Music All Around

Nine hours of lab work today alleviated only by a half hour meeting. I don't know why it took me so long because I didn't have that much to do. I guess I'd have estimated the amount of work I had at six and a half hours. I guess part of it was that when I got in, the autoclave (the cheeky thing) decided to give me a "Low plant steam pressure: Cycle was aborted" error. Yesterday when I loaded my items into it, I had waited long enough to see that it got to the right temperature so it must have decided to mess up after I left.

It's obviously out to get me.

Wheeling the cart all the way over to the autoclave in the other building and back did take up additional time. To get there is complicated. Because of California OSHA or something, every ramp on our sidewalks have to have yellow bumpy metal strips so blind people don't wander into the road (according to the safety rep). Only the strips get slippy when they're wet, and you can't push a cart over them because everything will bounce off. All us seeing folk who have to push carts between buildings end up either in the street or taking a winding complicated path through the four interconnected buildings. Which we're not supposed to do because we're passing food areas with our lab stuff. But anyway, that's what I did today so to get to the autoclave I had to go up an elevator, over a bridge, through a building, over another bridge, through the building to the autoclave, and then back. Twice.

The safety rep did say if someone gets hit by a car we might be able to get the yellow bumpy stuff removed. It's awful that I'm just waiting for that to happen.

I have an experiment going so I was in at work both days this weekend, and will be for the next two as well. That's the way the cookie crumbles. Sunday I fit work in between the early church service (which a lot of people arrived late to, I noticed - Daylight Savings strikes?) and going to a concert of Mendelssohn's Elijah at a Lutheran church in Palo Alto. I haven't been to a classical music concert since 2005 or 2006, probably (basing my timeline on the fact that it would have been our former roommate Laura's concert for the symphonic band in college). I spent most of the time watching either the tall tenor in the middle, who had a wonderfully expressive face and was obviously in love with the piece, or the principal second violin, who managed to look bored out of his skull while playing complicated passages. The music was amazing. It made me want to get out my trombone and play. I should at least practice more often to keep the GT fight songs memorized.

Though I'm not sure it's possible to forget those. I think Ramblin' Wreck became a muscle memory halfway through my RAT season.