Less than 3 weeks...
My senior project has to be done in less than 3 weeks. Meaning, I have to give my presentation on the 26th of April. I'm doing it on Gopher Tortoises, when they leave and re-enter their burrow, and if it's temperature related. I have to set up video cameras and thermometers at each Gopher Tortoise Burrow that I'm studying. Everything that could go wrong, has. The first thing I thought I took care of were the temperature loggers. This was last semester. Then I got the video equipment. I had to figure out how to set them up to time record. Then we found out the temperature loggers wouldn't work. The batteries are apparently dead, they're impossible to recharge, and even if I could, the cable that hooks them up to the computer so I could actually read the data was stolen when my teacher's laptop was stolen. After much thinking, and searching, I bought some big dial thermometers. I also had to find weather-proof, water-proof clocks, which was a trial in itself. Neither can be in direct sunlight, so I bought 4 (which is how many set-ups there are going to be) big tupperware things to put them in (they'll be laying on their side. Seeing as how motorcycle batteries (the power source for all this stuff out in the field) weigh a ton, and I have to bring 8 (2 for each set up), I had to buy a dolly to roll allthis stuff out there. It's in the sand, and I hope hope hope it doesn't get too stuck in the sand. Now, yesterday I set up a camera to one of the VCRs I'm taking out there to film one of the thermometers and my alarm clock, to see how long the battery would last. I just watched the tape and the thermometer and clock are completely unreadable. It's blurry and dark and it seems like the vertical hold is off. This fucking project is draining me financially and emotionally and I'm so ready to just be done with it. I don't know what I'm going to do... I have to set this all up this weekend, and the experiment needs to run for at least 6 days! That'll barely be enough time for me to analyse the data and put it all into a coherent paper. God knows it'll probably be inconclusive anyway... Why did I want to do something intresting? Why did I want to do something ambitious? Because I'm a fucking moron, that's why.