I don't know if it was my adoration of flowing water, my pirate fetish, or the recent dive I took into H.P Lovecraft stories that drove me to work on a deep sea hood creation.
Sharpie stroke by stroke our underwater scene grew. It took close to a year to finish with our lack of free time, but by the end multiple people in various parts of the lab contributed.
It is gorgeous outside, but the only sun rays I can see sneak through bushes and bookshelves to fall sparingly along the cold hallways of the lab.
So I daydream.
At work the samples pile high, but in my mind only, sunshine glitters off the waves creating prisms of rainbows in the water as schools of fish swim through. Sharks and octopi feel the freedom of the vast ocean.
I stand on my boat deck sword in hand, Captain of the ship, as I watch the waves roll by.
I might be a chemist, but my love has always been biology. Walking into work the other day I saw these tiny birds, so I dropped all my bags and took pictures. Hard to see but they are poking their tiny bird heads out of these 2 blue pipes.
Animals are always surprising me with their innovations.
The next morning I got out of my car and saw this bird perched on a co-workers vehicle.
I always leave the building for lunch. It is a half hour retreat to run away from the lab walls that confine me.
A half hour where I park next to trees in a parking lot, the closest I can get to being outdoors.
This lunch held a special treat for me though as a family of geese crossed my path.
Fuzzy yellow gosling tails waddling down an alley is all it takes to make me smile.
So I go back to work and think thanks nature for letting me enjoy you for a couple minutes more.
Ronda used to say our extractions room is like the obliette of Labrinth, where people are forgotten.
In our windowless room, at the end of the building, I think sometimes she was right.
Now even Ronda the mama bear I thought would be here forever has gone. Like a bear she growled and roared and fought her way out of the obliette.
On Ronda's last day I came home and
suddenly realized I was the last of our 4 ladies and a beaker crew. So I poured myself a shot.
It was a year of losing friends in a blur of chemically induced memories.
Of my 5 years now this last one, held the most change for me at work. It really was the end of an era when our boss and my SPE partner left. After they left, our extractions group fell away like dominoes.
I watched from my SPE counter as an entire new cast was hired into the 4 ladies and a beaker show.
My new SPE partner became Bacti Kim. Not to be confused with the original Kim, who still works here, but has moved up to instrumentation.
Shipping Dept made this sign of Bacti Kim and I ~minion style
Hiring new people was a harder task for management than it should have been, leaving us understaffed, under appreciated, and overworked.
Many days I went to work and thought I'd be walking out the doors later singing Take this job and shove it!
Bacti Kim found this meme in the midst of some of our worst days here and thought this looked like us in SPE. She says I have a good joker face, and she is definately a good instigating beetlejuice. We laughed everytime we looked at it, until management made us take it down.
Which brings me back to the title of this post: Toluene and Tequila.
Days at work this year have been especially long and hard. We had our share of ether highs and ethyl acetate lows.
Maybe this is why we think of margaritas often.
We worked hardest at keeping our sanity many days.
We celebrated often the achievement of making it through another day of work.
At happy hour we were just your average environmental scientists, chemists, biologists, and geologists coming together to appreciate some of the finer points of chemistry.
So that was a year of laboratory hell in a nutshell.
Just me and "The Kims" trying to survive extractions through a lot of tequila therapy.
Let's face it, when it comes to tough science, alcohol is the solution.
This is what we look like the next day coming to work.
I'm in love with The Mahones right now and this song is the inspiration for the post title. I hope The Queen and Tequila gets stuck in your head too!
