My thighs really hurt today-specifically my quads and hamstrings. Maybe I overdid it at the gym last night - well I did do 3 sets of each machine when I normally do 2, so maybe that's what it was. Then did my usual cardio after of bike/treadmill. It really hurt to walk down stairs, more so than walking up- at work I probably walked down stairs over a dozen times today. Today especially b/c I had to get my compounds ready for shipping. This meant several trips back and forth to the analytical instuments which are all downstairs.

Good news is that i had 2 compounds ready to ship today and our group had 10 altogether. Gives me a really good feeling that I contributed to it. My current supervisor is very cool. He doesn't bug me about when I'm getting stuff ready to ship. He simply waits until ship day and asks then if I have anything going out(he proof-reads and sends our paperwork for the compounds to our shipping dept). today he said, ohhh, you have 2 going out, that's great, that's great. Previous supers have been like monkeys on my back (my expression for this when i'm riled = up under my arse) asking every day when I'll have this ready or that ready. Much better to just let me get on with it.

Yesterday had to go to this seminar for class by this famous chemist - famous in the world of chemistry anyway. Many people told us that he was quite smug. I guess if I had over 1600 papers published with my name on them and if I was one of the most cited inorganic chemists today, I'd be somewhat smug too. Well the best part for me was his introduction given by this Russian professor(didn't catch his name) - it was the funniest thing and he had a slide show of each part of the story. Basically, it was about how he and Cotton got to see Red Square when they were in Moscow even though it was blocked off from the general public and all b/c the military police guy knew of Cotton(from his many chemistry texts). The other funny thing is that when Cotton got up there he said that it was the most unusal intro he'd ever had but that he wasn't too surprised since the Russian prof was a most unusal and original scientist. Kind of a compliment wrapped up in an insult.

I must confess that I slept through much of the talk. What I was awake for didn't make tons of sense to me. Guess it's a good thing that I'm not in the inorganic chemistry field :)
Also at the end of his talk(I was awake by then :), they asked for questions. This guy asked something(didn't quite catch it) - Cotton's response - he said that there were 2 kinds of stupid questions, 1. questions that are trivial and could be answered by anyone and 2. questions that are so obscure that they can't be tested or investigated. That was it, his ans to this guy. I did have a question but I figured that he would consider any question prefaced by "this may be a stupid question but..." would also be ans with disdain and ridicule. So I kept my mouth shut and my hands down. One more class left. Yay!

Was watching the Yankees-Red Sox game but it's 3-2 2nd inning in favor of Red Sox. Cannot watch this anymore. Time for idol anway. Today J and I spent quite a bit of time searching for CA zip codes. You may be wondering why. Well, we were wondering whether idol shows earlier on the West coast than it does here in NY and/or if they start at the same time everywhere. This was of course after the whole shipping rush(to get the compounds I made ready for shipment). Can't remember exactly why we had to know this info so urgently that we spent about 10min looking for it. But it might be b/c we were wondering how this would affect the voting i.e. best time for us to get through. We found out that idol shows at 8pm in NY first and at 8pm everywhere else as well - by then it'd be 11pm our time. Now that I've explained it, it seems really lame. Oh well :)