Well, except for cleaning up the lab where I worked, I am done.

That was...well, it wasn't hard, the main thing was it required stamina and not looking too much at the "oh noes I have 45 more plants to unpot and separate into roots and shoots" thing.

(Often, students ask me if I think they're cut out for grad school. I ask them if they have a high threshold for boredom and if they can do the same task over and over and over again many times. Because really, persistence is the key to research, as much as ingenuity is. You can be a right Einstein when it comes to thinking up experiments, but if you can't keep your backside in the chair long enough to actually generate the data, you're sunk.)

I bought my Christmas cards this morning (when I got the bags. Yes, I bought my cards at Wal-Mart. No, I am not going to feel bad about that.) I did what I usually do: got one pack of explicitly religious cards for my friends at church and other people I know who are fairly devout, and another, more general (but still Christmas) set for my friends and family who celebrate Christmas but are not particularly devout.

I think I'm going to clean house this afternoon, and then do the cards tomorrow morning. And I am not going to graduation Saturday - the sign-up was SO early this year (seriously, it was like in October) and I told the secretary to put me down as a "no," partly in protest of being asked such a thing so early, and partly because there was half a chance I'd be traveling already. And I'm kind of glad. It might be a rain/snow mix Saturday.

I'm slowly working into more of a Christmas spirit. I think part of it was I was just so worried about successfully harvesting all those plants - it is very hard to separate roots out from soil (especially "natural" soil that has leaf-bits and sticks in it) and I decided that I would just do a "reasonable" level of clean - not making it perfect - because there's too much risk of losing roots that way.

I can't quite believe I'm done (well, except for "locking in" my grades and having one committee meeting tomorrow.)