Phew, it's been a variable last few days, I've tried to keep up with dairying, but sometimes it's just hard to maintain. Work has been the usual collection of meetings and attempted chemistry. I had a meeting with the physicists and engineer on Wednesday morning which was somewhat useful, it seems we have the behaviour we desire, but only over one order of magnitude instead of the three orders of magnitude we need. In other words, we have useful set of behaviours over a factor of 10, but to be useful for a device, we have to extend that to 1000. Since the synthetic chemistry team (i.e. me) doesn't know what the physical nature of this effect is, I don't know how I'm going to tune the materials appropriately.
Not helping matters is the fact that it has been “hot as a kerosene cat in hell wearing gasoline britches” (to borrow a phrase). The temperature has been up to 100F during the day and the lab (as I've probably bitched about before) gets pretty steamy by about 4 pm. This afternoon we had another meeting to discuss intellectual property (IP) issues, and for whatever reasons we had a whole bunch of extraneous physicists there. We thrashed out a few things and started to get some direction to things, even if I think privately that they may overestimate the promise of these materials.
I had lunch with Tiffany on Tuesday afternoon, but she and her brother are working the evening (4-12pm) shift cleaning and doing janitorial work around the University so I haven't seen much of them this week. I think she mentioned they were going floating down one of the local rivers today, and I admit I was really quite jealous. Mainly because I would have liked to have hung out in the cool of the river with them rather than being stuck at work. Oh well, it's petty so I'll get over it.
Yesterday after work I went down to the local tattoo parlour (Why is it called a “parlour”?) to ask about a design I've been thinking about for quite sometime. They quoted me about $100 and probably under an hour to apply since it's a simple, single colour design. It was a nice enough place, I asked about how they autoclave their equipment, made sure the tattooist I was talking to had short fingernails and healthy looking hands and just generally tried to pick up the vibe. They had photo portfolios of work that the resident tattooists had done, and I had read online at How Stuff Works that 50% of people regret getting their tattoos. Having seen some of the work in the portfolios, I tended to agree. The work itself was of good quality, it was more a question of “Why would you want that design permanently on your body?”
For me personally, I just want a single tattoo in black (easiest colour to remove) down on the small of my back (easiest to hide). For me, the tattoo is a personal reminder of my transition, of how lucky I am to be here as myself today, of how it will always be an intrinsic but personal part of my life and history. Perhaps I want to immortalize it before I can put it to rest…