I’m making a list, checking it twice…

Before I went out to do fieldwork with my friend MarsGirl this summer, I watched her very carefully make a list and check it over and over. But even with her obsessive tendencies we forgot a couple of things; so we ended up stopping by Walmart on the way to our remote field sites to pick up a hammer and a ruler.

Now Dr. Hand-Waver and I are in the middle of making our equipment list for our upcoming research cruise. I took this responsibility fairly seriously until Dr. HW reminded me that there are no Walmarts in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Suddenly it morphed from a serious responsibility to an obsession: I MUST have everything I could possibly ever need on the list.

I think my list is complete now; Dr. Hand-Waver is going to look it over tomorrow. I’ve ordered all chemicals and disposable supplies that we were running low on, and none of them are back-ordered (theoretically speaking–sometimes things which are “in stock” on the Fisher Scientific computer sometimes end up being back ordered).

I need to have everything packed and ready to go in a couple of weeks so we can send it to our port of departure. This seemed like such an insignificant task at first but now I am very worried about pulling things together in time. And, worse, I worry about forgetting something very, very important and not realizing it until we’re 100 nautical miles from the nearest land.