Today, I spent most of my work day with a delightful German man named Claus. I've learned that in grad school, at one point or another everything in your lab breaks (literally everything, including grad students). And when that item is your $17000 microscope, you get to meet repairmen like Claus. In his own words, the inside of our microscope was "so dusty you could plant a potato garden." Now you understand what I mean when I say the man was delightful. He flipped our microscope on its head (which made me very nervous, but he seemed totally comfortable with) and worked some kind of magic involving hammers, Allen wrenches, sand paper, and lots of grease to make our vintage scope work like new again. He even polished it for us while telling me about one of his upcoming service trips to a naval base in San Diego to fix a submarine periscope. In short, Claus was the coolest.
The rest of the day was spent having an office hour to which nobody came, going to a seminar about catalysis where I understood about 20% of what was said, and polishing up my grad school presentation I'll be giving next week at my alma mater. Because guys, next week I'll be in Washington. I'm so excited I can hardly stand it.
I also replaced a (very) small but (kind of) important part on the interior of my car today! All by myself! Granted it was just the little piece that the sun visor clips in to, but I was still pretty proud of myself. I accidentally snapped the original one in half last week when I apparently got a bit overaggressive with the visor because it was way too sunny out for the middle of "winter." This resulted in the clip flying toward the windshield and the visor flying back toward my face, which made my drive home on the highway ever so exciting. Atleast it only cost $3.50 for the replacement part.
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