Sigh...........................

I feel like I'm just barely keeping my head above water.

I'm seriously exhausted. My brain has stopped working. My mind swarms with all the things I must juggle. Lately, my research has suffered a great deal of scheduling mishaps that totally sap my energy and frustrate me. I'm the one who has to patch it all up when things come falling apart. Participants fail to show up and then want to reschedule with me. Participants show up when they aren't supposed to and then want to reschedule with me. Participants forget that they have class and then want to reschedule with me. Participants call me at 11:45pm to say they can come the next day, oh, and by the way, sorry for calling so late. No problem, man, it's not like I'm asleep anyways.

Then my research assistants don't show up to test the participants. But, I have to test a my own participant. And I have to call my other research assistant to test my participant. And then another research assistant is late and I have to prep her participant before I can get to my own participant, who should have been tested by my other assistant who failed to show up. In all honesty, I think I forgot to let her know that she had participants for those times. Sometimes I wonder whether I bring this all upon myself or if these are freak accidents that keep happening to me. I don't know, but I can't possibly be this incompetent.

And in the midst of it all, I have to push forward a contract between my university and the hospital where I'll be doing my neuropsych internship. There's so much going back and forth; nobody knows what's required and who's supposed to be doing what. Sigh, I have to get all these shots tomorrow and run around getting signatures.

And in the midst of all that, I have not been able to put together a very simple, short IRB application to start running pilot tests on a new study. And I have to finish programming my paradigm in Superlab, let alone write a new program for this study. I even have to take care of the technical issues in the lab by contacting and scheduling the tech person around all the testing (and believe me, there are very few hours in a week that someone is NOT testing a participant). And let's not even get started on the fact that my grant proposal has blown to pieces and the deadline is looming. Plus, I need to start coding data so that I can ensure that the rest of the participants will be balanced across conditions in one of my studies. And I still have to write a test review, create a survey, collect data, and conduct a factor analysis on the survey for one of my classes.

And another participant left a message wanting to reschedule with me because he had class during our testing session this morning. AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Is the semester over yet? Whimper...