23 June 2012

The most awful week ever

This last week has surely been the most awful week ever. It all started on Monday. Obviously. On Monday morning my supervisor shows up in my office to tell me that my GRC meeting will be in one week. That's the yearly meeting with my graduate review committee to decide how my PhD is going and if I can continue. Which isn't really a big deal, it's just a formality really. But what it meant was that I spent the week making plans for the rest of my PhD and actually thinking about it all instead of repressing it like I usually do. It wasn't fun. There are only four months until my third year is finished. The first half of the PhD is done and my paper has been accepted (yay!) but I still have a lot of lab work. Can it be done in four months? I don't know. Not to mention that my supervisor doesn't realise that I want to leave so soon. I wrote up a schedule and it is awful - lab work every day, lots of it, and on weekends, no more procrastinating. It will be so exhausting! I am already so exhausted just thinking about it.

So if a week of hard work is not enough (and I really was working hard), we played the most awful, disgusting rugby game imaginable. It's not that we lost - that's really not such a bad thing. We have lost before (although for the summer league we had not lost a game yet). It was the other team that was awful. The were the most vicious pack of savages that we have ever come across. Some of it was also bad luck, but that bad luck definitely had a lot to do with their aggressive attitudes. About 10 seconds into the game one of their guys managed to elbow one of our girls in the face and he split her forehead open! She was gushing blood everywhere and had to go to the hospital for stitches. The ref was useless, the organiser of the league came over and he was useless too - they didn't do anything! You would think that they would be concerned for the players' safety and that at least somebody there would have some first aid knowledge. Instead they didn't even seem to possess common sense. I mean, she had a head injury, there could have been more damage than what we saw, and they didn't even offer to call an ambulance! I think they really should have done at least that. Instead she went off to the hospital, meaning we lost two of our best players and had no more subs. The game continued and a couple of minutes later the other team took out one of their own players - one of the blokes knocked one of the girls down and we all thought she must have broken her shoulder or something because she didn't get up for ages. She was crying and couldn't play the rest of the match. Yet it continued and the ref did not send off the guy that hurt our player nor the one that knocked down the other team's player. If that was our team being aggressive the ref wouldn't even have to do that because our own captain would send us off to chill out for awhile. So the game continued as it started; we were bummed out and off our game after the accident, they were aggressive and the ref was useless. Instead of penalising them he threatened to send our captain off for whining. For the last 10 minutes of the game we played in a torrential downpour. So all in all, it doesn't really get much worse than that.

But we still only lost by about 6 points I think, and we are still at the top of our division in the league. We just have to make sure that we win all of the rest of our matches by lots of points. And that the team we played this last week don't do so well. Which they might not, I'm not sure that they're really so good as all that - a lot of people were saying that the players last week were not the same players as in other weeks, as if they had borrowed some new people just for the purpose of beating us. That would explain the huge aggressive guys on the team, they were probably real rugby players and not used to non-contact sports. I hope so, because after what they did to our player (I mean, she is all swollen and scarred!) we really need to beat them in the league. And maybe meet them in a dark alley and beat some manners into them. It was such an awful, depressing game.

Well, all of that happened on Wednesday, so there were only two days left until the weekend, but they were days full of lab work, so they were not very good days. Not only that, but the lab work was not very successful. So that sucks. The week got moderately better when a woman stopped in with a box of chocolates for me, as a thank you for giving a group of students a tour of the zoology museum. It was very unexpected, and I felt quite underserving of it because I do get paid for my time. Unfortunately I couldn't even stop to chat to her and say a proper thank you because my supervisor was in my office trying to get her head around my research (in other words, wasting time that I could have spent doing real work). But finally Thursday was over and that evening I had a real break from work - I made cupcakes instead, for a friend's birthday. They were delicious, chocolate with caramel frosting and more caramel sauce on top. It was a long evening though, full of silly blonde mistakes, probably on account of my being so tired. First I screwed up the caramel by burning the sugar (it tasted awful). That was OK though, I had enough butter to make more. But then I didn't have enough butter for the frosting. So I dashed out to get some more, and as I went to take the butter from the shelf I noticed the weight of a pack of butter. That is when I realised my blonde mistake. The reason that thought there wasn't enough butter was that I had forgotten how much butter is in a pack of butter. I had used twice as much butter as I should have for the cupcakes! This is why you should always weigh everything!! Luckily cupcakes can survive quite a lot of mistakes and they were still good. Just somewhat denser than they usually are. Everybody loved them and thought they were like little chocolate brownies. So basically, I got through another day of work, then on Friday evening I fed everybody cupcakes, and now it is Saturday and I should have been working but I took the day off instead. Now I'm going to go to bed early and try to recover from my awful week.

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