work sucks.

The last couple of weeks have been a little bit of a roller-coaster with my PhD research.  Just last week I found out that the first abstract I submitted for my very first conference was not only accepted, but accepted for a 15 min oral presentation - pretty much the best a student can do.  In addition, my advisor's other student also had his abstract accepted for a presentation - so pretty much happy times in the lab (despite all the data we still need to generate).  Unfortunately, yesterday we found out that some random people from Cincinnati "scooped" us (ie published our data before we could).  This was especially upsetting because we have way more data than they did and our data is more compelling because we approach the question from multiple angles and have answered the question more fully.  I don't think we are completely screwed because we have all this other data, but we lost the novelty, and probably will not be able to publish in as good a journal as would have been able to otherwise.  Its been really disheartening, also, no idea what I'm going to present at the conference because a lot of it was just published...

Sorry, I know this was kind of a downer post, with nothing to do with our wedding, but I just needed to vent a little.