Holiday time! Thank god...

I’ve finally finished what felt like the longest working week in history. It really must be said that tomorrow’s trip to Sydney could not have come at a better time, because I was very, very close to losing the plot today. My brain had been on the verge of exploding for several days, what with a million jobs and ideas whizzing around in there, but it was one particular instance that had me ready to give up hope this morning.

I was in the lab, busy preparing some samples of spinal cord for experiments scheduled for when I return, when I managed to spill an open bottle of PFA on the floor. For the non-scientists among you, PFA, or paraformaldehyde, is a compound used for fixing (preserving) tissue and it’s particularly nasty. Like, carcinogenic nasty. Needless to say, it was a case of panic stations and I spent the next hour absorbing it with pellets, hoovering it up and cleaning the floor with a solution that, judging by my subsequent light-headedness and burning lungs, was even more potent than the PFA. Everyone had to leave the lab when it got sorted out, so I delayed everyone else’s work as well as my own. I’m such a clutz sometimes!

Obviously it was completely my bad, but what got me down more than this horrific faux pas was the incredibly hard time I received from the woman who’s in charge of health and safety; you’d think I did it on purpose. I hate confrontation as it is, and I guess I must have caught her at a particularly stressful time. I don’t know what all the fuss was about really; at least her newly installed “emergency spills kit” got its first use.

So there you have it; by lunchtime, I was well and truly over being at work. I persevered for a few more hours to get some analysis done, then took immense joy in saying goodbye to everyone for a glorious ten days of neuroscience-free living. I’m now at home packing and getting very excited for my east coast adventure! I fly at 11.30 tomorrow morning and will be staying with some guys from my course who are on placement over there. They’ll be working during the week, so I plan on 1) doing the whole tourist thing and 2) meeting up with a whole host of friends and family who are currently living in or visiting the city. I hope to check in next week with all kinds of exciting experiences; cheers Perth!