Friday, September 12, 2008

Herculean Effort and Mr. Chainsaw (good name for a band that!)

So today is my ninth (9th) straight day at work and apart from me wondering where the hell the time went (??) it has pretty much been a blur. I've put in some ridiculous hours over these 9 days to catch up all the work that didn't get done (by other people) when I took time off to spend with Rachel. I've pretty much caught up to where we need to be and all it took was 14 hr days, commandeering both Mass Spectrometers and both Gas Chromatographs and snarling like a pit-bull at anyone who even tried to talk to me or "help". We sent 5 GC columns last Friday to our USA office and today we're poised to send 6 more so that should keep the people on the other side of the blue door happy. This was no easy feat seeing as Mass Spec No.1 spent much of the last 9 days broken and is still the Mass Spectrometer equivalent of "Nerd Glasses" which are broken and being held together at the bridge by sticky tape. It now "works" and performs it's function (sort of..) but anyone who looks at it instantly knows that it's not healthy and on life support. This is why I had to also get Mass Spec No.2 in on the fun, the results it gives us are useful (it has no where near the sensitivity of MS No.1 though....and in mass speccing it's all about the sensitivity..oh and the vacuum..sensitivity and sucking...hehehe...also reminds me of another past time...anyway getting side tracked) but because the "client" for this project is the company that actually makes Mass Spec No.1 THEY of course want all the results produced on "their" machines. What they don't know won't hurt them though ...
So here we are at Friday again and (as of yet) there has been no mentions of anyone having to come in again on the weekend to work..let's hope it stays that way.
This morning, as it's WBBC day, I usually allow myself the luxury of 1/2hr extra sleep due to not having to make lunch for myself. So there I am, it's 6:45am and I'm merrily sleeping away dreaming of whatever it was I was dreaming of and suddenly there in my dream is a guy with a chainsaw?? Now, granted over the last 9 days I have thought many thoughts about many different things that could be solved (in my opinion) with the use of a chainsaw, so it's not all together unprecedented that my subconscious had stored this fact and thought that now was a good time to play that back. The subconscious after all is like the normal "Conscious" after several large Beers and 2 bottles of Tequila (i.e. EVERYTHING seems like a good idea regardless). I can't remember the context that Mr. Chainsaw played in my dream as I can't remember what I was actually dreaming about. For the sake of argument, i'll just go with what with I usually dream about which was probably something like being locked in a room covered in honey, surrounded by several diabetic Swedish lingerie models who all had low blood sugar levels and needed to get a sugar fix ASAP. As you can gather, a large, burly man holding a chainsaw and revving the crap out of it is somewhat the "Odd Man Out" in the above scenario. So my conscious brain sort of spoke up, as usually happens in such situations during sleep, and goes "WHAT THE HELL???".
I sort of slipped out out sleep into semi-awakedness and then realised that the chainsaw was infact real. It was being wielded by the people renovating the house next door who thought that 6:47am was the best time for them to start cutting up wood. Now, call me crazy, but there are several dozen other things I can think of that I would consider a good idea to be doing at 6:45am on a Friday morning and most of them involve a lot less chainsawing. So today, my sleep-in-day, actually started earlier than a normal non-sleep-in day. It's like I have some sort of phantom insomniac 3 year old waking me before I am due :( So I got up and did what any normal person rudely awakened in the early hours of the morning would do ..... played a bit of Scrabby (also because the chainsawing was accompanied by the arrival of the rubbish/recycling trucks to form an impenetrable sleep deprivation crescendo of "awake"). In my semi-awake state I didn't remember that I had played all my scrabby last night and would therefor be out of luck. However, upon opening scrabby...there were games to play??? Must have been a long night for my opposition as I went to bed rather late last night and they weren't played then? I quickly played my turns (noting that I am well positioned to win a few games to boot) and then went for a shower ... it was now 7am.
Tomorrow can't come quick enough now. Time off from work and a few exciting things to pass the time.
1) My u10 Basketball team is in the Grand Final :) we're going to get belted...but the fact that we are there is a major achievement in my first season as a coach.
2) My mother is in Melbourne and will actually visit my HOUSE!!! This will be the FIRST member of my family that has ever been to any of the houses I've lived in in Melbourne (I've nearly been here 5 years too!!)
3) My Basketball starts up again on wednesday and I think it's actually time for some new basketball shoes. The one's I've got I bought in Adelaide in 2004 ... so I thnk they have done a good job and besides, I think they are what's responsible for my foot aching for about a week after each game. So a trip into the Converse clearence store when I go get my mother is also on the cards for sunday.

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