Under the Crushing Weight of Exams

Actually, I've only got three, and one is down so yay.

Now, the reason I only have three is because my prof decided, in lieu of a final exam, we would instead have one giant lab report worth 50% of our mark. That sounded like an awesome idea until about five days ago when I realized it was due this Tuesday (tomorrow), at which point I started having nightmares about agglutination inhibitiors, and realized that my notebooks were full of drawings of angry bacteria pulling sugars off of sad blood cells:

Actually not a bad representation of how cells bind

So basically, I've got this one GIANT lab report to due, which is due tomorrow at 2pm, and the last few days have been intense. I'm up to about seven pages on the report, and I expect another three or four by the time I'm done. But the best part is this: when I'm done, can I relax and have a pint, maybe go sit on the beach? No, no I can't, because my Reaction Kinetics test is on Friday and the sum total of my memories from that class is "acquire rate expression, keep adding natural logs and re-graphing until you get a straight line". (To be fair I think that's all anyone remembers from that class, though, including the professor)

The experiment itself is basically one extremely short lab needlessly expanded to include several hours that were completely unnecessary. The upshot is this: In the presence of certain proteins, red blood cells will bind together. If you get a testing plate and put red blood cells and the right protein in together and leave it for a few hours, you'll see a 'carpet' of red where the blood cells have all bound together. Basically, our task was to test different methods of inhibiting this binding; when that happens all you see is a red dot at the bottom of the well. All in all, that would have taken maaaaaaybe two hours to do (fifteen minutes to put everything in the plate, 1:45 at the pub while the reactions went), so our professor decided to add more needless busywork: we had to synthesize the inhibitors ourselves. Each one took minimum three hours to do. There were five. OH GOD.