would literally drop dead on the ground in a matter of minutes. But of course I didn't. Instead I ended up in Richard Barry then Raymond Priestly and looked around confusedly. Probably like some stoned druggie.

It’s amazing what tiredness can do sometimes. A couple of weeks ago I accidentally got on Lilydale train rather than my usual Glenny line, and it didn't register to me all the way until I got to Surrey Hills! (thanks to Alyssa, I actually remembered Surrey Hills as a suburb, or else I probably would've missed this cue as well) so I had to get off at Blackburn station and take a bus to Syndal to get mum to pick me up. But it wasn't all too bad... It’s been 7 years since I last visited Black Station, back when I was at the English Language School. So I had fun sniffing the lush green foresty smells, (yes, rain-sniffing and forest-sniffing are my addictions), reminiscing the old times, and laughing at my absent-brain-ness. Then 703 came and I hopped on, way too happily for even Hong’s post-stuffing-up standards, and alterenated between napping and amusing myself with interesting stop names such as “Wandinong Sanctuary”. Hmm, had it not been 7:30pm and pitch dark outside I think I would've hopped off the bus and had a look at what that place was like.

I really do hope everyone can find their silver linings in their black clouds. Or else just live as if it's the last day of your life. At least that's how I feel sometimes, even if it's literally...

Pay no mind to my black humour.