An update on my current work. My job has slowed down a lot since the last time I posted. Maybe slowed down isn't the right term, lets try "changed focus." I spend most of my time with a chemist, kind of tied to the hip. He is a great person to learn from, and a good person in general. He goes about doing stuff in the lab with me watching, then next time something needs to be done he asks me to do it while he does something else. It is a style of leadership that I deal well with. The "changed focus" part comes from this guy (Boyd) being a lab technicial, and not really doing too much research on his own. The general feel that I get is that Boyd is responsible for refining the process which other researches use. So by learning from him, I have been training as a lab technicial. My training will come to a head in 15 minutes when Boyd has to go to a meeting and I am asked to plate 20 microns of copper onto these plates that we need to ship back to Dupont tomorrow. Unfortunately we don't have an accurate micron/minute rate for the bath, so I will have to pull it out periodically and test the thickness, retreat the plates and put them back in the bath. It is a tedious process, but in theory if I can get my hands on an AFM machine I will be able to run some tests and take some data. This is more exciting than the past few days, which have been filled with various tests and titrations in order to make sure our baths were up to spec. I am a titrating fiend. When testing last night I found out that it takes ~1ml of my semen to turn Matt's mom from unpregnant to pregnant.

This coming weekend Chowning and I are planning a wonderful weekend in Blue Ridge, Ga. We are renting a cabin and doing cabinny things, which includes tubing down some river. It should be a great weekend, followed by a trip back to Atlanta for our anniversary dinner and watching of fireworks. It will be a much needed vacation for us, because the past few times we have been together have involved a decent amount of fighting. Most of it revolves around the following issue: Chowning is ready to get married and I am not. When asked why I am not ready to get married my answer is that I don't feel like I am ready to get married right now. The result is Chowning not understanding why I am not ready if she is not ready and the fighting ensues. Most of the time it revolves around my attempt to explain why I'm not ready to be married, which doesn't go over very well since it is largely based on a feeling. Now, I don't want to paint Chowning in a bad light here, she doesn't necessarily want to be married right now, but soon. Unfortunately, when I say that things will happen "soon" or "in time" she doesn't believe me and feels like it will never happen.

So I pose the following question (which is likely to be unanswered since few, if any people seem to check this thing): How much should a person have to validate their feeling on whether or not they want to be married?