9 days later....(I must be a slacker)

Wow, time flies. I hadn't realized how long it had been since I'd posted. Anyway, not a whole lot to report. Last night, Rachel and I painted Ethan's new room. We went ahead and spent the money on some higher quality paint, so we only needed one coat and some touch-ups. Looks pretty good.

Work kind of sucks right now. I'm in the middle of trying to troublshoot an assay that just doesn't seem to want to work. It worked 2 years ago when we ran more than 1000 samples. But now, there's severe lack of sensitivity. The scientific part of it would be difficult enough, but it's made even more challenging by the fact that the client will be visiting our lab next week, and wants to see some good looking data. I feel like I've kind of been left to twist in the wind on this one. All the other staff scientists are busy with other projects, and they've assigned this difficult, high-profile project to me, the junior member of the methods development department. We had a meeting yesterday afternoon, and our lab director said she was disappointed in the progress we had made in the last 2 weeks. I tried not to take that personally, and she kind of backpedaled when she realized what she had said, but it still hurt my feelings a little. I came home early and kind of had a mini stress attack. Luckily, my technical manager called a few minutes later and gave me a nice pep talk, followed by and even nicer pep talk from Rachel. This is turning out to be a pretty hard job. I guess I should expect that, given that they're paying me more money to do it. I'm not really looking forward to going back to work today, but calling in "sick" is definitely not an option.

I went ahead and committed to going to China, and I paid my $100 deposit. I don't really have a clue as to how I'm going to come up with the $3000 for the trip, but at least I have $100 already paid! Fortunately, it looks like everyone else who wants to go is dealing with similar issues of finance. So at least I'm not alone.

All right, time to hit the shower and head to work. More soon!