I'm going to a Gordon Conference at the end of the month. That's essential a pretty hardcore scientific conference, with a full programme and lots of very clever people in attendance (and me). This particular meeting is at Colby College, Maine, which is in the middle of bloody nowhere.
Seeing as I'd have to break the journey anyway (because trans-Pacific flights arrive on the Eastern seaboard at stupid times), and overnight either in Boston or New York going up and coming back, I've decided to take an extra day and do the tourist thing. It doesn't help that the conference finishes on the 4th July, which is some kind of public holiday or party in the US. I might see if I can see fireworks anywhere and ask what's going on in my best English accent.
So. It took me about half an hour to write the abstract and a similar amount of time to create the application online. The Black Queen spent Thursday afternoon looking for flights, then I took over and spent all day Friday trying to juggle connections and whatnot, finally making bookings Friday night. On the weekend I rested (actually, I didn't: but that's a story for somewhere else). Monday morning I figured out the hotels I'd need, and since then I've been banging my head against the completely arcane and impenetrable accounting system in order to get approval for the money I've already spent on the corporate card for the flights, and to make a claim for the hotel bills that have to be paid in advance and have had to come off my own credit card.
It's a bloody nightmare. You've got to do all these things in the right order, and you can't click 'save' until you've got all the information: if you hit 'submit' too soon it shoots off to get approved and you have to winkle it back out (easy to cock this one up — the buttons aren't labelled in any meaningful fashion) — and if, because you like to multi-task, you decide to open a claim for one sort of expense while working on a travel requisition then the second opens in the first window (not in a new tab, no, that would be sensible) and you lose everything you've done up to that point because you can't hit save yet.
My travel requisition might be a little terse for that reason.
Anyway, I got it done, and if I haven't checked all the right boxed or filled in every last detail I'm sure someone in admin will scream and shout. Fine.
After all that I went into the lab and buffered some phenol/chloroform. It was comforting. The semi-ester scent of isoamyl alcohol purified my senses. When people saw me in labcoat, gloves and safety specs they knew I was doing something dangerous. And real.
It felt good to be alive.
