</standard-end-of-semester-panic>

[clicky-clicky for highly annotated version]

Ah, I turned in all my final paper and final exam and stapled together all my half-completed homework assignments^*, and now it's back to the good life at the coffee shop, with papers to read, notes to jot, and the wonderful baton rouge spring weather.

Incidentally, I seem to have killed my Canon digital camera (elph SD1000). It had developed annoying spots of dirt somewhere in the lens which produced unsightly blobs in the sky of my photos. There didn't seem to be any gunk on the outside of the lens, but I thought I'd try anyway to clean it, with a cotton swab q-tip and some isopropanol. Well, it went blind! That's right, the camera sees only blackness now.... I can only imagine that a tiny bit of alcohol oozed inside the lens and somehow debonded some electrical connection, but... ☹!

The lab shutdown is just about over now, too. The people setting off bombs have moved past the lab now, so we (and by "we," I mean, "people other than me") opened up the chambers and unlocked our mirrors. Right now we are still waiting to pump the air out of the chambers and re-establish sufficient vacuum. Then it's back to long nights at the lab.

[*] Yeah, I thought I was done with this stuff years ago too.