Life: everything at once!

The last few weeks have been absolutely crazy. I have not only been working on my own multiple research projects, but I have also recently starting working a project that a younger student in my lab is doing. I'm helping out from now until his paper deadline in June, to help with getting the work done in time, and to help by just being an additional person with ideas since the project is complex. It's an interesting project, but there is lots going on and lots to fix. I hope we get it done in time!

In addition to all of that actual work (think "too many projects"), I've also been actively trying to find a place to live next year, dealing with the fact that my car failed its emissions test during inspection, and planning a trip to look at wedding locations. Unfortunately everything seems to need to be done during normal business hours, which is quite a hassle.

Today we found 2 places that we'd love to live at next year, but each have draw backs. We disagree on which drawbacks are important, so it will be interesting to see if we can compromise or if we'll just keep looking and risk losing these places.

As far as the car is concerned, the first place we took it said the repairs would probably cost over $1,000 and wasn't worth doing on such an old car (to which I thought "oh my, my car is 9 years old!). I was going to apply for the Economic Hardship Repair Extensionso that I wouldn't have to fix it right now, but then I realized that we didn't take it to an official registered emissions repair shop, and therefore the quote wouldn't count toward it. So we took it to another place in town, and they couldn't replicate the error codes, and told us to drive it around so it could gather more data. Today we took it back, it had enough data but no error codes, so we returned to the inspection station and it passed with no problems. Are there still unfixed problems? Maybe. Am I concerned? Only marginally, since it's not a safety issue. I might be in the market for a new (i.e. new to me) car soon though. Not that I have any other expensive events coming up...

So planning for our trip has been annoying in the sense that I have to call people during business hours, and I'm very busy with work and meetings during the day. So far I've managed to make appointments for us to see 3 potential locations for the wedding and reception, but still need to make more. And we are traveling to visit them next week! You would think that being a graduate student would mean you could find the time for this sort of thing, but I think I am proving that is not the case. It's only true when you are in a non-busy time of year, and right now is ultra busy for me!

Well, back to work. Lots and lots of things to do, even though it's already past 5PM. I blame the combination of all of these things going on for why I haven't been posting!