a learning experience

What in the world was I doing up at 1:08a.m. this morning, anyhow?

Do you know what I love about life? Learning. That moment when all of a sudden things begin to click and one can step back and say "A-HA! Now I get it." It's also the most frustrating thing, because usually when you learn something, you realize that you've spent a lot of effort, time, and/or money on other ideas, concepts, or assumptions that turned out to be not accurate or true.

What I mean to say, as I randomly throw out words that jump in my exhausted mind, is that I've been trying and trying to get some things to work here in the lab. I used every resource I could think of. I followed all the steps I knew to be necessary. Yet still no luck. And then...I was informed of one secret ingredient that changes EVERYTHING. I still have to test that secret ingredient myself, but I am quite sure that it will significantly improve not only the quality but also the ease of my current experiment set. All very good things when one has spent multiple double-digit-hour days in the lab.

Of course, the down side is now I see that the efforts I've been putting forth the past three weeks were rather wasteful. I could have made so much more progress had I just known then what I know now. Plus, it would have used far fewer reagents and, thus, money. It's frustrating, too, that I didn't have the information I needed when I first needed it. And it makes me wonder if that's my responsibility - I tend to think it is, and even that fact can be really frustrating, because it means I would need to know that I need to know more than I know when I don't know something. Now that's a profound statement. Seriously, though - how and I supposed to know that I'm knowledge-less??? Perhaps I'm just so conceited and think I know everything already, that I never consider the fact that the aid of another, experienced person would be of any use.

Hm...

At any rate, it's a happy thought that I have finally found some promising leads to improve my research. And...it's also great that, on a FRIDAY!!!, I have some wonderful results that I've been trying to get for quite some time.

If only my head would stop pounding from lack of sleep, I would be a majority of contented.