Grading crunch.

When your wombats are being tested for their final on Wednesday, you try and get them back their reports lickedy split. This has led to me grading from Friday to today and I will hopefully be done tomorrow.

My new favorite sound therapy as I weep over their reports and how little they have figured out from me? Listening to Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me! on NPR.

Hopefully all this grading will allow me to study for my final on Wednesday. I've chosen the paper for my other class, so the prof just has to ok it. And the labwork parade marches on.

I think I can I think I can I think I can

Favorite wombat moment of today.

"Biochemist on the Run, I thought your email was so funny I almost made it my facebook status."

Oh, wombats.

Happy two days from half priced chocolate day!

I hope that you all celebrate in your own way. My way of celebrating Valentine's Day (making pancakes for a bunch of friends, whether I'm single or not...which is a good time to bring up that I have been seeing a fellow biochem first year) will have to be postponed until later this week, as I have a midterm Wednesday and an ongoing take home midterm for my inorganic NMR course.

Boo. Thanks, grad school.

And now, back to my massive pile 'o grading.

Favorite wombat fail of the week: When doing distillations, I had 3 flooded hoods due to wombat antics.

When the adviser's away...

...the grad students will work the same hours anyways.

In undergrad, when I went in on Sunday, there would maybe be one other person in there. Today when I went in (I usually work M-Sat as compared to Sun-Fri), 80% of my lab was in.

The boss-man is out all week, so looking forward to a less tense week that is *not* filled with grant writing. My project is still stuck on mol bio related stuff (ick---perhaps the most frustrating stuff to be stuck on as a chemist), but hopefully will move into the more exciting stages of growing/characterizing mutants within the next week. I am itching to no longer follow my grad student mentor around, but due to inherent trickiness in my protein, not a possibility. Sigh.

Though I must not be driving her nutso yet. We're going to a free yoga class together later this week with one of her friends from another lab.

Also, I seem to have collected a fan group out of some of my ochem wombats. A lot of them wish me good weekends in their emails/when they leave lab, a few found out about my half and ask me questions about that, and one of them hangs around until after lab and then she'll follow me back to my lab building asking for ochem advice/questions about my research and whatnot. It's all very cute. Though if they're hoping for points, my wombats have been severely disappointed. And with that, I'll leave you with one of my favorite wombat quotes from a lab report graded earlier this week, in which a major point of the lab was to learn about bumping and boiling chips:

Q: Why do we use boiling chips?
A: To make liquid boil.

It's true, wombat. That's why when making spaghetti I always include a boiling chip.

An Open Essay on Wombattiness.

Wombat: 1)(n) A small, furry marsupial, as seen here. 2) (n) A clueless undergrad or incoming grad student. Someone who has very little idea what is going on. Can also be used as an adjective to describe general incompetence.

It can be used in a sentences like these:

"Billy laughed at the new wombat in the lab who couldn't find the beakers."

"As she looked through a cabinet for the third time, BotR cursed the day that she had become a wombat."

"Dude, way to wombat it up by asking where we keep our FeCl3."

Can often be heard asking questions such as these*:
1. Where's the nearest bathroom?
2. Um, is this open?
3. Uh, is this on?
4. Can you say that again?
5. You guys store that in the -80, right?
6. Uh, how do I get into the building on weekends?
7. How does your autoclave work?
8. Any special instructions on the pH meter?
9. Do you guys grow your cultures in tubes like these?
10. Where is ________? (Fill in with any piece of equipment, reagent, location or wombat's mentor.)


Wombat syndrome can happen to competent people when moving into a new lab. However, this does mean that the competent person will be viewed as a wombat and spoken to in a gentle voice (by at least one person) so as to not spook the wombat**.

*These are all questions asked by me within the past two days. In my defense, the bathroom question was legit since I hadn't ever been in that building before.

**There's at least one person who thinks that I'm hopeless in my new lab. She's been very nice, so hopefully when I don't have to ask where everything is anymore she'll stop using a sugar sweet voice so as to not freak me out. In her defense, I'm pretty sure I run around with a crazy look on my face like "Omg, I will burst into tears if I can't find their filter flasks."