9:43 am - Saturday 5th May 2001

We now return you to your irregular programming.

Tuesday my supervisor got back after his short sabbatical to Japan. He was pretty out of it still on Wednesday, but there was a trivia night being held at the Research School next door. The Ph.D. students in our lab were hungry and so we crammed six of us into one car and went for cheap yet nice pizza in Dickson. After that I let them go to the trivia night and I went home to bed (they had a full team). The next day was a god-awful group meeting. It rolled on for 3 hours from 10 am till 1 pm, and at the end Clem and I summarized our work in 5 minutes each. Not because we hadn't done any work, but because we cut the bullshit out and just went for it.
I missed coffee because of the meeting (though I did sneak out, courtesy of my mobile for 5 minutes), but after I went to the Union for lunch I wandered over in front of Chifley library because there were all these artistic performances going on. I bumped into Emma and we chatted away, on of the people asked us to draw some stuff for some sort of montage, so we did and I chatted to Aveline who walked past and then Chrissy from DX. Jenny was sitting down on the grass so the three of us went over to sit with her and listen to the band which was playing. That was nice, but eventually I had to go back to work. That night I went back to the lab whilst waiting for the gym to clear, but was frustrated by not being able to print out sections of my thesis. I've pretty much decided to kill the environment and print out as many copies of my thesis as it takes to spot all the mistakes. I find it hard to overview a 50 page chapter on the computer and so I prefer to have a paper copy to flick through.

On Friday morning I had a long discussion with my supervisor over the continuing failure of G0(ene)-Cl, however we reached no definite conclusions. I went back to work synthesizing my second generation mini-wedge (MW-G2) and dropped into a discussion between him and Clem. The discussion swung back onto some aspects of my work and we came up with a very interesting twist to my work, a new multi-variant pathway which I find hard to believe that I hadn't considered it before. This was highly intriguing, so I put a reaction on with an anthracenyl core and let that react.

The day had been very peculiar. I had run out of my Progynova (oestradiol Valerate) on Wednesday and I had no new scripts. I also had to get more Androcur. I am also fairly broke, but after cycling into town, juggling money through a few accounts, picking up my new script, dropping the Androcur script in to be filled, getting essential food and so on, and then after all this cycling back to get my oestrogen script filled at Uni. I was in a particularly foul, edgy mood brought on by estrogen deprivation over the last few days, this took a long time to go away even after I downed 4 mg of Progynova and chilled with music and some luxurious yogurt. I chatted intermittently with Allison on ICQ in the afternoon, and after a few hours of food, coke and medications settling into my body I felt significantly better. The American academic who has been working in our labs received official word of his promotion to full professor, so we broke out the bottles of wine late in the afternoon. Anyway, after half a cup (yes we were drinking out of coffee mugs) I was feeling very tipsy, after another half-cup I was quite drunk, more then I have been in a long time. I was very surprised by this, but it was kind of fun, I was playing my music, talking on ICQ for a very long time and working up my reaction. I left the lab about 6:30 pm, still not feeling particularly steady on my feet, but feeling quite amazingly chirpy indeed.

I had some food and a nap, and at 9:30 pm I walked over to P.J.'s where Maddy and her housemates were having one last bash before she flies out to England on Wednesday with her mother. It was quiet night despite Maddy being tipsy and in search of a man. I got home about midnight and was very grateful to be able to crash out.
Today I am supposed to be meeting with this young CD whom I met a few weeks ago. Being his first contact point, I feel I can allow him some time but not a whole lot, I have to finish my thesis as well as. I'll try and hand him over to some of the CD's I know.

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