Lab before bedtime

It never fails.

Last night after putting Bean to bed, making a (delicious) dinner for Husband and I, packing Bean's lunch for school, and folding a load of laundry, I treated myself to an hour of deliciously trashy TV. (The Cleaner. Have you seen it? It's garbage TV but Benjamin Bratt is gorgeous and I'm kinda diggin' it.)

9:00 rolls around and I decide to enforce bedtime for Husband and I. So we're there standing at the mirror brushing our respective teeth and I'm of course thinking about my experiments for the next day. And that's when I see it: there are my restriction digests, still sitting at 37 degrees. The last thing I was supposed to do before I left work was add ethanol to those babies and stick 'em in the freezer. But I didn't. And the sample is precious. And star activity will ruin the experiment.

The age old question: is it worth it to run back to lab in the middle of the night (yes, 9:00 is the middle of the night for me these days) to save your experiment? In this case, because the sample took 5 days of prep, the answer was decidedly yes.

Age old sub-question: is it worth it to put on pants for said trip back to lab? In this case, because I am lazy, the answer was decidedly no.

So I hop in the car and head back to work. As I roll up to my building (a parking space even!), my stomach drops. The department has been hosting an evening seminar series on Wednesday nights which, if my calculations were correct, would currently be in the coffee and cookies phase in the lobby directly outside my lab. What better way to say I don't give a sh*t about this department then to walk through the seminar crowd in my pajamas? Awesome.

So I take the back stairs into the building and sneak into lab via 6 other labs. I remove my (possibly overdigested) samples from the incubator and sneak back out the way I came.

Now this tragedy of missed sleep and embarrassing pajamas could have all been avoided if I could just remember to finish my freakin' experiments. But it never fails. Whenever I have a long incubation and think I'll just take that out last thing before I leave, I always always forget.

I need some sort of, I don't know, timer or something. Oh wait, I have one of those. Clearly I need something else. Like a functional brain, or adequate amounts of sleep, but I'm not sure that working mothers can legally acquire either of those things.

Fine. I'll settle for an appropriately used post-it notepad and a total lack of faith in my ability to remember anything at all.