Random annoyance

I am still alive, just massively slackerly on the blog. For much of the past month, I can claim as an excuse the stats class that did its best to eat my life, in which I somehow managed a 4.0 despite not really caring about my grade nor feeling like I had mastered the subject matter. I guess old habits die hard. Every time I've taken a course pass/fail, I've ended up with one of the (if not always the overall) highest grades in the class. This class I wasn't taking pass/fail officially, but in my mental state for the term, a 3.0 was all I cared about. However, I do have an explanation: I only take classes pass/fail when I think they are complex and confusing. And I don't do well at not understanding things, so I tend to freak out and actually put in effort when I don't get what's going on. Therefore, it's not that the pass/fail grading scheme is causal to my doing well, but rather that there's a strong correlation between classes which intimidate me enough to take pass/fail, and courses in which I'll be scared into putting in substantial effort.

As for the random annoyance, I had two negative controls from yesterday's work. Same growth media in the two different types of containers I used. One of them was contaminated today; the other was not. And the one that was contaminated having to be restarted throws off my schedule for about a week, while the other one (had it been contaminated) would have had virtually no impact on my schedule. Grr.