REU at UK: Absolutely Nothing

I accomplished absolutely nothing this week.
I analyzed data and waited for the grad students in my lab to discover what is wrong with our gold because I cannot do anything without gold.

On Monday afternoon we figured out that the oven where the gold is annealed was not working properly.
On Tuesday the oven was fixed and I read papers.
On Wednesday I worked on my goal sheet and waited for one of the grad students to determine if the oven was in fact properly fixed before we annealed oodles of gold.
On Thursday we discovered that the oven was fixed properly but that for what I need the gold for, I didn't need annealed gold.
On Friday, I attempted to use un-annealed gold so that I could actually accomplish something this week. Turns out while contact angle and FTIR work on unnealed gold, PDMS peels off unnealed gold resulting in the chips being rendered useless.

Literally accomplished nothing.

Oh wait! I made PDMS molds in the shape of Legos. So I guess I did accomplish one thing... or nine really.

And the most frustrating part is that Brian only trusts one person to anneal gold, so no one annealed gold until Friday afternoon and since they have the keys and passwords and what not, they were supposed to text me if/when they got the gold out of the oven so that I could do some catch up work over the weekend. Well, that worked out splendidly. Looks like this is going to be a 60 hour work week in three days for me... oh wait. That's impossible.

To make things all the better this week, socially our group is going downhill. It seems that cliques have formed which are zero fun and keep not including the rest of us in the funtivities. Well, they can't be much fun without the 6 of us that keep "missing" our phone calls.

And Nate had surgery and will be gone for a couple more days, and so that's even more of a bummer because he and I often work in the same lab and now the lab is very quiet and significantly less fun. It seems as though he is doing well though, which is excellent.

So... yeah...

Here's to hoping it gets better!