Trying to keep it together

Pulling an all nighter is all about perseverance, will power, and personal pride. No one pulls all nighter's for fun. Sure, you might "stay up all night" working on something, but you still went to bed at 7AM to get an hour or two of sleep before going into work or class. A real all nighter takes a drive to do something truly silly for a goal that is never really worth it, but you do it anyway so you can wear it like a badge of honor. Those who have been there are inviting in conversation and discuss it with you like a combat veteran. Those that have tried and failed look on with awe and bewilderment, asking themselves the questions that haunt you during the long hours of the night: was it really worth it? How did they do it? Why are they that dumb to submit themselves to it?

It all began when my advisor convinced these technicians to come show us a piece of equipment. Now I had used this at other schools, but we were doing a "demo" to see how it worked so that my advisor could write a better grant to buy one and so we could get the machine to ourselves to run samples.

The goal was to convince them to let us keep it overnight to run samples. Other people in my department weren't optimistic, I admit even I had my doubts, but when the time came they came up with the idea to let us have it overnight to run the samples we wanted to run.

We finished that batch five hours ago, and now my lab assistant and I are working straight through the night to run as many of our samples as possible so she has data for her poster session next week...and so we can avoid a four hour road trip to and from Boston next week (which we still might need).

This is a little easier than my last all nighter in the fact that I haven't caffeinated yet...yet. Last time I had a red bull around 2AM and another around 4AM or 5AM and then coffee and other high caffeine drinks throughout the day. By the time I finally went to bed I had been up for over 40 hours and woke up into caffeine withdrawal and haven't had coffee since.

I'll probably take a 5-hour Energy at some point to make it through the morning/day. I foresee and early crash on this Thursday night and hating myself on Friday. But at least the samples will be finished.

To Acadia I boldly go!

So...the other week I did a 7 mile race and I had made the claim to my friends Maggie and Hannah (who ran it with me) that if I could complete the race in under an hour I would run the Acadia National Park Marathon with Miss Margret. I, however, failed.

Final time: 1 hour 1 minute 26 seconds. It was a little soul crushing to go the whole race and come so close to my goal, but it was a fine time considering I only trained for like a week and a half and it was only my second time running a distance that far...but it is still only 1 minute and 26 seconds from my goal.

So Mags (yes, I call her by multiple names) poked fun and said, "So I guess you're not doing that marathon, huh?" And I thought...for about 2 seconds, and decided I would do the marathon anyway.

So now I am running a marathon in October. Luckily I live with two former cross country/track kids so I am pretty sure I can get in shape for it in 3 months. My suggested goal is to work up to and maintain 40 miles a week. That is about 6 miles a day, running every day. I am going to work around that to long runs on weekends, shorter runs during the week, which is what most people do.

But...I should be recording my times to keep track of progress and to know how many miles I am doing. As such here is where I start keeping track:

Monday's Workout: 10 laps around the track (2.5 miles) with 10 sit-ups and 10 push ups before each lap.

Lap 1: 3.12

Lap 2: 3.19

Lap 3: 3.30

Lap 4: 3.27

Lap 5: 3.26

Lap 6: 3.38

Lap 7: 3.51

Lap 8: 3.41

Lap 9: 3.39

Lap 10: 3.25

Total: (I already cleared my watch, but I remember it being 35-ish minutes and change)

*Update* The Gorgeous Girl

Since the posting of my last...post, I have found out that The Gorgeous Girl is in fact already in a relationship.

Yeah, bummer. I found out from a mutual friend, who didn't find out until two days ago so I feel less bad about being in the dark, but wow...bummer.

Well, lots of fish in the sea, life goes on, (insert platitude here).

And now for some words of wisdom:

How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg. ~Abraham Lincoln

The end of a hiatus and the start of something new

So as the summer progressed I found myself with less and less free time. There was research during the day, hanging out with friends at night and then- oh shit, time for bed. Though I was able to find time every day to write a letter to my girlfriend, that activity mostly took over blogging for me. Writing at length about how my day was only to go back to a blog and write it again seemed silly and time consuming and I didn't want to just replicate the letters again, because then they would lose their significance (they were meant for her, not the whole world, whether the content was trivial or personal).

BUT NOW she is back in my time-zone and I am not out hiking about the west with Texans, so I can find some spare time out of my busy schedule to write again and keep this going.

So this is the end of the summer hiatus (until my week long vacation next week) for the Blue Shag Carpet, but more than just a restart, but a new beginning.

In the beginning I had pledged to keep people's names secret through the use of nicknames: this will change...maybe, slightly. The stories just don't flow well when I am having to constantly change and alter names, plus my friends who read this (all 2 of you) know who the people are so the anonymity is lost anyway. So it seems like a great opportunity to do a slight change. For the more benign tales of adventure, names will be used. However, some tales are just way too embarrassing for real names, but those stories never have a huge cast of characters. As such, for the especially juicy bits of gossip and ridiculousness, names will be arbitrarily changed on the spot. Most likely a "Boy A and Girl A were with Girl B and C..." sort of set up and if I am feeling especially creative: actual fake names!!! But for the time being, real names, real people, real hilarity.

Unfortunately these changes will have to wait until next week, since Ari (short for Ariana; my girlfriend) and I are going to the Adirondacks for the next week before school starts. I am really excited for this trip. Just the two of us, the mountains, the lake, nature, and all the time in the world. It's going to be so nice to just sit and relax and get away from it all before school starts up and there are the added things like life to get in the way of living.

Also, I have decided (almost arbitrarily) to do a triathlon in September. Now what would ever posses me to do such a thing you might ask? Well, at the start of last school year I decided to be more open minded and say fewer nos and more yeses, as such when I was asked to do a triathlon, it seemed like a great way to get in shape and I wouldn't be going it alone (Maggie, a grad student in my department, is the one who convinced my to do it). Now all I have to do is convince as many other people as I can to do it with me!

Well, that's all for now folks! More later and LOTS more after this coming week!

Epic Fail: making coffee

So, what do you need to make coffee?  Ground coffee, water and a filter for the coffee maker right?  Exactly what I thought.  So I wake up this morning and go for coffee and it turns out I forgot the most important ingredient in making coffee: a pot to collect it in.  So instead of nice hot coffee I had a sludge mess of grounds and water burnt onto the heating pad and dripping all over the table where my coffee maker is.  

In other words:  EPIC FAIL!