Monday, Monday, Monday. You'll pay for the whole seat but you'll only need the EDGE.

Seth Godin recently wrote "Getting your ducks in a row is not nearly as powerful as actually doing something with your duck." At least I think he wrote it, I heard about it on Twitter so maybe he said it aloud and it could be really old. Either way the premise really struck me. We (humankind) spend a lot of time with our thumbs up our asses assembling the perfect collection of ducks before actually doing something with them. I see and do this all the time but I also see people break free. A few of us here on this blog have started a post of with "I didn't really have anything good to blah, blah, blah" and by the time the post is finished it might be a steaming pile of shit but at least it's a post. If I waited around until I had something brilliant and/or inspiring to say I'd be posting things 4 days late. Which brings me to my ducks.


Over the past few weeks I have acquired each of my ducks, lined them up very neatly, and shot or watched each one of them get shot directly in the face. In this metaphor (or is it a simile) the ducks are all the things I need to do my research, here after referred to as research ducks. I have either killed off or outsourced my personal life ducks. Take my wedding for example, I'm getting married in July. I know where it is and approximately when but I specifically asked to be "left out of the picture, unless needed". I think the rest of my personal life ducks were eaten by my research ducks.

Some of you may have noticed that I did not publish anything on Monday. If you didn't then these are not the droids you are looking for. I would like to take a moment to list all of shit that went wrong.

1. Nitrogen gas was shut down in our building (until July) about a month ago, don't worry we have LN2 tanks to use as backups. I use nitrogen for all of my experiments, 15L/hr all day long.
2. The most important part of my fancy ass new instrument needed to be replaced (we just bought it in October, thought it didn't start working reliably until December).
3. Technicians took 5 days longer than expected to replace the part.
4. Due to shut down of N2 gas the pressure at the LN2 filling station is higher than normal which is preventing me from filling my LN2 tank that's supposed to replace the building N2. Fucking useless.
5. After my instrument was finally fixed a visiting collaborator showed up to use it all week.
6. My boss has had his foot up my ass because my current results don't tell a good story. On a related note I specifically did not show him this data because it did not tell a good story, he came over to my desk and started looking at it then began complaining. He also complained about things I didn't do that he told me NOT to do and things I did do that he asked me to do. That was not a typo.
7. I'm supposed to present at a conference at the end of next week which I was planning on having some new data for, see items 1-5.

So there I was running ahead of schedule when all of my ducks were taken from the row I put them in and unceremoniously drowned in a bucket of luke warm water. I went with luke warm water because I figured my hand would get cold after the first duck. The mental image of that statement just made me sad. First off I don't think I could drown a duck, a cat maybe but not a duck, and secondly it reminded me of all of the shit I'm in regarding my research.

Which brings me back to doing something with the duck I have left. I think that's the instrument but I stil have a lot of samples which are probably ducks also. So fuck'em I'm just running them without nitrogen, like a rebel, and do so in the off hours of the day, also rebel like. Every time I think of Mr. Godin's comment, specifically the part about doing something with the duck, I always picture me throwing it at someone. That makes me smile.

Finally on ADHD. I think if we euthanized all of the people with ADHD and all of people who don't believe in it we'd reach some sort of universal balance. I suppose that doesn't cover the issue of skyrocketing health care cost, euthanizing peeps is probably expensive. I'd like to see three supporting arguments and three dissenting arguments with citations (wikipeida is cool).