Today my PI is treating our lab to lunch at The London Chop House somewhere in downtown Detroit. Apparently, it's a yearly lab tradition to go somewhere kind of fancy for lunch before Christmas. I'm not sure how long we'll be out - lunches here tend to run really really long. As in 2-5 hours long. Should be fun once I toss back a drink or two.
Tomorrow is the annual department holiday party. Since I am head of the social committee (I'm really only a puppet for the more socially-minded grad students), I am at least partly responsible for pulling this thing off. Ha! Essentially, people tell me what to do and I (eventually) go do it. We are getting pulled pork and chicken from Slow's BBQ, as well as their macaroni and cheese. The most controversial part of the party plan this year is that we are hiring a bartender. The deal is that unless we hire a bartender ($125 flat fee, 4 hour minimum), our department can be fined $4000 for unauthorized alcohol consumption. The problem with the bartender is that everyone has to supply the alcohol they want served AND each person gets only 2 drink tickets before being cut off. So that means if I bring in a six-pack of beer, this douchebag bartender will only let me have two of my own beers. WTF??! Excessive regulation tends to drive people underground, so in the spirit of fighting unjust oppression my lab mates are planning to hoard liquor in the lab and run our own speakeasy (at the opposite end of the corridor from the party). Bartender or no, there will be drunk grad students. Anyway, I said that I would make cookies (that was a dumb move) and pick up some other supplies, so I have to go to the store after lunch today.
We are also having a white elephant gift exchange, which should be fun. I have a box of rejected Christmas gifts in the basement (any gift that we haven't so much as looked at in at least the last year or longer) that I can choose from. I think I'm going to go with a giant mace gun I got for Christmas last year. When I say gun, I'm not kidding. This thing looks like a starter pistol (it's all black and doesn't say "mace" or anything on the grip, unlike the picture in the link) and it comes with a giant cartridge of mace. Working in Detroit, it sounds potentially useful. However, where the fuck am I going to keep a starter pistol full of mace and still be able to get to it if I need to use it?? Although now that I see how much the damn thing cost, maybe I'll hang on to it. It just looks ridiculous and thus perfect for a white elephant gift exchange.
Ugh. I still have two hours until lunch. I guess I should start catching up my lab notebook. I know that I've threatened to do this before, but I mean it for real this time. I think I've located all of my note scraps and put them in relative order. That's huge. Now let's hope that it all makes some kind of sense when I write everything down where it was supposed to go in the first place.
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