Third Post

Well, I got in my first car accident today. I don't actually want to talk about it, but there it is, hanging like a very, very dark raincloud that insists on pelting me with golf-ball sized hail and icy rain to match. I hadn't hoped to have my first accident before I'd completed 20 years on the earth. I certainly hadn't hoped to be the cause of my first accident. Yes, that's right, I rear-ended someone on 81 this morning. Dear, sweet, stop-and-go, construction-filled 81.

I'm absolutely sick to my stomach over it. Not to mention that this accident caused me to miss Caiping's capstone seminar before her dissertation over her Ph.D. thesis. Which was, naturally, my only reason to get up before at least 10:00am this morning, as my meeting with FX was at 1:30.

Justine went. We'd been going to go together, but that clearly didn't work out. Later, after I'd sat in my car in the ESF Standart parking lot and sobbed for half an hour or forty-five minutes, she came out and gave me a hug and talked to me about the drama at the seminar and the drama in her lab. That calmed me down a bit... I think she frantically launched into stories because I was still teetering on the verge of tears and she didn't want to push me over the edge.

So I went up to her lab with her because at some point I was going to have to leave my car and come up onto campus, unless I wanted to sit there and mope for another three and a half hours. I walked around and watched what she was doing and talked to her and Margaret... and then Boyer came in and was really cruising for a meltdown as he demanded to know where some samples were, and Margaret and Justine told him they weren't sure because they hadn't worked with the samples. It was very tense. At one point he looked directly at me when he was asking a question and I'm pretty sure he thought I was working for him. So as soon as his back was turned, I made my escape. I didn't want a ridiculously tall, ridiculously angry chemist to eat me. Not today.

So I went down to the stockroom and found Christina, who was willing to give me several hugs, and then I briefly helped her with inventory. At one point some girl came in and asked "Can I just go through to the dry ice room?"

Christina said, "Yes you may," and the girl thanked her and said something about how she hadn't known if it was okay. Christina then said, "Oh, but be careful that the dog doesn't get you." She immediately afterwards cried, "No, I'm kidding! I'm just kidding!" She looked at me and turned progressively redder until we heard the door click shut, and then she laughed harder than I possibly have ever seen her laugh in my life. Apparently the girl actually thought she was serious about the dog. Hahahahahahaa, I got a good laugh out of that too, which was nice because laughs have been few and far between today.

Then we went to Marshall Street and ordered our usuals from Syrajuice. It was nice, they were nice, lunch was nice, and somehow we made it there just before it rained and left just after it rained. That was, I think, incredibly lucky.

I made it back well in time for my meeting with FX, wherein I filled out some paperwork (we had to make a pilgrimage to the secretary to get it, but we did) and was told to look some things up (I'm trying! Gosh darn it!) and come back tomorrow at 9:00am dressed in lab clothes. "Whatever you think they are," he says, "I'm not too picky."

Then I headed to Sci/Tech to pick up a book to discover that it is closed all this week, headed back to Moon and spent 45 minutes trying to log into SciFinder, and then finally broke into SciFinder and found exactly one article that might be helpful after searching for another 45 minutes. All in all... quite a day.

I'm hoping to catch up with Davey tonight. We'll see. Things are complicated since the accident.