Thank you to everyone who has inquired over the past several days about how my experiment is going. I had a bad day on Wednesday, but tried some things yesterday that ended up working out well, and am now back to getting nice results. And my work schedule complements nicely my vacation schedule--I'll finish up this data set tomorrow and then let the cryostat warm up while I'm on vacation with Matt. Then I'll have some more samples to measure when I get back, and that's when we'll know exactly how well this experiment is working.

In other news, I have found a new internship to apply for. This one is only for twelve weeks, but it sounds interesting, and I know that if I get it, I will make contacts that could lead to a permanent position in science policy. And that is something that I think I really need because two nights in a row I've had dreams featuring characters from The West Wing. I won't detail much about Wednesday's dream because mine is a relatively family-friendly blog, but I will say that Josh Lyman was involved, and I was Drew Barrymore. In Thursday's dream, I worked in the White House and asked Donna if she wanted to go to the UCen (UCSB's student union thingie) for lunch. At first she was skeptical, but then she agreed. We couldn't talk Josh into going because he had a meeting, but we ran into him on our way to lunch, and he decided to join us after all.